How can we understand the transformations that took place in late antiquity? How did the complex processes of social, economic, cultural and religious change interrelate? Can we understand these processes as activated from the bottom up, as well as top down, and how did these divergent forces interact? This book sets out to examine these questions, focusing on one specific geographical area, southern Gaul, in particular the city of Arles and its late antique ecclesiastical territorium, the area associated with Roman Narbonensis, hence largely but not exclusively modern Provence (see Maps 1 and 2). It covers a period of roughly 150 years, from c. 400–550, one of striking political, religious, social and economic change. Although the original impetus for the project came from reading the striking sermons of Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542, the main focus is not Caesarius himself: my aim is to look at the period through the lens of popular culture, undergoing its own transformation in late antiquity.Footnote ¹

Why popular culture? First because although popular culture has been studied by historians of other periods and cultures, ancient and late ancient historians have been slow off the mark and there is thus a whole fascinating area of study open for new research and analysis. Secondly, as I shall show, during late antiquity popular culture was problematized and targeted by the church as never before and thus we have at our disposal a number of sources from which we can examine both popular culture and its transformation. Finally, because the study of popular culture, its definition and development in late antiquity, provides an important means of examining the interrelated processes of social, economic, cultural and religious change in late antiquity. As I shall go on to demonstrate, ‘popular culture’ provides both a substantive area of study (under the rubric of ‘popular culture’ I shall examine such areas as singing, dancing, festivals, ritual behaviour, lived religion and social relations) and a heuristic model, which enables a properly ‘thick’ description of late antique culture, in all its richness. Popular culture in this way provides a framework for looking at the cultural, social and economic changes of late antiquity.

The challenge posed by the book is to look at late antique culture both from the outside and from its multiple ‘insides’. We shall attempt to look at the practices and views not just of bishops like Caesarius and his colleagues, or even of the landowners who formed the primary audience for clerical discourse, but also of a much broader range of individuals and groups who lived in southern Gaul. We shall investigate the lived culture of urbanites, hilltop villagers, small-scale viticulturists and salt-panners. These people were church-goers, church-refusers, ritual practitioners of various types, sceptics, party-givers and party-goers. They were peasants, landowners, small-scale entrepreneurs, artisans, shepherds and indeed slaves. We shall attempt to reach them not only by reading, often ‘against the grain’, the religious texts of the period – sermons, conciliar acts, hagiography – but also by examining the material culture of the non-elite.

The present study will build on the work of many other scholars: the detailed studies of experts on the religious history of the period but also the rich harvest of archaeological work carried out in the region at the end of the last century, and published in the first decade of this one. This is the first work of history of the region to make use of this material in its analysis of social and cultural change in late antiquity. This is also an account of (late) ancient history that is engaged in theoretical and methodological issues as well as with those related to the intricacies of the literary and archaeological records. It is a study of social, cultural and religious history that deals with questions of class, gender and power. To return to the quote from Samuel Dill with which this chapter began,Footnote ² it is an important aim of my book to restore visibility and agency to the individuals, societies and communities who made up the congregations (or indeed, did not) of Caesarius and his colleagues.

In this first, introductory chapter I shall begin by outlining what I (and others) mean by popular culture, then turn to look at ancient and late ancient evidence up close. Next the attention goes to late antique southern Gaul itself, with an outline account of the historical context. Finally, key sources, methods and themes are introduced.

What Is Popular Culture?

The definition of ‘popular culture’ that I shall use in this book is broad enough to be workable but does require some methodological and theoretical scaffolding. ‘Popular culture’, after all, is a heuristic construct rather than a clear objective reality, and as such it requires full methodological interrogation. I am guided by a seminal article by Stuart Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the “Popular”’, which clearly stresses the embeddedness of popular culture. As Hall made clear: ‘there is no whole, authentic, autonomous “popular culture” which lies outside the field of force of the relations of cultural power and domination’.Footnote ³ To begin with, then, popular culture does not exist as a free-floating substantive culture that belongs to any single group of people – in the case of late antique southern Gaul we cannot say, for instance, that we can identify unproblematically a ‘peasant popular culture’ The notion of embeddedness has further implications too: I share with Hall the conviction that any reading of popular culture must be political, even if not in the terms of crudely Marxist ‘class relations’.

Next, popular culture, like cultural relations in general, must be understood as dynamic, never as static: ‘what is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define “popular culture” in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture. It is a conception of culture which is polarized around this cultural dialectic’.Footnote ⁴ That is, popular culture constitutes the meeting point between dominant and subaltern fields: it is indeed ‘made’ at precisely this intersection. It does not exist in isolation. Firstly, it is deeply embedded in social and economic relations – which are therefore one important focus of the book. Secondly, it is embedded in broader fields of culture and ideology – thus the dialectic between popular culture and the ideology of the expanding church constitutes another major focus.

Clearly, Hall’s approach is just one of many theoretical takes on popular culture in existence. I shall briefly here consider just a few complementary approaches.Footnote ⁵ Michel de Certeau is much cited for his work exploring the ré-emploi (re-use) of popular culture by ordinary people. De Certeau’s approach allows a focus on the creativity and inventiveness of these ordinary people rather than drawing a model of popular culture as a passive, consumer culture.Footnote ⁶ In a similar vein, we can learn from the post-structuralist approaches which approach popular culture as bricolage, as formulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss.Footnote ⁷ We can also note the growing interest in contemporary cultural studies in the seemingly straightforward concept of ‘Everyday Life’, including the study of ‘things’.Footnote ⁸ It has indeed been suggested that when focusing on popular culture we should move our focus away from people to the ‘Social Life of Things’.Footnote ⁹ Pierre Bourdieu’s hugely influential concept of cultural capital is fundamental here,Footnote ¹⁰ with Holt Parker suggesting that popular culture can be defined as that which is produced for and consumed by those lacking cultural capital. Most crucially, Parker suggests that popular culture can best be understood as ‘unauthorized culture’Footnote ¹¹ – with the advantage that this definition bears no inherent political or aesthetic status, and implies no value judgement. As we shall see, this notion of popular culture as unauthorized works very well indeed when analysing late antique ecclesiastical discourse, which sought to demonize much of popular culture as ‘unauthorized’, using a range of tactics, which I shall unpick in the chapters to come.

So what, then, is the definition of popular culture used here? The model of popular culture that I use in this book is multifaceted. I am talking about substantive activities – a non-exclusive list would include festive behaviour, singing, dancing, eating and drinking, and insubordination, as well as tactics of memorization and knowledge transfer among the non-literate. But popular culture also, crucially, comprises strategies and techniques for interacting with structures of power. These activities – and others – are carried out by diverse non-elite individuals and communities. The category ‘non-elite’ is obviously wide and in the course of the following chapters we will look in some detail at a number of different groups, sometimes overlapping. They include small landowners, peasants, artisans (both urban and rural), coloni, slaves and beggars. During this analysis, therefore, we shall consider different types and degrees of subalternity. However, maintaining a broad spectrum is deliberate: many of the activities considered under the rubric of ‘popular culture’ were in fact carried out by people of all types. Indeed, in a running theme, our episcopal discourses persistently accuse even members of the lay elites of participating in what, for bishops, was unauthorized culture. Ultimately, popular culture is a heuristic concept which allows us to look at a cultural history that is fully embedded in structures of power, domination and inequality. It is also an approach that invites us to explore cultural change as coming from below as well as from above.

In this book I discuss late antiquity in part as an ‘after’: I explicitly set out to offer a study of the transformation of popular culture in this period, during the transition from the classical to the medieval world. This being the case, it is of course necessary to establish what type of popular culture existed before late antiquity in order to be transformed at this time; even if for reasons of space and focus, this will be a necessarily whistle-stop tour. Here it is worth pointing out once more that a major advantage of working on popular culture in the late ancient period is the huge advantage in terms of available source material. For instance, we have simply no relevant literary sources at all for southern Gaul during the republican and imperial periods – nothing that discusses the cultural and social life of the non-elite in any sustained way. However, we are able to compare what the archaeological evidence tells us about the relative lifestyles and material culture of earlier and later periods, and I shall do so at relevant junctures.

Looking at Ancient Popular Culture

The study of ancient popular culture itself has been neglected in comparison to other periods of pre-modern history until very recently; in the last few years we have seen an upsurge of interest in the history of subaltern cultures and in approaches to history from below among ancient historians.Footnote ¹² More generally, however, classicists and ancient historians alike have been slow to respond to the important body of work from scholars of early modern popular culture, such as that of Peter Burke and Natalie Zemon Davis in the Anglo-American tradition, and of Robert Mandrou and Roger Chartier (inter alia) in French scholarship.Footnote ¹³ The work of early modern historians constitutes a discernible influence, as we shall see: so much so that perhaps historians (myself included!) need to be careful lest the study of popular culture becomes overly prone to what we might see as popular culture clichés, brilliant and persuasive as these influential interpretations are.

The most influential work in the study of early modern popular culture is undoubtedly Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World, first (somewhat belatedly) published in English in 1968. Bakhtin argued for the symbolic centrality of the festival of Carnival to early modern culture. Both in Bakhtin’s work and elsewhere, ‘carnival’ and the ‘carnivalesque’ are crucial concepts for understanding the key features of popular (Bakhtin himself called it ‘folk’) culture. According to Bakhtin, carnival offers a site for inversion, liberation and renewal. Comedy, the grotesque and the ‘lower bodily stratum’ all play roles in structuring a ‘second world and a second life’,Footnote ¹⁴ with potential for opposition and rebellion.Footnote ¹⁵ As neatly expressed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, the carnivalesque is ‘a potent populist, crucial inversion of all official worlds and hierarchies in a way that has implications far beyond the specific realm of Rabelais studies’.Footnote ¹⁶ This is not to say that the concept has not undergone critique,Footnote ¹⁷ but it remains impossible to overestimate the influence of Bakhtin, including on recent studies of ancient popular culture that I shall discuss in what follows. I shall discuss the utility of carnival for understanding late antique popular culture in general, and the festival of the Kalends of January specifically, in Chapter 6.

In the case of ancient history itself, meanwhile, the first ancient historian to attempt a full-length study of ancient popular culture was Pedro Paulo Funari in 1989.Footnote ¹⁸ At the heart of this work is an innovative study of Pompeian graffiti; Funari argued eloquently for the need for scholars to confront and elucidate ‘another antiquity’: ‘An antiquity in which popular groups possessed a relative autonomy, as much in aesthetic terms as in its values and conceptions.’Footnote ¹⁹ It is regrettable that the impact of Funari’s work has been somewhat limited, no doubt because it was originally published in Portuguese and has thus far been translated only into Spanish.Footnote ²⁰ The first dedicated study of ancient popular culture written in English came, rather surprisingly, from a philologist best known for his work on Virgil: Nicolas Horsfall’s The Culture of the Roman Plebs, published in 2003.Footnote ²¹ Horsfall’s fascinating short book describes the ‘culture of the plebs’ as

Here in place of Funari’s ‘relative autonomy’ we have a ‘“parallel” culture’. Song and memory are key planks of Horsfall’s analysis, which focuses almost entirely on literary texts, which he mines for evidence of an oral culture, neglected by generations of scholars. Horsfall takes a synchronic rather than a diachronic approach, tending to see his plebeian culture as rather more timeless than most historians would.Footnote ²³ This does, however, enable him to adduce Caesarius as a key witness for the persistence of song in popular culture – an important move, as we shall see later in this book.

The culture of the Roman plebs has been investigated more recently still, with a more historical approach, by Cyril Courrier.Footnote ²⁴ Courrier depicts the Roman plebs not as an oppressed mass, a starving mob or a Lumpenproletariat, but as a stable community, able to develop a culture of their own. The Roman plebs as depicted by Courrier have a sense of self-esteem based on professional, work-based pride. Moreover, their political interests went far beyond ‘bread and circuses’: this is a picture of a highly politicized plebs, even though the advent of the imperial system clearly entailed a new type of political life. Nonetheless, as a caveat we should note that much of Courrier’s analysis deals, often explicitly as such, with what we might call a plebeian elite – as ever, the easiest tranche of popular culture to access.

Focusing more widely than the plebs as narrowly defined, Jerry Toner’s social-historical study Popular Culture in Ancient Rome takes a straightforward approach to ‘the culture of the non-elite’.Footnote ²⁵ Nonetheless, he makes the sensible qualification that ‘[t]he non-elite were too great a hotchpotch of differing groups to be united by a single, monolithic culture. They inhabited a complex world of different geographies, wealth and status levels that meant that no uniform way of life could ever exist.’Footnote ²⁶ For Toner, popular culture can be understood not least as a series of coping strategies through which the non-elite faced the difficult world in which they lived. There is a fascinating sensory component to this picture of popular culture – smell, touch and noise feature vividly, showing how the senses distinguish popular from elite culture.Footnote ²⁷ The carnivalesque makes an appearance, headlined by the Roman festival of Saturnalia.Footnote ²⁸

In general, there has been very little study of the popular culture of ancient Greece, for several reasons. Firstly, the lack of evidence is of course crucial, most notably for any polity outside Athens, but even for Athens the body of source material is tiny in comparison with the Roman, let alone the late ancient period. Moreover, Mirko Canevaro has recently argued that the very notion of popular culture is problematic for classical Athens, in that the dominant, official culture was indeed by many definitions ‘popular’.Footnote ²⁹ Finally, we should acknowledge that different degrees of subalternity – that is, the different levels of inequality between classical Greece and later RomeFootnote ³⁰ – also have an impact on the nature of popular culture in Greece and Rome, respectively. Nonetheless, the popular culture of classical Greece has made an appearance in scholarship in recent years. Leslie Kurke, even while stating that popular culture is ‘probably … a misnomer’ for the ancient world,Footnote ³¹ provides an intriguing study of the figure of Aesop. She argues that Aesop, or rather the texts of the Aesopic tradition, enable(s) us to trace a dialogue, or dialectic, between ‘high’ and ‘low’.Footnote ³² Meanwhile, in the highly ambitious Slaves Tell Tales Sara Forsdyke sought to uncover the dynamics and politics of popular culture in archaic and classical Greece.Footnote ³³ Forsdyke’s book very clearly shows the challenges of writing a history of popular culture for a period where the sources are highly fragmentary. Concerted use is made throughout of theoretical and comparative literature: Forsdyke is indeed explicit about the need to interpret ancient popular culture through the use of models taken from scholarship outside the classical world.Footnote ³⁴ For instance, she interprets Plutarch’s anti-democratic account of riots in sixth-century bce Megara with both Bakhtin’s carnival and E. P. Thompson’s ‘moral economy’ in mind.Footnote ³⁵ I shall return to these themes in Chapter 6, with a much wider range of (late) ancient source material at hand.

Having discussed popular culture rather in the abstract, it is time to move to much more concrete examples. So we shall make a detour to look at some striking comparative ancient evidence, from Pompeii in Italy, and from Aphrodisias in Caria, in modern Turkey, in order to consider a popular culture approach.Footnote ³⁶ Both sites offer exceptional material evidence, including rich bodies of inscribed texts of various kinds, which provide unrivalled insights into non-elite urban life in the ancient world and into late antiquity.Footnote ³⁷ In this way I shall introduce some of the key themes and contexts of ancient popular culture – and how we can study them.

First we need to imagine an urban popular culture that was lived in public and shared spaces. In Pompeii the Via dell’Abbondanza gives a vivid impression of ancient street life: it stretches east from the forum all the way to the Sarno Gate, with a lively mixture of bars, shops, workshops and residential properties.Footnote ³⁸ Businesses opened out into the street and open-air shrines marked crossroads, while the ubiquitous graffiti and other painted signs and images provide further evidence of the time people spent in the urban outdoors, such as a dipinto asking loiterers to move on, or bantering graffiti contests between love rivals.Footnote ³⁹ In Aphrodisias the recently excavated ‘urban park’, known as the ‘Place of Palms’,Footnote ⁴⁰ newly restored in late antiquity, likewise gives a suggestive glimpse of what we might call a landscape of popular culture. Graffiti enables us to see that this was a space that combined a range of functions, including commercial, professional and leisure activities – from meetings of associations to shopping to idling with board games.Footnote ⁴¹

Next, several factors combined to make the lower classes especially visible outdoors, and in public spaces: the nature of lower-class housing obviously made sociability in spaces such as taverns more likely, while under-employment was a common feature in the lives of the poor. The propensity of the lower classes to ‘hang about’ in the urban open air was noted with suspicion and indeed scorn by elite commentators, including during late antiquity. Ammianus Marcellinus was only the latest in a long line of critics of lower-class leisure,Footnote ⁴² combining several key topoi common to disapproving elite views of popular culture:

And likewise: ‘These spend all their life with wine and dice, in low haunts, pleasures, and the games. Their temple, their dwelling, their assembly, and the height of all their hopes is the Circus Maximus.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Locations particularly frequented by the non-elite came under frequent attack, not just from moralists but also from imperial legislation. As is well known, taverns (variously, but not always distinctly or consistently, identified as popinae and cauponae)Footnote ⁴⁵ were frequently targeted by legislation, for instance banning the sale of food in taverns in order to limit their attraction.Footnote ⁴⁶ While early imperial efforts in this area are best known, they continued into late antiquity: Ammianus writes disapprovingly of how the Urban Prefect Ampelius failed in his attempts to limit the sale of wine and hot food in Rome in 368.Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, it seems likely that such endeavours were generally unsuccessful: in Pompeii popinae/thermopolia are ubiquitous and instantly recognizable, distributed evenly throughout the town, especially at intersections. Wine could be sold at very low pricesFootnote ⁴⁸ and was accompanied by a substantial array of food.Footnote ⁴⁹ The low quality of food and drink in taverns was proverbial for ancient elite writers and it is interesting to see Sidonius Apollinaris, in fifth-century Gaul, still complaining about damp taverns, polluted with unpleasant cooking fumes.Footnote ⁵⁰ Taverns were also stereotyped in literary texts as locales for various types of unauthorized behaviour, and it is intriguing to see these depictions being embraced in the surviving decoration in the taverns of Pompeii.Footnote ⁵¹ Gaming and gambling are ubiquitously associated with tavern life and the frescoes decorating the inn on Via di Mercurio include an oft-reproduced depiction of men playing dice.Footnote ⁵² Meanwhile, a famous painting from the Tavern of Salvius depicts several scenes of tavern life which actually seem to play up to the negative stereotypes: the scenes show suggestive dialogue, gambling and a fight over a game, broken up, in the final scene, by the proprietor.

Such depictions lead us to ask: were taverns sites of a popular culture that was only for men, or at least for male consumers? Literary and legal sources alike consistently assert that taverns were no place for respectable women and assume an identification between bar/inn work and prostitution.Footnote ⁵³ It has been suggested that the urban popular culture that is visible to us is predominantly a male culture. The excavators of the Place of the Palms in Aphrodisias observe that it was ‘a clearly “gendered” space’, heavily dominated by men in its day-to-day activities, with very few women indeed appearing among the graffiti. However, they do note the possible presence of women as shop-keepers, as suggested in the names of Eutychia and Eudoxia on columns of the North Stoa.Footnote ⁵⁴ In Pompeii, meanwhile, graffiti brings to life Asellina, a proprietor of a thermopolium, as well as several of her female employees, Maria, Aegle and Zmyrina, whose names appear supporting a particular political candidate. Their nomenclature suggests immigrant, servile or ex-servile status and yet despite this, and despite their association with bar work, they are asserted here as persons of some significance when it came to political endorsement.Footnote ⁵⁵ In this way, looking at graffiti can sometimes allow a glimpse beyond the views of lower-class women found in other sources. Nonetheless, overall the popular culture that is visible in Pompeian material and textual culture certainly does seem to privilege and promote an aggressive and sexually dominant masculinity.Footnote ⁵⁶ This was certainly not a thing of the past in late antiquity: an inscription claiming ‘Eusebios buggers/buggered Doulkitios’ was designed to insult a prominent local official and benefactor in traditional fashion by associating him with passive sexual activity.Footnote ⁵⁷ I shall return to the issue of gender and sexuality in popular culture, and its critiques, and how both developed in late antiquity in Chapter 4.

Public entertainments are often associated with ancient popular culture, and the end of the traditional spectacles constituted a major shift in late antiquity. In Pompeii the entertainment buildings are famously conspicuous, including the amphitheatre which could accommodate around 20,000 spectators (a notable number given the estimated population of the town of c. 10–12,000). The social and cultural importance of the gladiatorial spectacles in the life of Pompeii is visible across the town,Footnote ⁵⁸ such as in the ubiquitous graffiti, including a large number of drawings of gladiators and graffiti made by the gladiators themselves.Footnote ⁵⁹ Likewise, in Aphrodisias there are a number of graffiti, both verbal and pictorial, related to the ludi, including depictions of victorious athletes and/or gladiators and (probably) animals associated with the venationes as well as graffiti relating to the circus factions.Footnote ⁶⁰ The popularity of the theatre is similarly prominent in the visual culture of Pompeii,Footnote ⁶¹ with graffiti allowing us to trace the popularity of particular performersFootnote ⁶² and to see how fans of these performers would identify themselves as such, even in electoral endorsements.Footnote ⁶³ The mime actor Gaius Norbanus Sorex, ‘player of second parts’, was honoured with a bronze portrait in Pompeii,Footnote ⁶⁴ a striking honour shown to a mime actor when mime was generally despised by elite Romans as a lowly and disreputable form, and would continue to be viewed as such in late antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁵ As we shall see, the ludi, broadly defined, would continue to hold ideological potency in our late antique sources, even at the time of Caesarius, and even as it is clear that urban dwellers were required to develop increasingly ‘do it yourself’ entertainments, as will be shown in the next chapter.

Graffiti in Pompeii and Aphrodisias alike permit us to interrogate several themes that are relevant to our interrogation of ancient popular culture. One is a question as to how far we can see popular culture as structured by horizontal as opposed to vertical relations and organizations. In Pompeii it is electoral graffiti that offers a striking glimpse into the occupation-based horizontal groupings that helped structure popular culture. A number of different professions declare their support, as a collective, for certain candidates; the professions appearing in these election advertisements and graffiti range from muleteers to goldsmiths, barbers to grape-pickers.Footnote ⁶⁶ These occupational acclamations might suggest, but can do no more, a more formal role for collegia, or professional associations. In the Place of Palms in Aphrodisias there is indeed a graffiti acclamation for the professional association of chair-bearers or litter-carriers.Footnote ⁶⁷ Work was of course an important part of popular culture, with many businesses and workshops located right in the heart of urban life, often opening right out onto the street.Footnote ⁶⁸ In Aphrodisias archaeologists and epigraphers use topos (place) inscriptions to try to locate the perhaps equally important temporary commercial structures which once filled public spaces such as the North Stoa in the Place of Palms, which enabled proprietors, workers and customers alike to benefit from its shade and shelter.Footnote ⁶⁹ Meanwhile, occupational identity formed a substantial element of non-elite identity and culture.Footnote ⁷⁰ For instance, Miko Flohr’s reappraisal of the fullo (fuller), traditionally assumed to be a low-grade, despised job, is suggestive for a study of popular culture, showing that fullers could not only be successful economically but could also gain and assert social and cultural capital, as evidenced through their individual and collective self-representations.Footnote ⁷¹

On the façade of the fullery of Fabius Ululitremulus is found one of the most famous graffiti in Pompeii, which reads Fullones ululamque cano, non arma virumq(ue) (‘I sing of fullers and the owl, not arms and the man’), thus combining wit, Virgil and fulling in somewhat unique fashion.Footnote ⁷² This irresistible combination of occupational pride and wit makes a neat demonstration of the interpenetration of high and low in ancient popular culture. The interactive nature of much graffiti indeed suggests that we need not let even pessimistic estimates of Roman literacy rates exclude the likelihood that large numbers of the population could participate in graffiti culture.Footnote ⁷³ Of course, not all graffiti had to be verbal, or at least fully verbal, but often involved symbols and drawings. Pedro Paulo Funari looked at Pompeian ‘graphic caricature’ as a case study for the analysis of popular culture. He stressed its wit and inventiveness and argued that the images display criticism of the powerful and expressed self-esteem, as well as popular interests and passions. However, for Funari Pompeian graffiti ultimately served to reinforce ‘social exploitation and distinction’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Can the graffiti and related evidence make broader suggestions about social tensions in the ancient and late ancient city? As already mentioned, graffiti were used in open spaces at Aphrodisias to mark out and reserve space, while, as noted by Angelos Chaniotis, evidence for the erasure of such graffiti can be understood ‘in the context of competition and conflict’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, a wider sense of competition between various entities, including cities, professions, religious groups, the elite and the people of the city, can perhaps be identified in the graffiti of Aphrodisias. Acclamations are a distinctive and well-known feature of late antique cities in the Greek east and while those found at Aphrodisias include repeated references to unanimity, there are also notable allusions to its very opposite: to violence, envy and ill feeling and ingratitude, as, for instance, in the injunction: ‘your enemies to the river’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The expressions of negative feelings and interpersonal rivalries alike are common features of inscribed objects such as defixiones, as found buried in the Fondo Azzolini necropolis, in Pompeii,Footnote ⁷⁷ but of course common across and beyond the Mediterranean.Footnote ⁷⁸

What if we are looking for evidence of more serious or even organized discord as part of popular culture? One of the most intriguing testimonies from Pompeii is a painting that appears to commemorate the amphitheatre riot of 59 ce, a violent clash with the inhabitants of nearby Nuceria. This event was considered so serious that it resulted in a number of substantial punishments instituted by the imperial administration in Rome, including the exile of the games-giver and his associates, a ten-year ban on games and the dissolution of all ‘illegal associations’.Footnote ⁷⁹ Were local associations involved in planning the riot? It is hard to know: collegia and their like were frequently seen as a danger to public order and were periodically banned,Footnote ⁸⁰ so we can only speculate as to whether there was a connection in this particular case.Footnote ⁸¹ Perhaps most interesting of all is the very fact that the riot was commemorated with a large and richly detailed painting, in the peristyle garden of a private home.Footnote ⁸² Maybe it commemorated the re-opening of the amphitheatre after the ban but maybe it was painted to celebrate the Pompeian citizens’ triumph in the bust-up with the Nucerians. A graffito found on the façade of another house certainly seems to do so: it depicts a gladiator brandishing the palm branch of victory, with a text reading: ‘Campanians, in our victory you perished with the Nucerians’.Footnote ⁸³ Taken together, this evidence does certainly suggest an intriguingly subversive element of popular culture – and yet its very uniqueness makes it hard to draw from on a more general level. Urban riots, meanwhile, are almost a cliché of the historiographical picture of late antiquity, and we shall look in detail at questions of social conflict in the city in later chapters.

Finally, we should think about the place of religion in popular culture. The sphere of ‘religion’ itself is of course very difficult to detach, such was its entanglement in the spheres of culture, economy, society and ideology. Religion and religious activity were fundamentally embedded in all aspects of life in Pompeii, as across the Roman world, probably most visible in the prominence of neighbourhood shrines in the streetscape,Footnote ⁸⁴ as well as of lararia, found in both houses and businesses alike.Footnote ⁸⁵ The household was a crucial locus for religious practice and protection, and the finds from Pompeii demonstrate both variety and personalization in religious practice.Footnote ⁸⁶ The religious landscape of the Roman world would undergo substantial transformation in late antiquity, as we shall explore in the chapters to come. In Aphrodisias the carving of religious symbols, especially menorahs and crosses, is a notable feature of the graffiti and has been analysed in terms of religious identity and community relations in the period. The presence of an etched erect phallus in a cluster of carvings on a seat on the north side of the pool in the Place of Palms, along with three game boards and a menorah, according to the excavators was ‘intended as an aggressive comment against the Jews, an act of humiliation’.Footnote ⁸⁷ This is certainly suggestive when it comes to thinking about anti-Jewish tensions in the city, which we shall discuss in Chapter 2.

This discussion of some of the unique evidence from Pompeii and Aphrodisias has been designed to provide an insight into a whole range of subjects and questions that we can keep in mind as we look at the popular culture of late antique southern Gaul, and how it changed in late antiquity. Streets and other public spaces provided vital loci for social interaction and for individual and collective expression. Taverns provided an important locus for male sociability, although the presence of women should not be underestimated. Work was a central part of popular culture and identity. Entertainment, both official and ‘do it yourself’, was important to popular culture: not just the ludi put on by local elites but street performances as well. Meanwhile, social tensions can be glimpsed across a range of examples. While late antique southern Gaul offers the historian neither graffiti nor frescoes, the literary sources offer new insights of their own, allowing us to consider such ephemeral but central elements of popular culture as dancing and gossiping, albeit through the distorting lens of episcopal writings. They also enable us to explore the issue of social conflict in more substantive fashion, as well as enabling us to look at both town and country, and the interaction between the two, an interaction that would take on new dimensions in late antiquity.

It is now time to turn to look at late antique southern Gaul in detail. In the next section I shall briefly introduce the historical context in which the action of this book takes place, sketching the outline of the main contours of the broader political and structural changes of the period. This account also provides some essential contextualization with which to understand the activities of Caesarius and the church of Provence.

Southern Gaul c. 400–550: Understanding Change at the End of Antiquity

In 400, Provence was part of the Roman empire, under the rule of Honorius and Arcadius – no matter how ineffectively Honorius actually ‘ruled’ the west (Map 1). The century and a half that followed provides the basis for a rich and complex histoire événementielle: by 550, after a whole panoply of military and political conflict, the Franks were firmly established across the region, as across the rest of Gaul – with the exception of Septimania, modern Languedoc-Roussillon, which remained part of the Visigothic kingdom until well into the eighth century. At the same time as this transferral of political power, shifts in patterns of landholding, settlement and indeed social organization and social relations were underway. Far-reaching cultural transformations also took place in our period with the transition, described in broad strokes, as from a classical to a new ‘medieval’ culture, including the consolidation of processes of what is often called ‘christianization’. None of these processes of transformation was fully completed during the period covered by this book, and the nature and mechanisms of these changes continue to be debated, while the interrelationship of these different processes of transformations is also in need of further interrogation. The period was one of often dramatic political and military change for southern Gaul against the backdrop of wider shifting configurations of power across the west of the Roman empire, caused, not least, by structural weaknesses of the Roman imperial system itself.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nonetheless, it has also been shown how deep and underlying features of the late Roman state and society perdured into the early medieval period. In particular, the work of Chris Wickham has shown not just the continuing significance of traditional tax-raising powers to the Roman state but also how successors – including the Gothic rulers in southern Gaul – were able to harness these powers and hence continue the outlines of this system well into the sixth century.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Augustan province of Gallia Narbonensis had stretched almost from Toulouse to Geneva but there would be many different versions of geo-political configurations over the centuries that followed. Under the Tetrarchy the southern diocese of Vienne was established, while under Constantine this was managed by the prefect of the Gauls. The reign of Constantine brought new prestige to Arles: the mint moved there in 313, the city hosted an ecclesiastical council a year later in 314 and the emperor himself visited in 315. A regional prefecture (based in Trier) was established in Gaul in the 340s, supporting the development of a well-connected and powerful Gallic ruling elite. The prestige of fourth-century Arles itself is revealed above all by the scale of the public buildings and the impressive collection of sarcophagi in the Archaeological Museum in Arles.

The fifth century would be a tumultuous one for much of the western empire, even if the experience of the south of Gaul would be distinct from that of the north. The events of New Year 406/7, when large groups of Vandals, Alans and Sueves crossed the Rhine and began a prolonged period of plunder of Germany and northern Gaul, would actually lead to positive political and economic consequences for Provence. The Prefecture of the Gauls transferred to Arles from Trier (although whether this took place in the aftermath of this major upheaval (c. 408) or in fact earlier (c. 390) is debated), and an annual council was set up.Footnote ⁹⁰ The usurper Constantine III chose Arles as his seat in 407 but was defeated only a few years later, in 411, by Honorius’ commander Flavius Constantius, who besieged the city. For several years after that political turmoil and bloodletting among the Gallic aristocracy followed the failed usurpation of Jovinus in the Rhineland. The politics of the western empire over the following years are full of turmoil, and southern Gaul was not to be spared further military and political upheaval.

A group of Goths led by Athaulf arrived in Gaul in 412; they were able to take Narbonne, Toulouse and Bordeaux before being driven back into Spain. However, just a few years later they were established as federates in Aquitaine, across a swathe of land extending from Bordeaux to Toulouse, in 418/19, led first by their leader Theoderic and then his sons.Footnote ⁹¹ Arles continued to be politically important: a revived council of the ‘seven provinces’ (of Gaul beneath the Loire) was set up at this time to meet annually. The ensuing years saw renewed military activity in the region, including the besieging of Arles by the eastern Goths in 425/6 and the campaigns led by Aëtius. Nonetheless, the council at Arles was still going strong at the time of Sidonius,Footnote ⁹² and would confirm its support for his father-in-law, the Gallic aristocrat Eparchius Avitus, who, after acclamation as Augustus at Arles, headed to Rome in 455,Footnote ⁹³ although like many of the emperors of this period Avitus would not last long. The new emperor Majorian (proclaimed in 457) travelled to Gaul (including a stay at Arles in 461 which we shall consider in the next chapter) and recruited senior Gallic aristocrats into his regime, but was himself murdered upon his return to Italy later in 461; what followed is aptly described by Michael Kulikowski as ‘a war of all against all’.Footnote ⁹⁴

Gothic armies attacked Arles several times over these decades,Footnote ⁹⁵ along with other sites in the region, such as Narbonne, which they besieged in 436 and gained fully in 461. With hindsight it has seemed that with the accession of Euric in Toulouse in 466 Visigothic ambitions grew further, with their armies seeking to extend territory across Provence as well as Aquitaine.Footnote ⁹⁶ Meanwhile, the Burgundians, who had been settled in Sapudia by Aëtius sometime after 443, increasingly looked to expand southwards, eventually reaching the Durance river. In 471 the Visigoths defeated an army sent by Anthemius, most likely in the defence of Arles. In 476, despite a treaty agreed a year earlier with the emperor Julius Nepos (which ceded the Auvergne), the Visigoths seized Arles among other remaining land in Provence, and it became the court of a Gothic count. Henceforth there was no longer to be Roman imperial rule in southern Gaul, a transfer of power long experienced elsewhere in the west.

From the 490s onwards the Franks, growing in power in the north, had their eyes on Gothic territory further south, and at the Battle of Vouillé in 507 they defeated Alaric II and the Visigoths. The Franks and Burgundians alike saw Arles and Narbonne as valuable targets. Arles suffered a prolonged siege by Burgundian forces in 508 but was finally relieved by armies sent by the Ostrogothic government in Ravenna, who took control of Provence. Theoderic, king of the Ostrogoths, re-established the Prefecture of the Gauls, and its vicarate, with its seat once more at Arles. There then ensued a period of relative political stability under Ostrogothic rule, a rule which Theoderic himself presented in a letter to the Gauls as a restitution of ‘Roman customs’.Footnote ⁹⁷ However, war between the eastern Roman empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom resulted in the ceding of Gothic holdings in Gaul in return for Frankish support against Justinian – and the Franks took control of Provence in 536/7, even marking their rule by holding circus races in Arles, according to Procopius.Footnote ⁹⁸

Our ecclesiastical sources in fact give us helpful insights into these political vicissitudes, with the careers of the bishops of Arles offering some intriguing snapshots of some of the ups and downs southern Gaul experienced. Several fifth- and sixth-century bishops had at times suffered from their very closeness to power in politically sensitive Arles: Heros, installed as bishop in 408 with the support of the usurper Constantine III, was removed after his fall in 411 and Heros’ successor, Patroclus, who had been supported by Constantius, was assassinated in 426.Footnote ⁹⁹ Hilary, bishop from 429/30 to 449, certainly enjoyed ups and downs in his relations with the local elites and both the secular and the ecclesiastical authorities, as we shall consider in some detail in Chapter 2. Bishops could be called upon to play a political role at sensitive times: the bishops of Aix, Arles, Marseilles and Riez were sent to Toulouse to negotiate with Euric as the emissaries of Julius Nepos in 475.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As for Caesarius, his election to the episcopacy in 502 was secured with the say-so of the Visigothic comes and his colleagues – described somewhat tactfully in his Vita (written under the Frankish regime) as ipsos dominos rerum.Footnote ¹⁰¹ His own origins in Burgundian territory would certainly prove significant: only a few years after his election he was accused of pro-Burgundian treason and sent before Alaric II and then into short-lived exile in Bordeaux. When Arles was besieged by the Burgundians and Franks in 597/8, Caesarius’ loyalty again came under suspicion but ultimately he would prosper under Ostrogothic rule. Indeed, he healed the resident praetorian prefect of the Gauls, the patrician Liberius, when he was wounded in a Visigothic ambush outside Arles.Footnote ¹⁰² However, commenting on the new Frankish regime, established at Arles in 536/7, Caesarius’ biographers once more felt the need to defend him from possible charges that he had betrayed the city.Footnote ¹⁰³ On his deathbed in 542 Caesarius specifically commended his female monastery to ‘the prefect, the counts and the citizens’, as well as to the clergy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Bringing our timescale to an end, Aurelianus, bishop from 546 to 551, seems in his turn to have been a recipient of Frankish royal favour, shown not least by the patronage he received for two new monasteries at Arles, very much in the Caesarian tradition.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

While our ecclesiastical sources can offer rich insights into the fluctuating political structures of the period, they are, inevitably, somewhat less helpful on broader questions relating to the economic basis of these structures; that is, on the development of taxation, finance, land tenure and related issues. Descriptions of excessive and unfair taxation, and the depredations caused by its burden, are, however, notable presences in these sources.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Constantius of Lyon describes the journey made by St Germanus in 435/7 to ask for a remission of taxes for the citizens of Auxerre, who are described as like fatherless orphans, crushed by extraordinary exactions.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Valentinian III himself referred to the difficulty of collecting taxes from the ‘exhausted taxpayer’ in 444.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Both Salvian of Marseille and Sidonius Apollinaris testify to the continuity of taxation processes from the 440s through to the 470s. Salvian’s descriptions are particularly well known and dramatic, describing how the harsh and corrupt taxation system drove people into highly dubious patronage relations and servitude and even caused them to join the Bagaudae.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Salvian’s account can certainly not be taken as accurate reportage, but this does not mean that taxation was not both high and oppressive.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Even in the 460s and 470s taxation appears frequently and incidentally in the letters of Sidonius;Footnote ¹¹¹ he also gives a highly coloured account of the activities of a certain Seronatus, a tax collector who allegedly collected tax in a harsh and improper fashion for both the Gothic and Roman authorities in southern Gaul.Footnote ¹¹² In the activities of Seronatus we indeed get a glimpse of how at least at first the post-Roman successor polities maintained the tax-collecting structures and practices of the later Roman state. The curiales continued to be responsible for tax collection, under the Gothic regimes: the Breviarium of Alaric II both preserves laws on decurions and adds full interpretations, while Cassiodorus’ Variae show the same pattern under the Ostrogothic kingdom.Footnote ¹¹³ It also seems most likely that, at least to begin with, the Franks continued this form of tax collection.Footnote ¹¹⁴

This points to broader structural continuities in the shift from Roman to post-Roman power. While the Visigothic rulers of Gaul did away with the office of the praetorian prefect, there was still a provincial governor, while at the civic level the towns and cities retained curiae, or town councils, filled by curiales or decurions, whose duty it remained to collect taxes, as we have seen. Under Ostrogothic rule Arles became the home of the praetorian prefecture once more. Even once the Franks had taken Provence, in 536/7, we can still see some notable continuity of political structures, if not personnel: the praetorian prefect was now a praefectus or rector Provinciae and it seems most likely the local council continued to function.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Obviously there were some changes in both structures and personnel, nonetheless. One significant new feature in the power structure of Gothic Provence that we have already seen was the role of the comes civitatis, the representative of the rex in the cities, a role that would be maintained by the Franks, under whose role Provence would become part of a new type of polity.

The fragmentation of a massive Mediterranean-centred polity into diverse regions and localities is a fundamental aspect of the history of this period.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Southern Gaul would have a distinctive trajectory in comparison with much of the ‘west’, experiencing what has been somewhat elegiacally described as ‘a long autumn of Romanity’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ An important argument of Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages is that the breakdown of traditional Roman landowning and legal structures with the fall of Roman rule in the west led to a weakening of landlord power and thus a relative détente in landlord/peasant relations.Footnote ¹¹⁸ But how far can we see this breakdown of structures in our own region and in this period? It is in fact the case that traditional landowning and indeed tax-collecting structures perdured much longer in Provence than in much of Gaul. Landowners themselves will be a not infrequent presence in our sources and discussions, as I shall explore in more detail in Chapter 3. Nonetheless, we will examine some striking regional and micro-regional patterns of change which at times might help to contextualize both the changing content of and conflict over popular culture in the light of social and economic as well as cultural and religious change. Following the framework established by Stuart Hall, my model of popular culture understands it as embedded in both ideological and economic and social structures. While the ideological programme of the late antique church is a crucial factor in my analysis, it would certainly be overly reductive to seek to interpret this dialectic purely in terms of ‘class struggle’. That is, we cannot and should not assume that the interests of the church and those of secular power will coincide: I shall seek to avoid crudely reductionist interpretations.

In this final part of this contextual section I shall provide an outline of the development of the church in Provence, in its turn just as distinctive as other aspects of the region’s history in late antiquity, including an account of the career of Caesarius as a main actor in this book. Indeed, Caesarius’ career once more provides a neat way in: as an aristocrat and an ascetic he was rather typical of the Provençal church, not atypical even in being an outsider to the region.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Born to an aristocratic family with ecclesiastical connections, Caesarius entered the clergy of Chalons at the age of seventeenFootnote ¹²⁰ but two years later, around 488/9, he journeyed south, following in the footsteps of other northern aristocrats, to enter the famous island monastery of Lérins (Lerinum), situated off the coast of Cannes.Footnote ¹²¹ Lérins had been founded c. 400–10 by Honoratus, future bishop of Arles. The prestige and intellectual influence of Lérins grew swiftly in the years that followed, as neatly encapsulated in Prinz’s description of the monastery as the ‘nursery’ of the episcopacy of southern Gaul.Footnote ¹²² Honoratus’ own relative Hilary spent some years at Lérins before succeeding Honoratus as bishop of Arles, demonstrating the same close ties between the city and monastery that are illustrated by the career of Caesarius. However, Lérins was not the only monastic centre in Provence:Footnote ¹²³ Marseille was also an important monastic centre. Although the chronology is not entirely clear, it seems that John Cassian arrived in Marseille c. 415 as a refugee from the theological turmoil of the east. With the support of the city’s bishop, Proculus, Cassian founded two monasteries, one for men and one for women.Footnote ¹²⁴ The dedicatees of the various volumes of Cassian’s works of the 420s, the Institutes and the Conferences, give a sense of a developed and closely connected local ascetic network.Footnote ¹²⁵

The epitaph of bishop Hilary of Arles (d. 449) is a nice indication of the elite ascetic paradigm: he is praised in classical hexameter for his love of poverty in preference to riches and his enthusiasm for menial duties.Footnote ¹²⁶ The ascetic enthusiasms of the southern Gallic church became more widely known in the course of the first half of the fifth century. In 428 Pope Celestine wrote to the bishops of Viennensis and Narbonensis expressing concerns as regards the dubious nature of some recent episcopal appointments. He worried that these were based on overvalued ascetic connections rather than more appropriate qualifications. Celestine also objected to what he saw as the inappropriate choice of ascetic dress by other bishops.Footnote ¹²⁷ A number of bishops in southern Gaul were indeed former monks, integrated into a broader ascetic as well as aristocratic network. Ties of kinship also clearly united a number of these bishops, although sometimes we can only make guesses as to their kinship.Footnote ¹²⁸ Nancy Gauthier is surely right to stress that the auctoritas of most Gallic bishops was predicated as much upon their status as aristocrats as on their official institutional power,Footnote ¹²⁹ even if the bishops of southern Gaul did not necessarily hail from the highest echelons of the aristocracy.Footnote ¹³⁰ This is something I shall explore in the chapters to come.

As for Caesarius, his own time at Lérins was cut short by illness, and his Vita tells us that he was ordered by his abbot to leave for Arles to make his recovery.Footnote ¹³¹ He arrived in the city with the substantial advantage that the bishop Aeonius was a relative (we probably need not believe the Vita that he was previously unaware of this fact). He swiftly made further useful aristocratic connections in the city as well as coming under the influence of the ascetic writer, grammarian and rhetor Julianus Pomerius.Footnote ¹³² Soon after, Aeonius ordained his young relative into the clergy of Arles, first as a deacon, then as a priest.Footnote ¹³³ Around 498/9 Caesarius was appointed as abbot of a suburban monastery,Footnote ¹³⁴ then shortly before his own death Aeonius presented Caesarius as his preferred candidate for the episcopal seat in 402.Footnote ¹³⁵ The actual process of election seems to have been contested: the promotion by the current bishop of a youthful, non-local candidate without wealth who was also a relative to boot was clearly controversial. Caesarius’ Vita clearly tries to smooth over the account, while also seeking to maintain the traditional motif that the new bishop was humbly unwilling to take on the role,Footnote ¹³⁶ but in any case, Caesarius became bishop while in his early thirties with the support of the Visigothic administration, as we have seen.Footnote ¹³⁷

Caesarius took on the by now familiar mantle of a monk-bishop, organizing a number of the clergy of the cathedral of Arles in an ascetic community, while he founded a female monastery a few years later.Footnote ¹³⁸ Like his predecessors before him, he sought to assert the precedence of Arles over local churches, even in the face of often robust opposition.Footnote ¹³⁹ We have already seen his political difficulties in the years 504/5 and 507/8. And again in the aftermath of the military attacks on Arles controversy arose when Caesarius took the decision to use church property in order to ransom captives.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Unhappiness over his use of funds raised from the property of the church to protect his female monastery most likely lay behind another arrest, which led to his being sent to Ravenna in 513,Footnote ¹⁴¹ although he was set free by Theoderic. Caesarius then travelled to Rome where Pope Symmachus awarded him the title of papal vicarius of Gaul;Footnote ¹⁴² he thus returned to Arles with a greatly strengthened position.

We continue to see how the fluctuating political circumstances of the region affected Caesarius’ own position, as well as the broader power structures of the regional church. The extension of Ostrogothic tendency after 523 had the effect of consolidating and unifying the area under Caesarius’ jurisdiction, while reduction of the same territory after the death of Theoderic in 526 likewise involved a shrinkage of his province. At perhaps the high point of his regional influence Caesarius presided over a succession of councils: at Arles (524), Carpentras (527), Orange (529) and Vaison (also 529), councils which passed a series of ecclesiastical reforms as well as making important theological decisions. However, Caesarius’ authority seems to have been waning in the 530s, as most visibly revealed when decisions made in 535 by Pope Agapitus conspicuously failed to go his way.Footnote ¹⁴³ The Frankish takeover in 536/7 constituted a further blow to Caesarius’ position in that he was just now one of a number of metropolitan bishops within the Frankish church. He did not attend the Frankish Council of Orléans in 541, although most of the bishops from Provence did, but was certainly increasingly frail by this time and died a year later in 542.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

When Caesarius died at the age of seventy-two, he was buried in the basilica of the women’s monastery he had founded and which he had fought so hard to protect. His sanctity was swiftly promoted by the preservation of his belongings as relics at the monastery and the composition of a Vita by his former colleagues.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As has been shown, Caesarius’ trajectory fits the broader pattern of the most prominent bishops of Arles before him: a pugnacious aristocrat of a strongly ascetic bent who was determined to assert the primacy of the church of Arles over the region. He remains distinctive, perhaps, in the number of governing regimes with which he had to come to terms. He certainly remains distinctive in terms of his corpus of sermons, exceptional in both nature and extent, as we shall see.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ The fundamentally ascetic vision he held of his pastoral role cannot be underestimated as a defining framework for his preaching and his agenda,Footnote ¹⁴⁷ as well as for the broader theme of ‘christianization’. This framework is all-important for how we read our historical sources, and it is to questions of methodology that I shall now turn.

Sources and Methods

This book focuses on southern Gaul in large part due to the richness of the evidence available. Firstly, this includes the evidence from material culture: detailed archaeological studies enable us to see an unusually granular picture of the region and of the late antique countryside in particular.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Chapter 2 focuses on cities in detail (especially the best known and most important, Arles and Marseille), while Chapter 3 looks at the countryside. These chapters together provide the all-important context that is required in order to write an account of a popular culture that is properly embedded in the late antique society and economy. Making use of accounts of archaeological survey, excavation and synthesis, these chapters provide as full an analysis as possible of these contexts. In the cities, where the archaeological picture is often challenging, I shall make use of the more extensive literary and (limited) epigraphic material to help build up a picture of developments in the economy, in occupational organization, in social relations and in urban topography, including the religious landscape. In the countryside I shall consider changes in settlement patterns, social organization, occupations and religious landscape, as well as the changing environment more generally.

Nonetheless, it is the literary evidence that lies at the heart of much of the analysis. There is a rich textual dossier for southern Gaul in late antiquity. An important caveat immediately arises: this material represents, almost exclusively, the literary production of the late antique church. The texts include conciliar documents, hagiography and letters, but above all sermons. Using this material raises substantial methodological challenges. A range of largely interrelated problems arise, including particular problems relating to the corpus of sermons of Caesarius of Arles, which will be dealt with in Chapter 4. The question of authorship is part of a broader problem regarding the large array of late antique and (especially) early medieval ecclesiastical texts from Gaul, where mutual interdependence is sharply apparent. Whether prescriptive, proscriptive or purportedly descriptive, this material, as is well known, cannot in any way be regarded as giving a transparent view of the activities and beliefs of our objects of study.

So how far can we extrapolate actual practices and beliefs from ecclesiastical texts? Scholarly opinion here is predictably divided as to how far this repetitive material constitutes any kind of reliable representation of lay religion and culture. For instance, on the basis of careful source criticism, Dieter Harmening influentially argued that repeated citations of topoi across multiple ecclesiastical ‘sources’ demonstrate not continuity of ‘pagan’ practices but instead continuity in clerical constructions of ‘paganism’.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Clerical texts, according to this reading, are therefore pretty much worthless for actually telling us anything about ‘real’ practices or beliefs – and thereby much of popular culture. While many scholars find this approach simply too pessimistic,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ we do need to have methodological clarity, including a firm basis for deciding which elements in a given historical description represent actual historical praxes. Rudi Künzel, in a helpful essay, provides a series of criteria for finding such ‘authentic’ elements among the morass of stereotypes – such as finding a new element in an otherwise stereotyped list, or the use of a ‘vulgar’ term in the midst of a Latin text, or even the presence of clear precision.Footnote ¹⁵¹

It seems to me that neither of the crudest options – that is, accepting clerical accounts of the ‘popular’ as basically reliable or stating that these accounts are useless and that we can know nothing of the ‘popular’ – are tenable. Hence I have every sympathy with the approach taken by Lisa Bailey in her book on the laity in Gaul. Bailey states: ‘I am fundamentally optimistic, I argue that we can know something about the laity, and that, given their importance, we should make the most of everything we have.’ Bailey is right: there is indeed a need ‘to move beyond an awareness of our evidential problems’ and to refuse ‘to let these reduce us to silence’.Footnote ¹⁵² Therefore we must do what we can to make the most of our clerical sources. As well as Künzel’s suggestions for identifying ‘genuine’ elements among clerical stereotypes and distortions, there are other options available. These, then, are the guiding principles that I shall employ in my detailed analysis in Chapters 4 to 6 in order to provide the fullest possible interpretation:

1. i. Analysis of practices, beliefs and ‘culture’ should be made with social, economic and local contexts in mind.

2. ii. In order to aid interpretation, comparative material – from different historical periods and locations – should be employed.

3. iii. Relevant theoretical frameworks can be used to provide helpful interpretative tools.

These methodological principles are not controversial or novel: rather, they represent a version of the standard ‘toolkit’ of any historian of pre-modern popular culture. Take, for instance, Peter Burke’s hugely influential book, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Burke is clear that using an ‘oblique’ approach – that is, using elite records to write the history of non-elite culture – is not in itself sufficient. Burke therefore, following Marc Bloch, counsels the use of the regressive method: reading history backwards from later periods.Footnote ¹⁵³ Next he advises the use of the comparative method, and methodologies from other disciplines, especially social anthropology. Burke writes: ‘Since the popular culture of early modern Europe is so elusive, it has to be approached in a roundabout manner, recovered by indirect means, and interpreted by a series of analogies.’Footnote ¹⁵⁴ This is even more true for late antiquity.

In the chapters that follow I take it for granted that ecclesiastical texts are, above all, revealing of ecclesiastical and pastoral priorities and strategies, at times intersecting with secular needs and trends, as we shall see. These priorities and strategies are of course important in their own right – such as the fundamentally ascetic framework of Caesarius – and in this way ecclesiastical discourse will form the focus of Chapter 4 in particular. However, reading ‘against the grain’ to uncover the activities of Caesarius’ congregations as they would have understood them is, of course, a harder task. One way of doing this, as already laid out, is to look at ‘religious’ and ‘cultural’ behaviour in its full social and economic context, enabling an understanding of religious and cultural change as part of broader transformations in our period. Making use of theoretical and comparative approaches is another important method when faced with an intransigent source base. For instance, in Chapter 5 I make use of insights from the contemporary study of ‘lived religion’ to help elucidate various late antique behaviours and beliefs. In Chapter 6 my study of another aspect of popular culture, ritual revelry in the shape of the Kalends of January, is in part shaped through the substantial body of work of historians working in other periods, as well as that of anthropologists and sociologists. (As noted above, however, I shall also take care to avoid giving an account which is too uncritically full of popular culture ‘clichés’.)

This book is focused on a specific region and my approach sees local context as absolutely central to its analysis. As I shall show, especially in the next two chapters, not just regionality but micro-regionality are key in the writing of the social, economic and cultural history of late antiquity.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Nonetheless, my analysis, and indeed interpretation, will not always focus entirely within the strict geographical or even chronological boundaries of the book’s title. While a close analysis of the specific contingencies of a situation or of distinctive (for instance) geographical and environmental contexts will be employed as crucial components of interpretation, it would be foolish always to limit the investigation in this way. My analysis of the popular culture of southern Gaul in late antiquity therefore:

1. i. understands it as closely grounded within the specific environment, which was undergoing contemporary social and economic as well as political transformations during this period

2. ii. uses complementary and comparative material to aid its interpretation.

With this in mind, in the final section of this chapter, I shall turn to two key themes that lie at the heart of the interpretation to come.

Key Themes in Cultural Change: ‘Christianization’ and ‘Democratization’

That late antiquity saw massive cultural change in religious terms, once described as ‘conversion’,Footnote ¹⁵⁶ now more commonly as ‘christianization’, is today taken as a given.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The extent and nature of these processes of course remain live areas of discussion, as does the way in which we conceptualize ‘christianization’ itself. In a typically thoughtful discussion, Peter Brown outlines the long tradition of seeing christianization as a ‘problem’.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ He cites a striking description of christianization given by Robin Lane Fox as a ‘state which is always receding, like full employment or a garden without weeds’.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Indeed, William Klingshirn begins his excellent book on Caesarius thus: ‘Christianization in the late Roman and early medieval west was a process of slow, incomplete, inconsistent, and sometimes reversible social and religious change.’

Klingshirn’s view of christianization is all-encompassing: ‘It required … the widespread adoption of a Christian self-identity and a Christian system of values, practices, and beliefs.’ Most, importantly, however, Klingshirn argues that we should not understand it as a purely top-down process: ‘Unlike baptism or “conversion”, which could be imposed from above, the social and religious changes required by christianization could not be put into effect without the consent and participation of local populations. The process of christianization was therefore reciprocal.’Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Klingshirn’s collaborative version of ‘christianization’ is at first glance highly congenial to the aims of my own project. However, caution is required: this christianization remains of course an etic definition and, as Klingshirn notes, the forms of christianization adopted by communities were often quite different from, indeed at odds with, those preferred by the official church.Footnote ¹⁶¹ In what follows I shall be considering ‘christianization’ in various different ways as appropriate: for instance, as a top-down process employed by the church authorities, as a strategy of local landowners and other elites and as a collaborative construction of communities and individuals.Footnote ¹⁶² As should already be clear, the fact remains that christianization on its own is not sufficient as an explanatory force. Here we might make a comparison with another problematic explanatory concept, that of ‘romanization’: as recent scholarship has clearly demonstrated, top-down, monolithic interpretations of cultural change are insufficient.

Next, a second concept or process of prime importance to this study is that of the ‘democratization of culture’. This influential concept was first mooted by Santo Mazzarino as long ago as 1960.Footnote ¹⁶³ Mazzarino’s concept of ‘democratization’ represented a clear alternative to that of decline: ‘democratization’ was a positive and creative movement, linked to empire-wide trends of decentralization and pluralism, rather than a process of decay. The concept implies political, social and cultural change, and entails an inherently pluralistic understanding of (late antique) culture.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Mazzarino located this democratization in the third century but more recently the concept has been deployed some way beyond this period, as a framework for examining cultural change across late antiquity; Jean-Michel Carrié indeed argues that we should move this transformation forward to as late as the sixth to seventh centuries.Footnote ¹⁶⁵

The notion of ‘democratization of culture’ can of course be understood in a number of ways, but at base we can envision two primary forms of the process; that is, moving ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’. According to the former model, we can envisage a process whereby the cultural forms previously shared by the lower classes moved upwards, to be shared by the whole of society and culture – or, to put it in the more dramatic form imagined by Ramsay MacMullen, whereby the cultural ideals of the subaltern classes ‘triumphed’ over elite culture and values.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ This represents very clearly a schema of ‘democratization-catastrophe’, as described by Carrié, with its vision of ‘a proletarisation of the general level of artistic, intellectual and cultural performance’.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ An alternative model, by contrast, imagines a top-down process, whereby institutions, primarily the church, deliberately produced cultural forms – notably sermons – that were accessible to a wider audience, thereby playing a central role in an attempt to construct a specifically Christian popular culture. We shall look in detail at the preaching of Caesarius of Arles in this light: indeed building on the work of Aron Gurevich, who saw Caesarius’ prose as constituting a new stage in the history of culture.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ Of course, these two options – top down and bottom up – are not, in fact, exclusive: what we will be looking at is in fact the interaction of cultural and social forces and forms in late antiquity, and, as discussed earlier, I share with Stuart Hall the notion that popular culture is constituted at precisely this intersection.

The cultural transformations of late antiquity can be understood as representing both democratization and christianization, with interaction between these two modes being central to my analysis in the chapters that follow. It is clear that the rise of Christianity brought about new forms of contact between different social and cultural levels.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ What interest, after all, would an aristocrat like Caesarius of Arles have had in the behaviour and wellbeing of the lower classes of Arles and its territory had he lived during the high empire? What need, indeed, would an aristocrat have had to communicate with the lower classes at all, except directly in their capacity as owner of land, property and slaves and landlord of tenants? We shall see Caesarius taking a great interest in popular culture – an interest which was scarcely benign. We shall see him, like many of his colleagues across the Mediterranean world, attempting to produce a new, christianized, version of popular culture – for instance, importing new Christian forms of song to provide alternatives to despised secular versions (Chapter 4). We shall also see the church trying to shut down highly resilient and creative forms of popular culture celebration, most notably in the case of the Kalends of January (Chapter 6). Finally, largely reading against the grain, I shall examine these cultural forms as themselves evidence for, variously, collaboration, creativity and resistance. At the same time, we shall see a struggle for both social and cultural control, on behalf of the church, using a range of strategies. In these ways the chapters that follow will provide a cultural history that is grounded in its social and economic context and founded on key theoretical and thematic parameters.