I am a student of Late Antiquity and of the Early Middle Ages. Throughout my studies, I have encountered a wide variety of reactions when I answered that I studied this time period. Once, while I was beginning my studies on the subject, I told a friend of mine that I was studying the emperor Julian, to which she replied: ‘You mean Julius Caesar?’; no, I really meant Julian Augustus, also known as Julian the Apostate.
Speaking frankly, I did not know much more about Julian than she did. To me, Julian was this character out of a Gore Vidal novel (Julian), who, in the book, had gone to school with the church fathers Gregory Nazanzian and Gregory of Nyssa in Athens, much like we go to College, and who hated Christians. Perhaps to the dismays of some professors of mine, I would recommend buying the Gore Vidal novel. It has an interesting insight on the world of Late Antiquity, albeit erroneous, but can provide the spark of interest.
There is a difference between being interested and studying actively the subject. A professor once told me that Late Antiquity was not a popular conversation theme at cocktail parties. When she said this, the DaVinci Code had just come out, and Constantine was not as popular as he is today. Thanks to Dan Brown, Constantine scholars as well as popular scholars have had a blast attempting to unravel a great church conspiracy in Late Antiquity: attempting to cover up Christ’s relationship with Mary Magdalene; At the center of this conspiracy lays the great Constantine.
However, if Constantine will be addressed in this blog, he will not be the most important feature. In this blog, you will meet people like the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus, like the Gallo-Roman aristocrat Sidonius Appolinaris, as well as modern scholars and their ways of thinking. I would like to introduce of world of change, and a world of continuity. I would like to introduce people, like St.Augustine, who, growing up in a Roman world, died with the Vandals besieging his town of Hippo. I would like to introduce a world greater than Constantine, and which ideals, more so than the Council of Nicea, helped shape the modern world.
