Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World DIVINATIONS: REREADING LATE ANCIENT RELIGION Series Editors Daniel Boyarin Virginia Burrus Derek Krueger Acomplete list of books in the series is available from the publisher. Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World Catherine M. Chin university of pennsylvania press Philadelphia Copyright © 2008University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chin, Catherine M. Grammar and Christianity in the late Roman world / Catherine M. Chin. p. cm.—(Divinations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4035-1(hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8122-4035-9(hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Grammar, Comparative and general—History. 2. Christianity and culture—History. 3. Rome—History—Empire, 284–476. I. Title. P63.C492007 415.0937—dc22 2007023273 For my parents This page intentionally left blank Contents 1. introduction: toward tyranny 1 2. imagining classics 11 3. from grammar to piety 39 4. displacement and excess: christianizing grammar 72 5. fear, boredom, and amusement: emotion and grammar 110 6. grammar and utopia 139 epilogue: christianization and narration 170 notes 175 works cited 245 index 261 acknowledgments 271 This page intentionally left blank 1 Introduction Toward Tyranny his book is avery long answer T to a very short question: How did W literate Romans of the fourth and fth centuries come to the idea that there was such a thing as Christianity? On its face the question seems naïve. There was, in this period, a dramatic growth in the numbers of people, buildings, books, and public events that were called, at least in some con- texts, Christian; historians now conventionally refer to this period as one in which the Roman Empire was Christianized. The question that this book attempts to answer, however, is not whether people or places called Chris- tian existed in the later Roman Empire. Instead, the book addresses the question of how some later Roman readers and writers went about trans- forming those people, places, texts, and events into a generality, and how they summoned that generality into conceptual existence. My basic argu- ment is that a movement from the description of various people or things as Christian to the concept of a free-standing religious and cultural entity that could be named Christianity did take place in this period, but took place in a series of quite tenuous intellectual movements, under very spe- W ci c educational conditions, and with no immediate guarantee that the notion of Christianity would become an enduring component of the West- ern cultural imagination. Christianitasis a decidedly uncommon formula- tion in the early centuries of Christian history; its conceptual fragility is worth examining. Because this is a book about the conceptual consequences of names W and naming, it is about language as much as it is about religion. Speci cally it is about how the teaching of language in late antiquity shaped the ability of late ancient readers and writers to have concepts that we call religious. This language teaching was primarily in the hands of grammarians, and so texts surrounding the discipline of grammar, in both Christian and tradi- tional contexts, form the evidentiary core of this study. The modest premise