Labid loves a camel less favored in appearance

Labid loves a camel less favored in appearance:

. . . with a lean camel to ride on, that many journeyings

have refined to a bare thinness of spine and shrunken hump,

one that, when her flesh is fallen away and her strength is spent

and her ankle-thongs are worn to ribbons of long fatigue,

yet rejoices in her bridle, and runs still as if she were

a roseate cloud, rain-emptied, that flies with the south wind,

or a great-uddered she-ass, pregnant of a white-bellied sire worn lean

by the stampeding and kicking and biting of fellow-stallions.

The poet Tarafah was himself ambitious but realistic:

Had my Lord willed, I’d have been another Kais bin Khdlid, and had my Lord willed, I’d have been another Amr bin Marthad; then I’d have been a man of much substance, visited by all the sprigs of the nobility, chiefs and sons of chiefs.

I’m the lean, hard-bitten warrior you know of old, intrepid, lively as the darting head of a serpent;

I have vowed my loins cease not to furnish a lining

for an Indian scimitar sharp as to both its edges,

trenchant—when I stand forth to take my revenge with it

its first blow suffices; I need no repeat stroke; it’s no pruning-hook-

a trusty blade, recoiling not from its target.

In another ode, ascribed to Zuhayr, we see lovely ladies borne along in litters on their journey:

Kainite camels

Their howdahs hung with costly cloths, and fine-spun veils whose fringes are rose-red, the very hue of dragon’s blood; issuing from Es-Soobdn, they have threaded its twisting course mounted on Kainite camels sleek and excellently nourished, swerved through hollow Es-Soobdn, ascended its rugged ridge wearing the sweet coyness of the luxuriously nurtured.

It is as though the thrums of dyed wool littering every spot where they alighted were uncrushed berries of the red fand.

With the dawn they arose, and sunrise saw them stirring, then into Wadi Er-Rass they plunged like hand into mouth, and when they came to the waters blue in the brimming well they cast down their sticks, as one who pitches his tent to stay; a sweet diversion are they to the gentle, a pretty sight well worth the scrutiny of those who like looking at beauty.

Islam is, among other things, what Abraham made of that magnificent world when Muhammad gave him the chance. In Arabia as in Judaea and all up and along the eastern frontiers, life could take its own course in these communities, barely touched by the twitches on the strings of au¬thority that ran back to Constantinople.

Constantine to the reign of Justinian

Of all the councils and confabulations that took place from the reign of Constantine to the reign of Justinian, the few that emerged as authoritative were understood—or at least argued—to have had a privileged access to the truth and to have left behind concise formulas that could stand beyond controversy and time and guide right belief. Reciting a proper creed with heartfelt assent was the Christian shibboleth, the phrase whose utterance revealed and ensured identity and loyalty. God’s power frowned so heavily on insincere assertion that no one would utter a creed he disbelieved—or so men thought. Why did God require the assertions of his creatures to capture so accurately and precisely his own nature and report it back to him? No one asked that question loudly enough to unsettle the obsession with definition.

Public compromise and private coercion both played a part in Justinian’s strategy. One way to go forward was to rewrite history, and so in the 540s, Justinian began to throw historical baggage over the side.

Intellectual Christianity

The first victim was an astonishing one: Origen, the greatest scriptural interpreter in the history of early, and arguably of all, Christianity, had always been slightly suspect. His name was a code word for a style of intellectual Christianity that had partisans but was also easily sacrificed to make a political point. Barsanuphius of Gaza, for example, had no time for these elite intellectuals: “These are the speculations of the Greeks; these are the dreams of people who fancy themselves to be something.

But these doctrines do not lead those who believe them to the light, but rather to the darkness.” The teachings of the monastic innovator Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399) had shaped the way Origen’s ideas integrated with monastic pride. But Origen had written things that could embarrass even his followers, such as his defense of “apocatastasis,” the doctrine that at the end of all things even hell would pass away and the damned would be rejoined to their benevolent creator. What Origenists had in common by the sixth century was resistance to the emperors, attachment to freedom of thought, a mystical impulse, and Platonic intellectualism. They were too smart, too well read, too independent, too little attached to party politics for their own good.34

Jerusalem

There were monks around Jerusalem who invoked Origen’s name in support of positions too far outside Justinian’s comfort zone to be tolerated, and so in 543, Justinian himself condemned Origen and his works. This condemnation went far afield in several ways. For one, it led loyal believers to destroy most of the surviving works of Origen himself in Greek. (We depend for our knowledge of his contributions on surviving fragments and on works translated into Latin by 400 or so.) For another, it let the emperor be seen and known as the arbiter of theology in his own voice and his own name kukeri carnival.

This imperial ukase ran afoul of deep conservative traditions. Living theologians could find their work and doctrine disputed, controverted, and praised, but once they had died, their fate and the approval or disapproval of their teaching was traditionally to be left in the hands of God. To condemn the dead because of their teaching seemed dangerously arrogant. But Justinian knew what others had not fully internalized, that books were now forces in their own right, and there was no necessary difference in authority between the books of the dead and the books of the living.

A deeper strategy animated Justinian. By attacking the dead, he could implicitly attack the living at little cost. Firing over the heads of the monophysites to attack Origen was one thing, and turning then to attack Theodoret, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and Ibas of Edessa—the authors condemned in what came to be called the “Three Chapters” of an edict—brought the extreme Chalcedonians within firing range. Attacking the three extreme “dyophysite” (“twoish”) authors would frighten any contemporary sympathizers, who may have been few enough in number, except for those who rightly venerated the contributions of Theodore of Mopsuestia, but it would also reassure the monophysite (“oneish”) faction that attention was being paid to their concerns.

Pay close attention to Theoderic’s role

This ecclesiastical power struggle resembles many others, but we should pay close attention to Theoderic’s role. The reader who knows something—anything—of this history will have been puzzled until now at the omission of some important words regarding him and his followers: Goths, Ostrogoths, barbarians, invasion, tribes, even hordes, Arians, heretics. Theoderic’s life conventionally takes up part of the history of the barbarian invasions of Europe, the Volkerwanderung or “migration of peoples.” This standard tale has as its centerpiece a group of insensate, unfeeling brutes who insidiously overthrew civilization, little understanding what they had done. We must learn to do without that story.

Theoderic was ever remarkable. The story you have just read of him, whatever labels you might wish to put on various people and their deeds, is as exact as I can make it, carefully adjusted (I hope) for the exaggerations and prettifications with which loyal and disloyal narrators over time varnished their accounts. Theoderic’s truth at the moment I have tried to capture him, robed in imperial splendor in 500, is complex and not to be reduced to stereotypes, labels, or slogans. He was brought up in the imperial court, and that exposure to monument and ceremony strongly shaped his ambitions for the Italian cities he made his own, including Rome itself. He had to be fluent in Latin, probably knew a fair amount of Greek, and also knew the Germanic language his troops shared. For the first fifty years through which we can trace him, beginning with his return to the Balkans from Constantinople in the early 470s, when he was in his late teens, until the 520s, his self-presentation and his performances were consistently Roman, citizenly, imperial, and respectful of the old ways of the lands where he dwelled. The few and mild military adventures that made his reputation among his people were exactly comparable to the exploits of generals with impeccably Roman pedigrees who came both before and after him.

Christian religious traditions

He was Christian by birth. His father was brought up in the Christian religious traditions of the Danube armies, whom missionaries from Constantinople had converted 150 years earlier. Those armies were faithful to the Christianity they had been taught, but in the meantime doctrinal fashion had changed at Constantinople. The dominant orthodox clergy at court now condemned what had been orthodox under Constantine, calling it Arianism. Theoderic’s followers had a Bible that Ulfilas, a bishop trained in Constantinople, translated into Gothic10 in the fourth century under the influence of Constantine’s version of orthodoxy. But this Bible translation was barely intelligible, although it was probably the first serious attempt ever to render Greek into a language with almost no written tradition. That official Christianity and this Bible quickly became the possession of peoples deeply integrated in the Latin Roman world balkan tours, even when they found themselves rebuked as Arian heretics by followers of contemporary doctrinal fashion at court.11 Rome’s military leaders from 459 onward were all Arians of that kind, and they built and maintained half a dozen churches at Ravenna and at least one in Rome. We have a collection of Latin sermons copied in 500 that comes to us from an Arian preacher in Verona. A little after that date, a monk at Naples—Eugippius, whom we will meet again—wrote to a colleague with a theological question for an ongoing debate with a “count of the Goths” who was pressing Arian points of view on him. That debate captures a relationship between two communities marked simultaneously by disagreement and civility. No one in Theoderic’s Italy thought of burning anyone else at the stake.

Theoderic’s father’s family was Arian, but his mother, Erelieva, was orthodox, taking the name Eusebia (meaning “pious”) in baptism, and Theoderic’s own experience of Christianity when he was a youngster in Constantinople must have been mainly if not exclusively orthodox. He and his army stayed faithful to the creed and clergy that they brought with them to Italy, and so on Sunday found themselves in different church buildings from most of the native population. Theoderic, though, was repeatedly called on to arbitrate the business of the orthodox church of Rome during his reign. Some of his authority came with his role as the legitimate imperial ruler of the province, and some came easily owing to the religious amphibiousness of his childhood and youth.