The Religion of Ioannes Lydos

Abstract

THE RECENT GROWTH OF INTEREST IN LATE ANTIQUITY and its emergence as a more or less coherent discipline has had salutary and far-reaching effects. Archaeologists, philologists, historians, and patristic scholars are now enabledand required-to situate their work within the context of a discussion broader than that generated by their sub-fields. Also, it has begun to illuminate a period of ancient history neglected by classicists and ancient historians. As and coalesce it may one day become possible to recover the holistic view of antiquity held by the Byzantines,1 or indeed by all humanists before Victorian prejudice and German nationalism devised cut-off dates for classical history that are now ideologically obsolete but still widely accepted (roughly Alexander for Greece and Tacitus for Rome). Yet progress has been distributed unevenly. Whereas some eras still remain in the dark (e.g., the eastern empire after the reign of Arkadios), others have received plenty of attention (e.g., religious controversy in the fourth century or the settlement of the barbarians in the western provinces in the fifth century, which is sometimes known by the project-title The Transformation of the Roman Empire). Authors of the sixth century such as Ioannes Lydos have been neglected, as have the cultural dynamics of his age. Part of the reason for this is the rarely discussed fact that few scholars work any longer on untranslated texts. Only one of Lydos' three treatises has been translated-On the Magistracies of the Roman State--and that not until 1971. And this text is still mined as a source of information rather than studied in its own right. Lydos' two other works, On Celestial Signs (lit. On Signs from Zeus) and On the Months, have not yet been translated and even their latest editions are over a hundred years old.2 Indolence aside, other obstacles have been thrown up by the way in which the field has developed and by its (usually unacknowledged) philosophical commitments. Most scholars of late antiquity are primarily interested in religion and tend to believe that their subjects saw the world largely or entirely in religious terms. This modern interest does not stem from Gibbon's philosophical skepticism. Once popular, his polemical rationalism has been abandoned in favor of psychology and the analysis of religious pathology. For example, it involves a twofold rejection of reason: scholars no longer aim to refute dogmas and discredit miracles, a positive development; but the role that reason is allowed to play