11 4shaw

Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory
Brent D. Shaw
Journal of Early Christian Studies, Volume 11, Number 4, Winter 2003, pp. 533-563 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/earl.2003.0069
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SHAW/JUDICIAL NIGHTMARES
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Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory

BRENT D. SHAW
An institution whose effects were as traumatic, mundane, spectacular, and ordinary as the Roman trial necessarily left its imprint on the consciousness, both waking and unwaking, of the empires subjects. The experience of going to court provoked a recursive dynamic in which images of the judicial process were recalled and replayed. Memories of trial and punishment became a kind of recollection that was an ekphrasis of the experience. Since Roman courts were so central to their history and to their ongoing experience, Christians, and their texts, especially reect this imperial subjectivity. The judicial nightmare was a rhetorical form that both enabled memory and congured response. The dreamworld of Christian consciousness reveals what was necessary to the making of this kind of subjectivity, and the necessary qualities of the memories themselves.
Louis Ferdinand Maury was one of those intriguing nineteenth-century rudites whose curiosity about antiquity provoked him to write on Greek religion, astrology, and magic.1 His fascination with astrology and related matters led him rst to Artemidorus and other ancient dream-interpreters, and then to the subject of dreaming in general. In 1861 he composed what is arguably the work that stands at the head of modern scientic dream analysisLe sommeil et les rves.2 Like many such oneiric researchers, then and now, Maury relied in no inconsiderable part on personal
1. L. F. A. Maury, La magie et lastrologie dans lantiquit et au moyen ge, ou tude sur les superstitions paennes qui se sont perptues jusqu nos jours (Paris: Didier, 1860); Croyances et lgendes de lantiquit applique quelques points dhistoire et de mythologie (Paris: Didier, 1863)amongst other such works. 2. L. F. A. Maury, Le sommeil et les rves: tudes psychologiques sur ces phnomnes et les divers tats qui sy rattachent, suivies de recherches sur le dveloppement de linstinct et de lintelligence dans leurs rapports avec le phnomne du sommeil (Paris: Didier, 1861). It was reprinted in many editions; the one quoted by Freud, below, was the fourth edition of 1878.
Journal of Early Christian Studies 11:4, 533563 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press
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recollections of nightly visions. Here is how one of his dreams has been described:3
Maury was ill and lying asleep in his bed, with his mother seated beside him, when he dreamt that it was during the Reign of Terror. After witnessing a number of frightful scenes of murder, he himself was nally brought before the revolutionary tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville and the rest of the grim heroes of those terrible days. He was interrogated by them, and, after a number of incidents which were not retained in his memory, he was condemned and, surrounded by an immense mob, was led to the place of execution. He climbed onto the scaffold and was bound to the plank by the executioner. It was tipped up. The blade of the guillotine fell. He felt his head being separated from his body.
Maury then woke up in what is reported to be extreme anxiety. He obtained some relief by the discovery that a board from the top of the bed in which he had been sleeping had fallen down and struck his neck in just the way that the blade of a guillotine would have done. The description of this dream is by Sigmund Freud, who returned to Maurys juridical nightmare several times in the course of his Interpretation of Dreams.4 In Freuds work, as well as those of his immediate predecessors and successors, Maurys report led to much learned and inconclusive debate over real-time sequencing in dreams. I merely wish to note the embedding in the subconscious nonawake mind of images of national punishment, in this case dreamt by a Frenchman two or more generations after the revolutionary guillotine had completed its nasty work.5
3. The original is found on p. 161 of the fourth edition of 1878: Jtais un peu indispos, et me trouvais couch dans ma chambre, ayant ma mre mon chevet. Je rve de la Terreur; jassiste des scnes de massacre, je comparais devant le tribunal rvolutionnaire, je vois Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, toutes les vilaines de cette poque terrible; je discute avec eux; enn, aprs bien des vnements, que je ne me rappelle qu imparfaitement, je suis jug, condamn mort, conduit en charrette, au milieu dun concours immense, sur la place de la Rvolution; je monte sur lchafaud; lexcuteur me lie sur la planche fatale, il fait basculer, le couperet tombe; je sens ma tte se sparer de mon tronc, je mveille en proie la plus vive angoisse, et je me sens sur le cou la che de mon lit qui stait tombe sur mes vertbres cervicales, la faon du couteau dune guillotine. 4. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vols. 12, Eng. tr. of Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig-Vienna: F. Deuticke, 1900), ed. J. Strachey, London, 1953 [vols. 45 of The Standard Edition, on Maury at 4:2627] (the same dream is also discussed at 64, 49598, and 575). Such legal dreams, including an arrest in a restaurant (49495), a man arrested for infanticide (15557), and visits by police inspectors (41718), seem to be rather rare (he speaks, at 67, of a Roman emperor who had a man put to death because he had dreamt that he had assassinated the ruler; cf. Plato, Rep. 9.1f). 5. Maury, it might be noted, had a propensity to dream in this conservative mode. Given suitable promptingthe sharpening of a pair of scissors, a hot iron being held
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Less rve than cauchemar, Maurys vision was centered on an incident of trial and punishment. For the subjects of the Roman empire, the experience of witnessing and participating in a trial was arguably the quintessential civic experience of the state. It was the most intense and widespread public and ceremonial imperial presence found in a myriad local venues in the provinces of the empire. In the management of the concerns that struck most directly at the state and its subjects, urgent problems were resolved in the forum of the civil trial that was staged in a public and dramatic fashion by elite ofcials of the state. The formal rituals and frightening apparatus of the court and public punishment had a powerful effect on persons caught up in the direct confrontation with the authority of the state. It is the manner of this impact upon the human psyche as reected in the (relatively) unconscious reection of visions of the type that frightened Ferdinand Maury many centuries later that is our concern here. The Roman state consciously intended its punishments to be public and strikingly visual precisely in order to achieve the terroreffect that was to provide the desired deterrent. The public trials staged by Roman governors were calculated to be preventative spectacles, visual sights that were meant to startle: an ekphrasis of administrative power and of undisguised coercion so riveting that it was further developed in internal pictures of the mind. Hence the signicance of judicial dreams and punitive nightmares. They are symptoms of a collective picturing and memory of a specic kind of power.6 Maurys dream was about a past occurrence that was open to interpretations of what these events signied about ones past mental and psychic development. This was not the case with another dream of punishment that I now wish to examine, a vision seen by a woman in prison who was awaiting execution by the Roman state as represented in the person of the acting-governor of the proconsular province of Africa. Her name was Vibia Perpetua. She had been arrested with several companions on the charge that they were Christians. The charge was true. In any event, the criminals had no wish to deny their crime. Indeed, they were happy to admit it and to face the consequences. While in prison, Perpetua had a
close to his facehe dreamt, respectively, of the terrible days of 1848 and then that the chaffeurs of the Vende had made their way into a house where they were robbing the inhabitants in their usual mode of forcing the victims feet into the hot coals of the heating brazier (see Maury, Sommeil et les rves, 15456). 6. Obviously, I am exploiting the idea in the sense developed by Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and tr. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
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series of incandescent visionary dreams, the third of which related to her forthcoming punishment, which was to take place in the arena in Carthage. Her dream of punishment is necessarily more dramatic than Maurys to the degree that some Roman punishments were theatrically staged events that were purposefully designed to double as a kind of public entertainment.7 In her own words, originally part of her prison diary, Perpetua reported that:8
. . . the day before we were to ght in the arena, in a vision I saw the following things: Pomponius the deacon came to the entranceway of our prison and began to knock furiously on the gate. I went out and opened the prison gate for him. . . . He said to me: Perpetua, were waiting for you come along. . . . At last, almost out of breath, we arrived at the amphitheater and he led me into the center of the arena. . . . I looked at the huge roaring crowd. Since I knew that I was condemned to the beasts, I was astonished when no wild animals were sent out against me. Instead, there came out against me an Egyptian, a man of repulsive appearance, together with his assistants, to ght with me. . . . We circled each other and then began to hit each other with our sts. My opponent wanted to get hold of my feet, but I made a mess of his face by kicking him with my heels. Then when I was hoisted into the air, I began to hit him even though I wasnt able to step on the ground. Then when I noticed a break in our ght, I joined my hands by knitting my ngers together and put a hold on his head. He fell face-down on the ground. I put my heel on his head. The crowd began to cheer and my supporters began to sing my praises. . . . I walked in triumph to the Gate of Life.
Having been condemned to die in the arena, in her dream Perpetua recongured her death sentence to a different and potentially more winnable confrontation. She later understood the dream to interpret her future: Then I woke up. I realized that it was not with wild animals that I would ght, but with the Devil. And I knew that I would win the nal victory.9 The dream is different from Maurys in a critical, but typical, sense. In antiquity ones dreams were not invariably about past events, and they did not always reveal the signicances of past occurrences. Rather, they were often dramas that had future consequences and predictive power.10
7. K. Coleman, Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as Mythological Enactments, JRS 80 (1990): 4473, is the by-now classic study; see also D. Potter, Martyrdom as Spectacle, in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed. R. Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 5388. 8. Passio ss. Perpetuae et Felicitatis, 10.113 (SC 417:13440). 9. Passio ss. Perpetuae et Felicitatis, 10.1314 (SC 417:14042). 10. S. R. F. Price, The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus, Past & Present 113 (1986): 337; see, however, the important warnings by G. W. Bowersock, The Reality of Dreams, chap. 4 in Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7798.
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That is how Perpetua responded. Her experience might well be much like Maurys in another sense, however, in that she already dreamt in literary constructions. Her hand-to-hand struggle in the arena cannot be identied with any precise type of martial combat known in the Roman world: it was neither a gladiatorial contest nor a pankration, but rather a literary amalgam of these and other forms of physical contests which she had seen and about which she had read or heard.11 We know that judicial processes constituted a social eld of rule-driven behavior that seems to have necessitated all sorts of recourse to illogical devices, from formulaic magical prayers to the use of magical curse tablets, to have some effect on, or perhaps merely to cope with, a process that seemed so formally removed from day-to-day logic.12 That people in the Roman world should have dreamed of, or, more appropriately, had nightmares about courts and judicial punishment is therefore hardly surprising. Standard dream-interpretation manuals from antiquity, notably that of Artemidorus of Daldis, featured characteristic annotations on the connections between dreaming and punishment.13 Artemidorus offered interpretations to those who dreamt of various forms of judicial punishment, including imprisonment, hanging and beheading, and the three great death penaltiesburning alive, being thrown to wild beasts, and crucixion the fatal triad of the Roman summa supplicia.14 He also interpreted the signicance of ordinary dream themes to various forms of punishment.15 For example, a dream of dancing, if the dreamer was a slave, signied that he would be beaten; if a man in bonds, that he would be set free; if a
11. As pointed out long ago by Pio Franchi de Cavalieri, La passio ss. Perpetuae et Felicitatis, Rmische Quartalschrift, Supplementheft 5 (Rome, 1896), 3739 (= Scritti Agiograci, vol. 1 [Citt del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1962] = Studi e Testi, no. 221), 41154, at 6062. 12. For a selection and analysis of both see J. Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); H. S. Versnel, Beyond Cursing: The Appeal to Justice in Judicial Prayers, chap. 3 in Magika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60106. 13. I. Hahn, Traumdeutung und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit: Artemidorus Daldianus als sozialgeschichtliche Quelle (Konstanz: Universittsverlag, 1992). 14. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica: imprisonment or placing in bonds (1.40), beheading (1.35); the summa supplicia are included at the end of a section (2.4954) which deals seriatim with various forms of punishment: death, strangulation, having ones throat cut, being burned alive, crucied, and exposed to wild beasts (in that order). 15. Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.39 (horns = you will be beheaded), 1.48 (walking on the spot = imprisonment); 1.70 (meat = to a slave, it signies torture and whipping); 1.77 (crowns of ivy and vines = imprisonment for ordinary persons; for criminal it means beheading because such plants are cut with iron).
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criminal, that he would be crucied, because, says Artemidorus, of the outstretched position of the hands while in the act of dancing. Then there is singing in the bath. When one sings in the bath, Artemidorus noted, ones voice becomes indistinct. Hence, many people have been condemned to prison after such a dream.16 He also considered the signicance of dream themes for involvement in litigation.17 Again, the type of the dream signied potential outcomes of trial scenarios. For example, walking on water: This is . . . good for a man who is involved in a lawsuit. For he will be superior to the judge and will naturally win the trial. For the sea also resembles a judge, since it treats some people well and others badly.18 From such notices, and a host of comparable materials, we can deduce without much fear of contradiction that the possibility of being involved in a public spectacle, either a trial or a public display of physical torture and punishment, was one of the imminent hazards of life that was deeply embedded in the conscience of the ordinary people of the timeenough to evoke the nightly apparitions that were regularly commented on in the dream-interpretation manuals of the time. It seems equally signicant to note that in circumstances where the provocations of Roman trial and punishment were absent, the dream images seem to have been adjusted commensurately. Which is to say that dreaming about judicial trial, torture, and punishment was not a necessary given. In the Oneirocriticon of Achmet, for example, a Byzantine dream-interpretation manual cast as an orientalist fantasy, and dating perhaps to the tenth century, dreams of judicial trial and torture are few and their images seem pale and mechanical by comparison with the themes of judicial punishment reported by Artemidorus.19 And if it eventually became a fact that the Roman emperor could be dened as someone who was free from the constraints of the law (legibus solutus), then it is equally interesting to note that emperors, not being subjects, did not suffer from judicial nightmares.20
16. Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.76. 17. Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.60, wrestling signies a court case over land; 1.67, eating certain types of vegetables signies lawsuits; 1.72, cakes signify bad results for persons involved in lawsuits; 2.32, a gladiator signies that you will become involved in a lawsuit, struggle, or some such type of battle. 18. Artemidorus, Oneir. 3.16. 19. S. M. Oberhelman, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A Medieval Greek and Arabic Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991); for the dating and provenence see 1114; for the few parallels see 15 16 (9293); 8990 (11820); 12021 (12930), some of these being drawn rather articially from Artemidorus. 20. G. Weber, Kaiser, Trume und Visionen in Prinzipat und Sptantike (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 56973, compiled an exhaustive catalogue. The judicial
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That the spectacle of the court was so impressive as to affect deeply the mental disposition of those brought before it was a fact of which the members of the Roman ruling order were well aware. Consider the following example from the letters of Seneca, one of the rst in the Roman imperial mode who ruminated at length about the nexus of the human body, judicial trial, punishment, torture, and mental disposition:21
Our judicial procedure is a spectacle that surrounds itself with ery torches, iron chains, and the claws of wild animals that are unleashed to tear out human innards. Consider what you see in the place of trial: the prison, crosses for crucixion, the torture rack, the iron claw, the stake driven so far through the middle of a man that it juts out from his mouth, the limbs of a human body wrenched apart by chariot wheels drawing them in opposite directions, the so-called ery shirt laced with pitch and acid, and other instruments of savagery that I have not yet mentioned. So it isnt surprising, is it, that there is such a great fear of all this process in which there is such wonderful variety and such a terrible apparatus. The torturer does not have to do much more than simply set out the instruments of pain. The defendants are mentally overcome by the mere appearance of those things which they would have resisted with physical endurance. In fact, the instruments with which torturers subjugate and dominate our minds are more efcient to the precise degree that they are simply displayed.
Note that it was accepted that the process was designed to induce fear in which onlookers would be mentally overwhelmed.22 Recognition of this powerful mental impact of courtroom spectacle, and premonitions of punishments, were commonplace observations, not just amongst denizens of the ruling class like Seneca, but also for a Christian bishop, Cyprian of Carthage, who, two centuries later, was to die in one of the rst empire-wide state-directed persecutions of Christians.23
nightmare does not appear, save for one exception: Maximinus Daia, who has a ctitious vision foisted on him by Lactantius (de Mort. Pers. 49.5); see 46871. 21. Seneca, Ep. 14.2. 22. Of course, it need not be state-engendered fear that would produce the dream; so Aug. Serm. 161.6 (PL 38:880): The man whos going to kill you, whom you fear, who terries you, whom youre running away from, dread of whom wont allow you to get any sleepif you see him in a dream when youre asleep, youre paralyzed with frightwhats he going to do to you? 23. Cyprian, Ad Donatum 10 (CSEL 3.1:1112): Incisae sunt licet leges duodecim tabulis et publico aere praexo iura proscripta sint: inter leges ipsas delinquitur, inter iura peccatur, innocentia nec illic, ubi defenditur, reservatur. Saevit invicem discordantium rabies et inter togas pace rupta forum litibus mugit insanum. Hasta illic et gladius et carnifex praesto est, ungula effodiens, eculeus extendens, ignis exurens, ad hominis corpus unum supplicia plura quam membris.
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See Donatus: the laws of the Twelve Tables are engraved on tablets of bronze, but the law is violated in their very presence. Innocence is overcome in the place where it should be most protected. Adversaries rage against each other, wars ame out amongst citizens in togas, the forum resounds with a great clamor. Here is the lance and the sword, the executioner ready to apply torture, the claws of iron, the rack of torture, the burning irons, and other tools to break and to pull apart, more instruments of torture, in a word, than the human body has limbs.
Cyprian asks his interlocutor to behold, to see, to envisage the sights of court and punishment. The ekphratic nature of the impressions that he is attempting to evoke in the reader is manifest. That the description of the facts of a trial was intended to be so visual shows how the force and the impact of judicial ritual was intended to strike the viewer. The majesty and the fear of the law imparted by the spectacle of court procedure was recognized as a continuing function of the courts themselves in the trials of ordinary criminals in the centuries after the empire had become Christian and Christians themselves were no longer being hauled before the courts on the charge of being a Christian. When the late-fourth-century writer of an anonymous Arian commentary on the gospel of Matthew turned to the subject of the passion narrative, the preacher was able to appeal to visual recollections that he assumed would be shared by his parishioners.24
The judge who will hear the cases of criminals in public, places his tribunal in a high location . . . and you will see there the ofcials arranged in their
24. The Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, usually collated with Chrysostoms works, is in fact pseudo-Chrysostomic; see M. Meslin, Les Ariens dOccident, 335 430 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 15263, and J.-P. Bouhot, Remarques sur lhistoire du texte de lOpus Imperfectum in Matthaeum, VC 29 (1970): 197209. Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, Hom. 54.31 (PG 56:941): Criminosas personas iudex auditurus in publico, tribunal suum collocat in excelso, circa se constituit vexilia regalia, ante conspectum suum ponit super mensam calliculam, unde tribus digitis mortem hominum scribat aut vitam; hinc inde ofciales ordinate consistunt; in medio secretario ponuntur genera horrenda poenarum, quae non solum pati, sed et videre tormentum est. Stant iuxta parati tortores, crudeliores aspectu quam manibus. Tota iudicii facies cuiusdam schematis terrore vestitur. Et cum ad medium productae fuerint criminosae personae, ante interrogationem iudicis ipsius, iudicii terribili discutiuntur aspectu. Similiter et Dominus se ad iudicium venturum promittit similiter cum tremore, non cum simili terrore. Nam et bona et mala similiter ordinata sunt in terra sicut in caelo, non tamen similia. Ergo videntes in terra poenas, et glorias, non similes putare debemus in coelo; sed cum sint talia super terram, multo maiora suspicari debemus in caelo. Quantum enim Deus distat ab homine, tantum caeleste iudicium a terreno. Istius enim iudicii splendor in schemate, illius autem iudicii maiestas in veritate, testante propheta. . . .
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proper order: in the middle of the judicial hearing chamber are placed the horrible devices of punishment, which are painful not just to suffer, but even to see. There stand close at hand and at the ready the torturers themselves, crueler in their appearance than ghostly apparitions. The whole appearance of the court is clothed in the dress of terror. When the criminals are lead into the midst of this scene, even before any interrogation has actually begun by the judge, they are already broken by the terrible sight of the court itself.
Note that the writer is speaking about a strong continuity that long outlasted the persecution of Christians, but which is here recalled in the context of his discussion of the trials and execution of Jesus son of Joseph as remembered in the gospel of Matthew. Once again, the visual elements are paramount. It is another judicial ekphrasis. Calculating the known effect of seeing dramatic presentations, Roman authorities deliberately used the spectacle of trial and punishment as a piece of theater that had to be witnessed by numbers as large as possible to inculcate in them precisely this effect.25
After a few days [the governor] Anullinus ordered his heralds [praecones] to travel through the neighboring rural districts and cities so that the people in them would come to witness the spectacle of the martyrs. Hearing the announcements, and out of fear of punishment, all the people came from every possible direction to the spectaclesand those who did not wish to come were urged to do so by the governors ofcials.
Here it is not of particular signicance that it is an invented Anullinus who has been made the ctional bearer of Christian memories, but it is important how the images are construed. The actions are reported in a martyr act of dubious authenticity, but they surely depict a not unusual occurrence. Whether local townsfolk were urged on or not, the news of the governors tribunal being set up in the forum traveled by word of mouth throughout the neighboring quarters of the town and drew large numbers of spectators to the sights. The consistent reports found even in the genuine acta conrm that the trials were witnessed by huge crowds
25. Passio s. Mammarii 5. The text can be found in Jean Mabillons Vetera analecta, new ed. (Paris: Montalant, 1723; reprint, Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg, 1967), 17881, at 178: Post dies autem aliquot, iubet [sc. Anullinus proconsul] praecones per regiones et civitates, ut ad spectaculum sanctorum venirent. Audientes vero universi populi prae timore poenarum undique ad spectacula veniebant; et qui venire nolebant ab ofcialibus urgebantur. See also E. Le Blant, Les actes des martyrs: supplment aux Acta Sincera de Dom Ruinart = Mmoires de lInstitut National de France, Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 30.2 (1883): 57348, at 108 ( 11).
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who behaved as if they were attending an impressive event of public entertainment.26 And these same martyr acts, even the more ctitious ones, also betray the clear cognizance of the Roman ofcials themselves that the mere sight of such a spectacle was sufcient thoroughly to terrify defendants.27 The Christian martyrs dreamed accordingly.28 Perpetuas dream of her own punishment prompts us to consider other local accounts, such as that of Marianus and Jacobus, in the generations following her death that also include dream sequences modeled on hers.29 Set in 259, the nal year of the persecution of Christians ordered by the emperor Valerian, the story of their martyrdom is marked by a certain imitation of style, form, and content established by Perpetuas account of her experiences in prison.30 Marianus, a reader (lector), was arrested along with Jacobus, a deacon, at a rural villa near a place called Muguae on the outskirts of the city of Cirta. Marianus, Jacobus, and the anonymous author of the narrative were then escorted by a centurion and his soldiers to a hearing before the municipal magistrates of Cirta. Here they were interrogated in a trial sequence which, although only briey alluded to in the letter of their imprisoned brother that forms the core of the narrative of their arrest and martyrdom, must have had a profound impact on them. While in prison at Cirta, before their transfer to a hearing before the governor of Numidia at Lambaesis, but following the brutal tortures to which their bodies had been subjected, the martyrs had a series of prophetic visions. Marianus was the rst of these. After the torture of his body, he lapsed
26. Acta s. Cypriani 3 = Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, no. 11, 172 73; Passio S. Philippi Heracl. 5 (Ruinart, Acta sincera, 214). 27. Acta ss. Timotheii et Maurae 1 (AASS, 1 Maii): the governor, in order to break the Christians, says to them: Dont you see the instruments of torture all around you? 28. E. Le Blant, Les songes et les visions des martyrs, chap. 8 in Les perscuteurs et les martyrs aux premiers sicles de notre re (Paris: E. Leroux, 1893), 8997. 29. Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi = P. Franchi de Cavalieri, La Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi = Studi e Testi 3 (Rome: Tipograa Vaticana, 1900); for recent interpretations, see J. Aronen, Marianus Vision in the Acts of Marianus and Jacobus, Weiner Studien, n.s. 18 (1984): 16986. 30. Franchi de Cavalieri, Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi, 13, noting how Schultze regarded the similarities between the Acts of Montanus and those of Marianus and Iacobus: Questa somiglianza dimostracos egli ragionilesistenza nellAfrica settentrionale di una sorta di schema, principalmente foggiato sugli Atti di s. Perpetua, per chiunque volesse esercitare la sua penna nel campo dellagiograa. Franchi de Cavalieri admits this inuence as natural, but he argues that it actually determined the bare facticity of the later martyrs who used Perpetuas story as a template for their own narrations.
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into the peace of a deep sleep. Through divine favor there was revealed to him a vision, the contents of which he retold to his fellow prisoners after he awoke.31 He recounted his dream as follows:32
My brothers, I was shown the sublime construction of a very high, shining judicial tribunal on which, in the place of the Roman governor there sat a judge of sublime appearance. There was a judicial platform for the defendant facing the tribunalnot the usual low one which is mounted by only a single rising step, but one which was furnished with a whole series of steps and which could be reached only by a long, celestial ascent. The individual ranks of those who had confessed moved forward, and the judge ordered them to be taken to the sword. This also happened to me. Then I heard a great clear voice saying: Summon Marianus. I ascended the judicial platform for the defendants. . . . Then, all of a sudden, behold! Cyprian appeared seated at the right hand of the judge, and he stretched out his hand and raised me to a higher place on the platform, smiled, and said: Come, seat yourself here beside me. Then the other groups of defendants cases were heard, while I was seated in an advisors position [on the tribunal]. Then the judge rose and we were taken to his headquarters. Our route took us through a pleasant place of meadows and densely leafed forest glades, made dark by cypress trees rising together to great heights and pine trees that touched the sky. You would imagine the place was surrounded on all sides by luxuriant woods, but there was an open place in the center where waters owed plentifully from a clear spring. . . . And at this point the judge suddenly retired from sight. . . .
This sort of judicial dream became part of the narratives of African martyrs that followed Perpetuas, although in the elaborate story of the
31. Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi 6.5 (Franchi de Cavalieri, 53): Etenim Mariano post illam vexationem corporis altius in soporis tranquilla resoluto quid divina dignatio ad duciam spei salutaris ostenderit, expergefactus nobis sic ipse narravit. . . . 32. Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi 6.613 (Franchi de Cavalieri, 5354): Ostensum est, inquit, mihi, fratres, tribunalis excelsi et candidi nimium sublime fastigium, in quo ad vicem praesidis iudex satis decora facie praesidebat. Illic erat catasta non humili pulpitu, nec uno tantum ascensibilis gradu, sed multis ordinata gradibus et longo sublimis ascensu. Et admovebantur confessorum singulae classes, quas ille iudex ad gladium duci iubebat. Ventum est et ad me. Tunc exauditur mihi vox clara et inmensa dicentis: Marianum applica. Et ascendebam in illam catastam. Et ecce ex inproviso mihi sedens ad dextera eius iudicis Cyprianus apparuit et porrexit manum et levavit me in altiorem catastae locum et arrisit et ait: Veni, sede mecum. Et factum est ut audirentur aliae classes, me quoque assidente. Et surrexit ille iudex, et nos eum deducebamus ad praetorium suum. Iter autem nobis erat per locum pratis amoenum et virentium nemorum laeta fronde vestitum, opacum cupressis consurgentibus in excelsum et pinis pulsantibus caelum, ut putares eum locum per omnem circuitus ambitum lucis virentibus coronatum. Sinus autem in medio perlucidi fontis uberantibus venis et puris liquoribus redundabat. Et ecce subito ad oculis nostris ille iudex recessit.
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martyrdoms of Montanus and Lucius, who were also executed at Carthage in the nal year of the Valerianic persecution, the dream is more abbreviated in scope.33 From actual dreams and literary evocations of them, therefore, we know that the judicial process impressed itself upon the individual consciousness of defendants of the time. The behavioral symptoms of guilt that were induced in accused persons by judicial rituals were well known and were signaled in public by a pervasive body language of blushing, sweating, shufing, bowing, scraping, weeping, and so on.34 That was the behavior of persons who were convinced of their own guilt by the overpowering presence of the court and awe of the law. Tertullian, who reports these reactions, does so only to insist that the bodily movements and gestures of Christian defendants did not signal guilt but rather the reverse, and hence an implicit condemnation of the imperial system. But it was surely bodily involvement in the steps and procedures that imprinted these experiences so vividly in the mind.35 It is also known that the dreams and remembrances of trial and punishment were already following an internal imperative, as it were, within the Christian community, where the process of trial and punishment had provoked discussion about the new values to be attributed to those who suffered. It was such a novel and pervasive inversion of norms that its repercussive effects were felt within the individuals who were subscribing to the new social values. Perpetuas dreaming of her future punishment was imitated not just by other lay Christians and priests, but also by Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage himself. As reported in Cyprians biography by the deacon Pontius, the judicial dream had now become a stereotypical and necessary literary artice.36
33. Actio et Visio Martyrum Luci, Montani et ceterorum comitum, 5.12 = F. Dolbeau, La passion des saints Lucius et Montanus: Histoire et dition du texte, REAug 29 (1983): 3981, at 6970: Tunc Reno qui nobiscum fuerat adprehensus, ostensum est ei produci singulos, quibus prodeuntibus lucernae singulae praeferebantur; cuius autem lucerna non praecesserat, nec ipse procedebat. Et processimus nos cum lucernis nostris, et expergefactus est. Et ut nobis retulit. . . . 34. Tert. Apol. 1.1.1013 (CCL 1:8687), and his discussion of the emotions of timor, pudor, tergiversatio, paenitentia and deploratio ordinarily displayed by accused persons. 35. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 7274, emphasizes the importance of common physical involvement in recursively repeated ritual-like events to the formation of collective memories. 36. Vita Caecilii Cypriani 12 (CSEL 3.3ciiciv): . . . admirabilem visitationem Dei non praeteribo, qua antistitem suum sic in exilio esse voluit de secutura passione securum . . . eo enim die quo in exilii loco mansimus . . . apparuit mihi, inquit, nondum somni quiete sopito iuvenis ultra modum hominis inormis: qui cum me quasi ad praetorium duceret, videbar mihi tribunali sedentis proconsulis admoveri. Is
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I will not pass over Gods wonderful visitation by which he desired that his priest would be certain in exile of his passion that was to happen . . . for on that day when we rst took up residence in the place of exile [the city of Curubis] there appeared to me, he said, when I was deep in sleep, a young man of unusual height who conducted me to the governors headquarters where I was led before the tribunal of the proconsul who was seated on his dais. When he looked at me, he began at once to note down on his tablet a sentence which I did not know since he had, as yet, asked nothing of me with the usual interrogation. But the young man who was now standing at his back very anxiously read what the governor had written down. Because he could not announce it openly in words, he tried to indicate to me by a hand gesture what was contained in the writing on the tablet. For, with his hand, expanded and attened like a blade, he imitated the stroke of the usual punishment and expressed what he wished to be understood by his signal as clearly as by any speech. I understood the future sentence of my passion. I began to ask and to beg immediately that at least one days grace should be granted to me, until I could arrange to get my property affairs in order. When I had urgently repeated my request, the governor began to make some new annotations on his tablet which I could not see or know. But I understood from the calmness of his facial features that the judges mind had been moved by my petition, since it was a just and fair one. Moreover, the young man, who had already revealed to me what my passion was to be by gesture rather than by words, hurried to signify repeatedly by a secret signal, by twisting one of his ngers behind the other, that the delay till the next day had been granted. So, although the actual sentence had not been read, although I rejoiced with a very glad heart with joy at the delay that had been granted, I still trembled with fear over the uncertainty of my interpretation that the remains of this fear still set my heart beating with excessive agitation.
ut in me respexit, adnotare statim coepit in tabula sententiam quam non sciebam, nihil enim de me solita interrogatione quaesierat. Sed enim iuvenis qui a tergo eius stabat admodum curiosus legit quidquid fuerat adnotatum. Et quia inde verbis proferre non poterat, nutu declarante monstravit quid in litteris tabulae illius ageretur. Manu enim expansa et complanata ad spatae modum ictum solitae animadversionis imitatus, quod volebat intellegi, ad instar liquidi sermonis expressit. Intellexi sententiam passionis futuram. Rogare coepi et petere continuo, ut dilatio mihi vel unius diei prorogaretur, donec res meas legitima ordinatione disponerem. Et cum preces frequenter iterassem, rursus in tabula coeperat nescio quid adnotare. Sensi tamen de vultus serenitate iudicis mentem quasi iusta petitione commotam. Sed et ille iuvenis, qui iam dudum de passionis indicio gestu potius quam sermone prodiderat, clandestino identidem nutu concessam dilationem, quae in crastinum petebatur, contortis post invicem digitis signicare properavit. Ego quamvis non esset lecta sententia, et sic de gaudio dilationis acceptae laeto admodum corde resipisco: metu tamen interpretationis incertae sic tremebam, ut reliquae formidinis cor exultans adhuc toto pavore pulsarent.
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Once again, it is important to note that the dream is clearly interpreted according to the prophetic psychology of the times: it is not read backwards as revelatory of the formation of Cyprians psyche. Rather, as Pontius himself puts it: What revelation could be more manifest? What more happy than this recognition? In this way everything was predicted to Cyprian which in fact later happened to him.37 On occasion, it is true, nightmarish visions were recorded in which the lines of power inherent in the rituals of trial and punishment were reversed. One such narrative concerns the judicial hearing and torture of an African Christian named Maximian in a dramatic scene set in the persecution of dissident Christians (Donatists) in Africa in the year 347. Following his arrest, interrogation, and torture, Maximian was thrown into prison to await his nal sentencing and punishment. In prison, he had a dream that foretold his release from all prisons. Apparently, like Perpetua, he was sentenced to die in the arena, and, like her, Maximian preplayed his forthcoming punishment in his dream. In the arena, however, Maximian does not battle a dark man construed as Satan, but rather someone whom he immediately recognizes as the emperor. He ghts a savage hand-to-hand combat with the supreme ruler of this world; violently laying his hands on the prince, he wrenches the emperors eye out of its socket. In this way Maximian was able to rejoicein his dreamas a great victor, and, ascending heavenward in his apotheosis, he heard the voice of an old man thundering out three times: Woe to you, O world, for you are perishing.38 The Christian preacher who was remembering this episode and commenting on the dream took the signicance of the vision to be obvious. By gouging out the emperors eye, Maximian left him as blind to the truth as he was. He had thereby overcome an evil force. Such subversive readings of the judicial process, even in dreams, however, are very rare occurrences in the existing martyr narratives. In both senses, it seems, Maximians dream was a minority view. The more normal judicial dream, if we might call it that, became a staple of Christian rhetoric in periods long after the state persecutions were a thing of the distant past. In their replaying of imperial authority, such dreams functioned less as a judgment of the social order than as a cognitio of the self. In the midst of a long letter that the not-so-saintly
37. Vita Caecilii Cypriani 13.1 (CSEL 3.3civ): Quid hac revelatione manifestius, quid hac dignatione felicius? Ante illi praedicta sunt omnia quaecumque postmodum subsecuta sunt. 38. Passio Isaac et Maximiani 8.5410.72, in the new edition by P. Mastandrea, Passioni di martiri Donatisti (BHL 4473 e 5271), AB 113 (1995): 3988, at 8183.
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Jerome wrote to the young Roman aristocrat Eustochium (to advise her on the touchy subject of virginity and celibacy), he reported his nowfamous nightmare that is as good an example as any.39 Jerome begins with context: he confesses that, although he had become a Christian, he had continued to love pagan literature. He was starved without his Cicero. And whenever he perused the books of the Bible he was appalled by their barbaric language. Thus tortured and wearied, late one afternoon he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, a physical lassitude he blamed on the inroads of that old serpent. He felt his body becoming cold and remote. Then there was a rush of movement,
. . . when suddenly, taken up in the spirit, I was hauled before the judges tribunal [ad tribunal iudicis], where there was so much light and such a great shining from the radiance of those who were standing about that, throwing myself on the ground, I did not dare even to look up. When I was asked my status [interrogatus conditionem], I replied that I was a Christian. The one who was presiding as judge intoned: You are lying, he said, You are a Ciceronean, not a Christian. Your treasure is there, where your heart is. I remained rooted to the spot, tongue-tied. Amidst the lashes of the whip [verbera]for the judge had ordered that I be beatenI was tortured more by conscience than by any torturers rebrands, and I considered that little piece of verse in my mind: Who will confess you in the res of hell itself ? I began to cry and shouted out: Pity me, my lord, have mercy on me. Amidst these pleas of mine the lash of the whip resounded. Then the spectators who were standing round about fell on their knees before the tribunal and began to implore the judge that he should have pity on my youth, that he should make allowance and forgive my mistake, and that he should only impose the penalty of crucixion if I ever again read the books of the gentiles. But I wished to give an even greater promise. I began to swear an oath and to take his very name as a witness to it, saying, Lord, if I ever should have worldly books, if I should read them, I will have wronged you. Having made this formal oath I was dismissed and returned to those above [i.e., the living]. I opened my eyes, washed with so many burning tears that transform unbelievers into believers from corporeal pain. For that was no mere sleep I experienced or one of those hollow dreams by which we are sometimes fooled. The tribunal before which I prostrated myself is witness, the court which I feared is witnessmay I never have to face such terrible judicial torture againso much that I had
39. Jerome, Ep. 22.30 (CSEL 54:18991). As Dom Paul Antin put it better: Le songe de saint Jrmecest lexpression reue, mais il vaudrait mieux dire le cauchemar. See Autour du songe de saint Jrme, REL 41 (1963): 35077, at 350; for interpretive context, see P. Cox Miller, Jerome and His Dreams, chap. 8 in Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 20531.
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bruises covering my shoulders, and I still felt the effects of the blows after I had woken up. . . .
Here the whole courtroom experience is replayed in the mind: the ritualistic obeisance before the raised dais of the tribunal on which the presiding magistrate, the governor, sat as judge, and the use of bodily torture to elicit the truth. Here too is the identication of the self before a curious crowd of onlookers who intercede with their shouts exhorting the judge either to condemn the miscreant or to show mercy and to set him free. The whole thing is a quintessentially Roman experience. Jeromes literary dream-replay simultaneously assists the social memory of judicial ceremonial and exploits it to persuade his readers: the youthful girl Eustochium, and his third audience, we who read them both. Such texts embedded the spectacle of judgment and punishment in the heart of Christian discipline. Jeromes dream could be thought of as a piece of high-cultural selffashioning were it not for the fact that all of its principal elements can be found in social circumstances that were profoundly local and entirely peripheral to the social circles in which Jerome maneuvered. Take the case of a common man from Hippo Regius, a busy port city in North Africa, as reported by Augustine to his parishioners in a sermon.40
Let me tell your graces a story that Ive never told you before, something that happened in this congregation, in this church. There was a man here, a simple soul, harmless, a true believer, known to many of you people of Hippo, indeed to all of youa man named Tutuslymeni. Who of all of you, my fellow citizens, didnt know him? It was directly from him that I heard what I am now going to tell you. Someone refused to give back to him what he had entrusted to that personwhat that man owed Tutuslymeni. He was relying on that mans honesty. He was so upset that he challenged the man to swear an oath. That man swore, so our man lost his property. But while our man lost his property, that man lost his soul. So our Tutuslymeni, a serious and dependable man, told me that later that same night he had a dream in which he was brought before a judge. With considerable violence, and terror, he was brought into the presence of this awful and exalted personage, attended by a court of similarly exalted persons. And he told me that, as he cowered in a corner, the order was given for him to be summoned back again, and that he was interrogated in these words: Why did you challenge a man to an oath when you knew that he was going to
40. Aug. Serm. 308.5 (PL 39:140810); the date is uncertain, scholarly guesses placing it in the later era of his preaching, after c. 420. Doubt must fall on the personal name Tutuslymeni; some indigenous African names, it is true, are unusual, but in this case one suspects problems generated by copyists.
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swear falsely? Our man replied: He refused to give me back what was owed to me. And would it not have been better, the answer came, for you to lose the property that you were demanding, than for you to destroy the soul of this man with a false oath? The order was then given for Tutuslymeni to be placed on the ground and to be beaten. He was beaten so severely that we he woke up the welts raised by the blows were evident on his back. But after being punished, he was told: You are being spared for your otherwise blameless life. But take care you do not ever do this again. Tutuslymeni, you see, had certainly committed a grave sin and was punished for it. But any of you here will be committing a much graver sin, if after this sermon of mine and hearing this warning you do anything of the same sort.
In recounting the sheer physicality of the dream experience before a court, was Tutuslymeni merely imitating what he had read in Jerome, or what had been suggested to him by Augustine, his pastoral bishop? I think not. What was being replayed was a vivid personal experience.41 Of course, it was one that Augustine suggests was intentionally inculcated by preachers in the believeras, no doubt, it already had been for Tutuslymeni. But this inculcation was also a reinforcement of a common experience and a common knowledge. There is no doubt that bishops appropriated the judicial experience and preached it. The believer was to set up his or her own imaginary court that would pronounce judgment on them, announce the appropriate sentence, and inict the suitable punishment. As Augustine vividly advises in one of his sermons: Question your faith, lift your soul onto the defendants tribunal [catasta] of your conscience, torture yourself with the fear of judgment, and then answer the questions: In whom do you believe? Why do you believe?42 Augustine normally congures God, like the late Roman state and its intrusive ofcials, as an omnipresent being who sees and hears everything. You must therefore already have your personal judge in the secret recesses of yourself; it is an internal dynamic that logically leads to the Christian analog of the judicial confession.43 Hence the moral frequently preached to his congregation that each one of you must sit in judgment of yourself or investigate yourself. You must interrogate yourself in every respect to discover what your conscience
41. M. Dulaey, Le rve dans la vie et la pense de saint Augustin (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1973), 17174, separates the long-term textual elements in Tutuslymenis dream from those that were drawn from experience with contemporary courts in early fth-century North Africa. 42. Aug. En. in Ps. 96.16 (CCL 39:136768). 43. Aug. En. in Ps. 74.9 (CCL 39:103032).
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tells you. In short, you are to hold court over yourself, to judge yourself.44 In a sermon preached at the shrine (mensa) of saint Cyprian in Carthage on 27 May 418, Augustine made the connection with a Roman trial strikingly explicit.45 He urges his listeners who are considering the merits of public power to sit in judgment on themselves:
. . . rst, for your own sake, sit as a judge on your own case [esto iudex in te]. First judge yourself [prius iudica de te] so that from the innermost recesses of your conscience [de penetrali conscientiae] you may advance with a clear mind against another person. Return into yourself, arrest yourself, debate with yourself, hold a hearing with yourself. I want you to clear yourself in the court of an honest judge where you will require no witness. You wish to proceed with power in order to make one tell you something that you do not know about another. Before you go to court, however, you must do some judging into your inner self [prius intus iudica]. Has your conscience told you nothing about yourself? [Nihil tibi de te dixit conscientia tua?] If you dont deny it, it has certainly done so. I dont want to hear what it said. You yourself must judge, you who conducted the hearing. It has told you about yourself: what you have done, what you have received, what sins you have committed. I would like to know what sort of sentence you have pronounced [on yourself]. If you have conducted this hearing well, if you have conducted it honestly, if you have been just in conducting it, if you have climbed onto the judicial tribunal of your mind [si tuae mentis tribunal ascendisti], if you have suspended yourself on the torture rack of your heart before your own eyes, if you have applied to yourself the tortures of fear [si te ipsum ante te ipsum in eculeum cordis suspendistis, si graves tortores adhibuisti timoris], then you have heard the case wellif that is how you held it. And beyond any doubt, you have punished sin with repentance. So, you see: you have held a judicial examination, you have conducted the hearing, you have passed the sentence, and you have inicted the punishment.
What is at stake here, as is manifest in Augustines diction, is the new sense of conscientia.46 It is precisely the quality of the linkages between inner self, self-awareness, judicial procedure, and the awe of the Roman
44. For example, Aug. Serm. 16A.7 (CCL 41:223), and Serm. 49.5 (CCL 41:617): Iam de iudicio priore dominico disputavi, ut iudicares te ipsum . . . iudica te ipsum, noli tibi parcere . . . iudica inde te . . . Cum ergo iudicaveris te ipsum . . . and so on, throughout the sermon. 45. Aug. Serm. 13.7 (CCL 41:18182). 46. It is only necessary to consider the range of meanings in sections (ii) and (iii) of the entry for conscientia in TLL 3:36468, to sense the general shift in meaning from one of a shared knowledge with others about something, often pejoratively about a crime, conspiracy, or such, and the later sense, in which the usage of Christian authors dominates, of a sense of knowledge about the inner self.
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trial that we have seen refracted in the interpretations of dreams and visions. These visions reveal the typical ways in which the ordinary process of Roman judicial force was embedded in the mind. In a letter in which a correspondent of Augustine was at pains to emphasize distinctions between the provincial culture of Spain and North Africa, he describes a series of complex machinations involving one Syagrius, the bishop of Huesca in Spain. Syagrius gets caught up in a web of lying and deceit, and he enters a period of acute anxiety during which he tries to nd a way out.47
Suddenly that very same night, terried by a miraculous vision of our Lord Jesus Christ, he saw himself in distress standing before the tribunal of the fearful judge, after having received the severe sentence for his part in such a great crime, and then, in terror, he awoke with a jolt and was struck with such consternation of mind that . . .
upon awaking, he decided to make a clear breast of his nefarious activities and involvementswhich is to say, to confess them. The intense personal experience of judicial spectacle imprinted on memory was subject to imitation and parody in a constant replay that continued to the end of antiquity. But it needed a literary text. From the embedding of the spectacle of punishment in the consciences of persons of the time, we must therefore move to the wider implications of social memory.48 Here there are some manifest indications of the way in which the nature of Roman judicial procedures and punishment were remembered: the martyr acts and the narrative accounts of the trials and executions of Christians, such as those of Perpetua, Marianus and Jacobus, Montanus and Lucius, and many others. The very existence and continuity of this form of memory, however, is itself a problem. As studies of the spectacular punishments vented on criminals during the high Roman empire have emphasized, a good deal of what can be reconstructed of the
47. Aug. Ep. 11*.15 (CSEL 88:63) dated to about 419: . . . cum subito eadem nocte domini nostri Iesu Christi mirabili visione perterritus vidit se ante tribunal metuendi iudicis constitutum tristem pro tanto conscientiae crimine suscepisse sententiam moxque trepidus consurrexit tantaque animi consternatione percussus est. . . . 48. J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992), 49 51, 1067, although commenting on oral memory, draw attention to the type of sequencing and narrative that is important for the kind of legal drama that is being recollected here, and how it is complicated by the presence of texts in a way that sets into relief the issue of who controls commemoration in any given society, rightly drawing attention to the determinate role played by local literary lites (in this case, in the Brazilian Northeast).
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nature of judicial process in criminal cases in the period, as well as of the whole story of the instruments of torture that were routinely used in the pursuit of the truth for those courts, comes from these very same martyr accounts. The attempt to stand outside them and to nd a comparable body of independent evidence that is as detailed and coherent is a rather difcult undertaking. This specic utility of the martyr narratives depends on the fact that they themselves were a new kind of writing centered on the spectacle of trial and punishment. Judicial processes specically contributed to a literary genre that was invented within the context of the Roman imperial state. Dreams of trial and punishment are a barometric measurement of the weight with which the imperial judicial drama imposed itself upon the souls of persons of the time. But the extensive record of such dreams in Christian writers raises a larger problem. There is every reason to suppose that the majesty of the law elicited similar responses from nonChristians long before the coming into existence of martyr narratives. The extensive pagan dream interpretation literature guarantees as much. Even so, the pre-Christian remembrances that are on record seem neither as vivid nor as frequent in their replaying of judicial dreams. This simple observation draws our attention to the obvious fact that the Christian dreams are replayed in peculiar kinds of written records and that it is through them that there subsists an unusually detailed record of Roman judicial procedure and its experience by defendants. Some of the distinctive coloring of this new literature is surely the result of the written remembrance of a wider social range of defendants and their experiences, not just the stories of those born to honest rank, but the narratives of other less fortunate persons as well. No matter how much the scenes of judicial terror imposed themselves on individual minds, even to the point of producing dreams about them, the more difcult problem is therefore one of what has been called social memory. As long as such individual impressions were only thought and spoken, they remained in a sphere of instant-performance oral culture that was not likely to leave much in the way of permanent records. But it is this exceptional preservation of memory that the written records of the Christian martyr acts achieve. This achievement was no accident, since it was the declared intent of those who preserved such records that they be maintained in order to encourage and edify the faithful in times of persecution and to serve as a record of the injustices perpetrated on the Christians. As the men and women executed with Perpetua indicated when they entered the arena, by means of facial expressions and hand gestures directed at the Roman governor: Now, usthen, you. When that Final
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Court was held at the end of time, the persecutor would face an indelible written record for which he would be held personally accountable. Given this narrative impulse, it is perhaps not surprising that the only other major example of the isolation of judicial memories in the realm of oral discourse is to be found in the world of ction. Matters of arrest, court procedure, and trial and punishment are central to the plots and stories that constituted the narratives of the novel, from Petronius and Apuleius to the romances of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. Scenes of criminal activity, investigation, arrest, detention, formal hearings, torture, and public punishment are core elements of the novels, and hence they represent one of the manifest interfaces between ction and history. This is precisely why it has been so tempting to exploit the novels in reconstructing the real life scenarios entailed in trial and punishment in the Roman world.49 Apart from the ctions in the novels, however, much of what is known about actual Roman court procedure, including the critical areas of arrest, detention, interrogation, torture, sentencing, and punishmentin short, the spectacle of the lawis known through Christian texts that carefully preserved a record of the confrontation between Christians and those who hauled them before the courts for trial and punishment. So, for example, the arrest, trial, and execution of the apostle Paul constitute one of the very rare, attested examples of the appeal procedure (provocatio ad Caesarem) available to Roman citizens.50 Almost all of our knowledge concerning the processes of interrogation of accused persons rests on the details preserved concerning the trials of Christians. Indeed, the whole area of criminal trials and capital punishment would remain a rather arid set of rules attested in the law codes were it not for the details contained in hundreds of different Christian martyr texts and related genres that describe these processes in vivid detail. The actual experience of trial and punishment in the Roman world is something for which we depend, in very great part, upon the narrative literary forms in which it was remembered by Christian rhetoric.51
49. See F. Norden, Apuleius von Madaura und das rmische Privatrecht (Leipzig: Teubner, 1912); R. G. Summers, Roman Justice and Apuleius Metamorphoses, TAPA 101 (1970): 51131; and, more generally, F. Millar, The World of the Golden Ass, JRS 71 (1981): 6375. 50. See P. Garnsey, The Lex Iulia and Appeal under the Empire, JRS 56 (1966): 16789, at 176, 18285; for Pauls own story, see Acts 22.2526; 23.27; 25.622. 51. It is very difcult to nd anything comparable from Roman pre-Christian texts to match the detail of experience that can be culled from these sources, or, indeed, to imagine what our knowledge of the experience of the judicial process
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But the process of preservation depended on the raw materials and drama of a judicial spectacle to be remembered. A well-known comment on the process is found in the late-fourth-century Christian poet Prudentius. In the rst poem in his Book of the Martyrs Crowns (Peristephanon Liber), a hymn composed to honor the soldier-martyrs Emeterius and Chelidonius (of whom, notably, nothing else is remembered or known), Prudentius notes that one of the rst strategies of Roman authorities, governors who were lled with envy of the heroic achievements of martyrs, was to take from them the privilege of memory by denying them the nal coup de grce : a public trial and execution. Failing this kind of denial, however, as in the case of Emeterius and Chelidonius, the governor would do the next best thing: he would make a deliberate attempt to efface the written records of the trial that would enable a permanent memory to be maintained.52 Prudentius bitterly records this of his martyrs:53
O destructive forgetfulness of an ancient silence by which we are enviously begrudged the facts and by which the fame of those events is gradually extinguished. That blasphemous governor destroyed the records so that later ages could not learn in tenacious books, and kept the sequence, timing, and measure of their suffering from spreading in sweet words to the ears of men in later times.
The tactic is attested to in many of the martyr texts, such as that of Vincentius of Saragossa in which it is stated that the Roman authorities
would be like if the Christian sources were missing: P. Allard, Les procs des martyrs, and Les supplices des martyrs, chaps. 78 in Dix leons sur le martyre (Paris: V. Lecoffre, 1913), 233308; Le Blant, Les actes des martyrs, passim; and the relevant studies included in Les perscuteurs et les martyrs. It is also clear from the numerous micro-studies on judicial procedure, punishment, and torture made by Pio Franchi de Cavalieri in his editions of the acts of the martyrs. The rich vocabulary relating to these matters is accessible through P. Knzle, V. Peri, and J. Ruysschaert, Indici agiograci dellopera di Pio Franchi de Cavalieri pubblicata in Studi e Testi (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964). 52. J. Petruccione, The Persecutors Envy and the Rise of the Martyr Cult: Peristephanon Hymns 1 and 4, VC 45 (1991): 32746, at 32830; he nds a close parallel in Passio S. Vincentii Martyri: V. M. Simonetti, Una redazione poco conosciuta della passione di S. Vincenzo, RAC 33 (1956): 21941, where the old enemy (i.e., the devil) did not wish the story of Vincents martyrdom to be written down (p. 342, no. 7); cf. Jerome, In Zachariam 2.8, and Eusebius, HE 8.2, who provide other examples. 53. Prudentius, Peristephanon 1.7378 (CCL 126:254): O vetustatis silentis obsoleta oblivio! / Invidentur ista nobis fama et ipsa extinguitur, / chartulas blasfemus olim nam satelles abstulit, / ne tenacibus libellis erudita saecula / ordinem tempus modumque passionis proditum / dulcibus linguis per aures posterorum spargerent.
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ordered that no written records be kept of the proceedings. We would have no recourse to a trial transcript; the enemy thus wished that nothing would remain as a record of his defeat.54 Christian fears that such a repression of records was being instituted purposefully in order to destroy memory were pervasive. But the claim, asserted in a dubious martyr narrative, that Roman authorities actually did not keep records of the trial for this reason is probably not credible. The Christian charge that Roman magistrates were deliberately attempting to repress the court acta in order to prevent Christians from getting hold of them, thereby preventing the making of their own memory, however, is repeated again and again in the more ctitious of the martyr accounts precisely because it was such a real fear.55 The confrontation itself, the implication of local communities and agents of the Roman state in persecution, produced these relicts of memory. It has been noted that one of the critically enacted scenes that separates the concept of Christian martyrdom, and the manner in which it is remembered and recounted, from similar pre-Roman antecedents is the centrality of the criminal trial: In Christian martyr acts, despite all the differences in form, the kernel is the authentic documentation of the legal hearing.56 There can be no doubt that the experience of judicial persecution contributed greatly to the conguration of Christian memory and that it also had a critical impact on Christian theodicy. For central to Christianitys eschatology was the conception of a last or nal court, a trope which is singularly absent from the central Jewish inheritance of the Christians, from the core texts of national resistance in Daniel and 12 Maccabees to later apocalyptic and pseudepigraphical texts.57 It is in the Pauline and deutero-Pauline texts of the New Testament that there rst emerges a clear sense of the idea that just as he or she might face trial and punishment in this world, so each Christian will have to render an account of his or her actions before a divine court.58 It is with the martyr
54. Passio s. Vincentii Levitae 1 = T. Ruinart, Acta Sincera, 366; cf. Le Blant, Actes des martyrs, 66. 55. Le Blant, Actes des martyrs, 71, citing Passio s. Firmi et Rustici (Maffei, Istitut. Diplom., 310); Acta Martyrii s. Alexandri episcopi, 14 (= AASS, 21 Sept.); Acta S. Victoris Mauri (= AASS, 8 Maii). 56. J. W. den Boeft in Die Entstehung der jdischen Martyrologie, ed. J. W. van Henten (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 221, cited by G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27. 57. J. Rivire, Jugement, in Dictionnaire de Thologie Catholique 8 (1925): 1721828, at 174450, reviews the earlier literature. 58. The texts are cited in Rivire, Jugement, 175163.
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acts from the mid-second century, and in the defenses, explications, and debates connected with these texts by early church Fathers like Tertullian, that the interplay between the actual court days faced by Christian defendants and the development of the concept of a divine tribunal becomes more and more explicit. The relationship between the Christian and his or her God came to be congured as a judicial one. Fairness and justice, vengeance and retribution became the principal qualities of God the Judge. And the nal judgment was seen as a court in which Christ was to act as our intercessor or defense attorney. Of course, the same role could also be lled, perhaps with even greater sympathy, by those mortals who had actually suffered in the judicial process.59 Finally, it was also a theodicy in which the present persecutors were eventually to be held accountable by the very same legal means that they themselves had used to arrest, interrogate, torture, and execute Christians. Tertullian is but the rst of a long and continuous line of Latin Christian ideologues who, when commenting on the nature of pagan spectacles, emphasize that the nal judgment, and the resurrection of the body to face trial before Gods tribunal, will be, as he puts it, our spectacle.60 But what a spectacle is now at handthe coming of the Lord . . . yes, and there are still other spectacles to comethat nal and eternal day of court . . . how vast will be the spectacle of that day, Tertullian announces excitedly. He then climaxes in one of his more lurid passages by imagining how he will be able to gaze joyfully on the cosmic punishments vented on philosophers and their students, and on other such sinners, whose bodies will literally liquefy in burning rivers of re. Images like these continued to be deployed down to the end of the fourth and the early fth centuries. Ambrose, for example, reports the typical words of the Roman judge to a guilty defendant as the same words God the Judge will use at his nal tribunal: I am not judging you, rather it is your own actions that condemn you. . . . I myself am not acting against you personally; rather, I am proceeding against you according to the rules of the court.61 Ambrose,
59. Tert. Adv. Marc. 1.2629 (CCL 1:46974). 60. Tert. de Spectac. 30.13 (CCL 1:252): Quale autem spectaculum in proximo est adventus Domini. . . . At enim supsersunt alia spectacula, ille ultimus et perpetuus iudicii dies. . . . Quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! Cf. de Resurr. Mort. 14 (CCL 2:93637). 61. Ambrose, Ep. 20 (ex-77).1112 (CSEL 82.1:15152), the rst paragraph of which reads: Constitue aliquem reum coargutum et convictum criminis, non astruentem defensionis genera, sed deprecantem ac volventem se ad genua iudicis. Respondet ei iudex: Non possum a me facere quisquam. Iustitia in iudicando, non potentia est in iudicando. Ego non iudico, sed facta tua de te iudicant, ipsa te accusant, et ipsa condemnant. Leges te adiudicant, quas iudex non converto, sed custodio. Nihil ex me
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who had himself been a Roman governor (iudex), was perhaps familiar with this rhetoric from personal experience. One suspects that he must have uttered much the same words to some poor defendant facing his tribunal. They were part of an ofcial paean to the impartiality of the law, to the judge and his decisions as founded on unbiased legal norms. The throne of the divine judge and the apostles who serve as his assessores are therefore metaphors drawn directly from Roman trial procedure.62 Unlike much later mediaeval and post-mediaeval visions of a grand collective judgment of all Christians at the end of time, the judgment that the Roman Christian was to face was a solitary one of the individual hailed before an impartial court on a specic set of charges.63 The image is also attested to by the Christian iconography of the period, one of the better guides to the visual realities of Roman courts on which we are otherwise not particularly well informed. Scenes of court dramas, of trial and judgment, beginning with the archetypical trial and execution of Jesus son of Joseph, that are found on the wall paintings in the catacombs of Rome, or carved in the elaborate relief sculptures on Christian sarcophagi, emphasize the centrality of judicial proceedings before a Roman magistrate.64 Almost invariably, they picture the individual defendant facing a magistrate seated on his curule chair, mounted on a tribunal, surrounded by his assessores.65 As was the case with the ctions in the novels of the time, there is also a manifest interplay between these Christian visual memorials of trial and punishment and the popular Roman iconographic depictions of punishment in the arenas and amphitheatres of the empire. Such punishments were seen not just as a spectacle, but a spectacle to be remembered and celebrated, not only in the elaborate and brilliant mosaics that decorated
ego profero, sed ex te forma iudicii in te procedit. Secundum quod audio, iudico, non secundum quod volo; et ideo iudicium meum verum est, quia non voluntati indulgeo, sed aequitati. 62. Ambrose, Exposit. In Luc. 10.49 (PL 15:19089). 63. Rivire, Jugement, 176364, 177677, 178486, 1801, 181226; see C. W. Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 2001336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 18889. 64. H. Leclercq, Le jugement de lme, 8 in Lme, DACL 1.1 (1907): 1502 13. 65. J. Wilpert, Le rappresentazioni del giudizio, chap. 19 in Le pitture delle catacombe Romane: Testo (Rome: Ponticio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1903), 36083, and J. Wilpert, Scene della passione di Nostro Signore, chap. 3 in I sarcofagi Cristiani antichi, volume secondo, testo (Rome: Ponticio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1932), 31420.
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the houses of the wealthy, but also in a wide range of minor objets dart, such as trinkets, amulets, lamps, and medallions decorated with scenes of torture and execution. These latter items were, it has been argued, the fare of popular art: they were, quite literally, souvenirs of the event.66 The pictorial representations themselves then played back into literary descriptions of them in the traditional mode of ekphrasis in which the writer struggled to evoke the visual power of the image in readers minds by the superior power of his verbal description. A typical example is found in a sermon by Asterius of Amasea in which he is describing a fresco that he had seen at Chalcedon that depicted the trial of the martyr Euphemia.67
The judge is seated on a high tribunal. He looks sharply at the young girl with a harsh eye. Art is thus able, whenever it so wishes, to express anger with dead materials. Around him stand the governors personal guards [doryphoroi] and numerous other soldiers. And there are the notaries of the court [hypomnmatn hypographeis] holding their tablets, their pens poised ready to write. One of these men, having raised his hand from his waxen writing tablet, is looking intently at the female defendant, turning his face fully towards her as if to command her to speak more distinctly, so that he might avoid all error in the transcription of her replies to the judges questions. The young girl stands clothed in a shining chiton and himation, showing, as it seemed to the painter, that she is a philosopher with an urbane countenancebut, it seems to me, rather as a woman radiating a soul lled with virtue. Two soldiers are leading her to the governor, one dragging her from the front, and the other pushing her from behind. The young girls appearance is marked by modesty and a sense of resolve. She is casting her glance groundwards, blushing, in order to avoid the gaze of the
66. Le Blant, De quelques monuments antiques relatifs la suite des affaire criminelles, chap. 24 in Perscuteurs et les martyrs, 27196; Potter, Martyrdom as Spectacle, 6869, citing G. Lafaye, Criminals livrs aux btes, Mmoires de la Socit nationale des antiquaires de France (1893): 97116, at 111, who suggested that the small decorated terracotta pots had been manufactured as souvenirs for the games. 67. Asterius Amaseansus, Hom. 11.3; text: C. Datema, Asterius of Amasea, Homilies IXIV, text, introduction, and notes (Leiden: Brill, 1970): xi. The Ecphrasis of Euphemias Martyrdom, 14955, at 154; cf. Le Blant, Actes des martyres, 65, and Prsecuteurs des martyrs, 2. The dates of Asterius are in dispute; Datema, ibid., xviixxiii, gives the following estimates: Asterius time at Chalcedon (when he claims to have seen the picture), 35580 c.e.; bishop of Amasea, c. 380 390. Latin versions of his ekphrasis are reported as part of the proceedings of the Second Council of Nicea (787 c.e.): see PL 129:27980 and 42529 [= Mansi, 13, 1618 (Acta concilii Nicaeni, sessio iv) and Mansi, 13, 30809 (Acta concilii Nicaeni, sessio vi)], where they were raised as part of the iconoclastic controversies.
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males. She stands quite unmoved and not showing any signs of suffering from the terrible contest [agon deilon]. As I myself have praised other painters, I was reminded of the story [to drama] of that woman of Colchis, who wished to murder her own children with the sword, her visage divided between a look of pity and another of rage, with one of her eyes showing anger while the other showed motherly compassion and concern. So I am now transforming that wonder [thauma] of artistic representation to this written account. Indeed, I greatly admire that artist, since he modulated the manner of emotions, at once mixing modesty and manliness [aid te homou kai andreia], emotions that are hostile to each other by nature. Indeed, when our picture is viewed more closely, one can see that the nude public executioners [dmioi], dressed only in brief tunics, are beginning their work. One of them, having grabbed the young girl by her hair and forcing her head backwards, is exposing her face to the other man for punishment. The other executioner, standing in front of her, strikes her in the teeth. The hammer [sphyra] and the other sinister instruments of torture are clearly visible. I began crying at this point, and the suffering cut off my account. The painter has depicted the streams of blood so brilliantly that you would say that they were actually dripping, and you go away, transxed with grief.
This remains by far the dominant scenario, xed by actual Roman judicial drama to the end of antiquity. The possibility of a general mass judgment at the end of time, an idea that gradually developed from marginal eschatological remarks in the New Testament and the early church Fathers into a more elaborate conception, is not actually envisaged iconographically in the Christian West until the eleventh century.68 Funerary epigraphy conrms the impression that this model of judicial procedure had on the minds of Christians, high and low. The wealthy and powerful Cinegius is spoken of as a man who will be safe with the holy Felix as his patronus when he is brought before the court on the day when, at the terrible blast of the trumpet, human souls return again to their containers.69 Others were like the sixth-century noblewoman
68. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 197, citing G. Voss, Das jngste Gericht in der bildenden Kunst des frhen Mittelalters: Eine kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Leipzig: Teubner, 1884), and B. Brenk, Tradition und Neuerung in der christlichen Kunst des ersten Jahrtausends: Studien zur Geschichte des Weltgerichtsbildes (Vienna: H. Bhlaus, 1966). 69. ILCV 3482 = CLE 684 = CIL 10.1370 (Cimitile near Nola): [patronus pl]acito laetatur in hospite Felix, / [sic et tu]tus erit iuvenis sub iudice Christo, / [cum tuba terri]bilis sonitu concusserit orbem / [humanaque ani]mae rursum in sua vasa redibunt; / [Felici merito] hic sociatur ante tri[bunal], / [interea] in gremio Abraham [cum pace quiescit]; cf. the comments by G. B. de Rossi in BAC, 2nd ser., 5 (1874): 31.
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Honorata, who warned persons not to touch her body nor to violate her tomb unless they wished to defend themselves when she would prosecute them before the eternal tribunal.70 Or a similar caution from Rome where the owner of the tomb threatens violators that they will have to go for interrogation before the tribunal of Our Lord.71 On tombstone inscriptions this nal day of judgment is often referred to in reverential and fearful terms as that day of court (illa dies iudicii), the coming day of court (dies futuri iudicii), or on the fearful day of court (per tremendam diem iudicii).72 Just as litigants in secular and earthly courts, the deceased pray to have powerful patroni who will intercede on their behalf and plead the case in their defense, so the woman Dalmata hopes that in that future court the martyrs (sancti) will act as her intercessores.73 Thus, as defendants, they hope to avoid the penalties that the judge will impose.74 Such pictures of God or Christ draw on earlier biblical allusions like those in Deuteronomy or the Psalms that refer to God as great and powerful or long-suffering. But the novel aspect that they add is that Christ is also to be a iudex, a judge. Such revised formulations therefore refer to an all powerful Christ, venerable and terrible judge (omnipotens Christus, iudex venerabilis atque terribilis); or to God, a just, hard, and longsuffering judge (deus, iudex iustus, fortis et longanimis).75 These modes of remembrance, however, though more persistent than the individual humans who produced them, were themselves transitory. The iconographic depictions of trial and punishment in the frescoes and reliefs of the catacombs did not outlast the fth and sixth centuries, and much the same is true of the relief sculptures on the Christian sarcophagi. It was therefore the written texts of the martyr acts that remembered in real and ctive detail the nature of the Roman judicial spectacle. In the mid-thirteenth century (about 1260), when Jacob of Voragine penned
70. ILCV 3864 = CIL 5.7793 (Albigauni Ligurum): . . . ne me tangas nec sepulcrum meum / violis name ante t[ri]bunal aeterni iudicis mecum causam dicis (she died at 40 years of age and was buried on 1 Feb. 568); cf. ILCV 3849 = CIL 11.325; ILCV 3853 = CIL 11.329 (Ravenna); and ILCV 3859 (Ariminum) for similar sentiments. 71. ILCV 3865 (Rome): abea inde inquisitionem ante tribunal d[omi]ni n[ost]ri. 72. See ILCV 386263, 3866, 3869A, and 3879B for examples. 73. ILCV 3845 = CIL 12.1694 (In Agro Vocontiorum): et diem futuri iudicii intercedentibus sanctis lectus spectit. 74. ILCV 3879 (Aquileia): in dei iudicii inmones a penes abadas [= immunis a poenis evadas]. 75. ILCV 61 = CLE 302 = CIL 13.3256 (Basilica S. Agricola Remensi), lines 11 12; compare Vulg., Deut. 10.17 (deus magnus et potens et terriblis); Ps 102.3 has dominus longanimi, where the Roman Psalter, 7.12, has the addition of the word iudex.
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what was surely the most popular and widely-read book in western Europe after the Bible itself, his Golden Readings (Legenda Aurea), it was lled with the accounts of martyrs that recalled in loving detail the procedures and practices of Roman trial and punishment.76 Preserved throughout Europe in hundreds of manuscripts and transmitted by dozens of translations into local vulgar languages, it achieved a massive success which is still not fully comprehended.77 It taught a Roman code of trial and punishment that had been maintained in European memory for a thousand years by means of these wonderful ctions.78 For its creative origins, however, this memory, whether ctitious or true, depended on the existence of a specic type of confrontation between the state and the accused that produced the requisite creative impulses, whether in the form of the romantic novel, the sacred biographies we call gospels, or the stories of the martyrs. The martyr tales, of which the gospels are both forerunners and parallels, constitute, a wholly new literature, that was as exciting to read as it was edifying.79 It was a genre of literature created by dramatic encounters with the instruments of the civil power of the Roman state that were implanted everywhere in the empire. The frequent intrusion of trial scenarios into the ctional romantic novels of the time, and here too even in dream sequences, show that trials provided ready-made narrative constructions, preadapted for service in creative writing. Recollecting dreams in narrative was therefore a kind of ekphrasis of the mind. Seen as a narration, the trial required the completed actions of all the parties to create a possible basis for memory. Otherwise, solitary defendants, no matter how innocent or just, would have no stage on which their drama could receive a completed meaning. That is why, in some cases at least, Roman governors purposefully sought to avoid using public and theatrical venues of trial and punishment.80 And, as Prudentius realized, shorn of the possibility of the public spectacle
76. Jacobus a Voragine, Legenda aurea vulgo historia lombardica dicta, ed. Th. Graesse (Leipzig: Arnoldiana, 1850 (1890) [reprint: Osnabrck: Zeller, 1965]); Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., tr. W. G. Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). 77. A. Vernet, Survivances et innovations dans la littrature latine de lOccident mdival, Comptes rendus de lAcademie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1993): 88998, at 896. 78. G. Huot-Girard, La justice immanente dans la Lgende Dore, Cahiers dtudes mdivales 1 (1974): 13547. 79. G. W. Bowersock, The Written Record, chap. 2 in Martyrdom and Rome, 2339, at 29. 80. Potter, Martyrdom as Spectacle, 5961, provides some examples.
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of trial and punishment, especially the latter, there would be no memory, or at least a severely impaired one. The most heightened cases of memory therefore required more than just the dramatic impulses of a trial. They also needed the judicial punishment. Take one example. In the early 30s c.e., in the Roman province of Judaea, one Jesus son of Joseph (Yeshua ben Yusef) was causing problems in the city of Jerusalem. He was an itinerant holy-man and wonderworker who walked the citys streets, preaching apocalyptic messages. He predicted the destruction of the Temple. Not unnaturally the ruling elite of Jewish society saw in him a dangerous troublemaker, a threat to themselves and to their social order. They had him arrested. They had him interrogated and humiliated. They took him before the Roman governor and insisted that he be put on trial and executed on the grounds of seditious activities. The trial of Jesus son of Joseph before Pontius Pilatus, the Roman governor of Judaea, and his subsequent execution by crucixion offered precisely the possibility of a complete narration. We all remember him.81 But there was another Jesus.82 About a generation later, one Jesus son of Ananias (Yeshua ben Anania), an idiot rustic (idiots agroikos), was causing problems in Jerusalem. He was a sort of itinerant holy-man and wonderworker who walked the streets of the city, uttering apocalyptic words. He even stood in the midst of the Temple and predicted its end. Not unnaturally, the members of the ruling elite (epismoi tines) of Jewish society saw in him a troublemaker, a danger to themselves and to their social order. They had him arrested. They humiliated and interrogated him. They took him before the Roman governor and insisted that he be put on trial and executed on the grounds of seditious activities. Lucceius
81. It is perhaps not without signicance that judicial dreams intervene even here, even if indirectly. The wife of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilatus, was involved: While Pilate was seated on his tribunal, his wife sent word to him: Have nothing to do with that good man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream. (Matt 27.19). 82. Josephus, BJ 6.300309; The incident is dated to the time of the Festival of the Tabernacles (Sukkoth) four years before the war so in the fall of 62 c.e. Albinus was procurator for the years 6264. For those who are interested, Josephus reports that this Jesus continued to recite aloud his message of doom in the city of Jerusalem, oblivious to those who beat, harassed, and cursed him. One day, after the Roman siege of the city began, he was struck with an artillery stone from a Roman ballista and died with the words Woe to the city, woe to the people, woe to the Temple, and . . . woe to me, on his lips.
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Albinus, the Roman governor of Judaea, interrogated this Jesus at length.83 He considered the matter. He issued his decision. He was not going to put this Jesus on trial. After all, it was plain for everyone to see that the man was simply mentally deranged (katagnous manian). Albinus ordered this Jesus unceremoniously to be thrown back onto the streets of Jerusalem. No public trial, no spectacle. No execution, no story. No one but academics like me remember Jesus son of Ananias. Brent D. Shaw is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania
83. For the identication of the governor as probable, see E. Schrer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. F. Millar and G. Vermes (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1973), 1:468 n. 50.

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Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory

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Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

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