or any Egyptian nationalism, he identifies completely with the Roman order and relies on it to fight off his local enemies. He never criticizes a Roman emperor or the Roman state as such. Quite the opposite. As Shenoute sees it, the duty to care for the “poor” and to ensure social justice belongs, above all, to the state. The ideal of social justice that so many of his sermons and writings advocate can be described in two words: “vertical solidarity.”35 A vertical chain links God, the emperor, his magistrates, provincial governors, and the local “poor,” as represented in the person of Shenoute himself. The members of this chain are, ideally, linked with each other by ties of hierarchical reciprocity. Loyalty and obedience are owed to one’s superior—and above all to the emperor—in exchange for protection. Justice and mercy are owed to one’s inferior—always pictured as the “poor”—in exchange for loyalty. This vertical chain of protection and loyalty should bypass and neutralize the corporate interests of the local elites. But an effective advocate of the “poor” will occasionally have to travel “up” all the way to the imperial capital and skip missing links. For it is the “righteous emperors” who are, in Shenoute’s opinion, the last resort of the “poor.” They have been established by God to bring justice to the land and to punish all those unjust landowners who oppress the weak.36 “In their love for God,” they have also put an end to the public practice of paganism and have offered financial support to his monastery. Shenoute only has words of praise for them.
If not for the modern belief that Shenoute somehow represented a “national” Egyptian Christianity, this should have been expected. The identification of the imperial court as a model of heaven on earth and as the “exemplary center” of society is one of the dominant themes of late antique Christianity in the Eastern Empire. The faithful, it has been said, came to “see the realization of God’s kingdom in the miracle of the sumptuous imperial court, which had converted to the new faith.”37 Christopher Kelly has documented the grip of the imperial court on the Christian imagination of the time. When Pachomius’s successor Theodore saw an angel in a vision, what he saw looked like an imperial bureaucrat. When Porphyry of Gaza witnessed the procession for the baptism of the child-emperor in Constantinople, the splendor of the imperial ceremonial and its hierarchical perfection suggested to him the splendors of heaven. When theologians argued about the true nature of Christ, their arguments replicated debates on the nature of imperial power as expressed in the courtly ceremonial at Constantinople.38
Shenoute always made sure that both friends and enemies knew about his positive relationship to this numinous center. He once declared to a visiting governor that he was “amazed” that someone who despised ambition and worldly honors as much as he himself did had still managed to become famous among the powerful, “not only in Alexandria or Ephesus, but also at the imperial comitatus and at the court of the emperors, just like light carrying off the darkness and scattering the gloom.”39 He also claimed to have been offered money by the pious emperor Theodosius II himself, only to refuse it of course.40 And his biography illustrates the same aspiration in its usual, over-the-top way. According to a story contained therein, the emperor once “thirsted” for Shenoute’s presence in Constantinople. The military governor of the Thebaid was therefore commanded to bring him over to the imperial capital where the “entire senate” was looking forward to his visit. Shenoute was unfortunately too busy praying for his own sins. The solution: he mounted a shining cloud, flew over to the royal palace in Constantinople, blessed the emperor, and came back the same night!41
Stories like this, also reported about other holy men famed for their familiarity with the powerful (John of Lycopolis; Victor of Tabennesi, said to be the “secret son” of Theodosius II),42 show the value placed by such holy men and their admirers on an “immediate,” almost miraculous contact with the emperor. A privileged access to the emperor was considered crucial for any success in local politics. Visiting the imperial capital and approaching the imperial court was expensive and dangerous, but no miraculous clouds were needed. In the fifth and sixth centuries, Constantinople was invaded every year by thousands of petitions and petitioners from the provinces in the hope of finding a favorable, quick, and definitive resolution to their conflicts. This was a situation fostered by the Roman government itself. By rewarding petitioners, the emperor encouraged criticism of local powers and even of his own provincial representatives as a way to strengthen his precarious hold over provincial life and the state apparatus. Just when they refused to leave their capital, the emperors’ role in local life became more important than ever. As a result, all politics, in the late antique Near East, was imperial politics. Two well-known examples of this situation—which has been described as an “advocacy revolution”43—come from Egypt. The famous petition of Appion, bishop of the border town of Syene (Assuan), demanding military protection for his churches, shows that the emperor was available even in the most remote confines of the empire.44 Dioscorus of Aphrodito, on the other hand, the “pompous, vain and opinionated”45 villager who repeatedly resisted the demands of the city of Antaeopolis on his village, traveled twice to Constantinople in the mid-sixth century to argue on behalf of his “poor” village and against the violence it suffered at the hands of the powerful of Antaeopolis.46
It is not surprising, therefore, that Shenoute frequently threatened his enemies at Panopolis with a trip to the emperor, or that he boasted of a privileged relationship to the imperial court.47 His writings show that he did eventually travel to Constantinople. And like Dioscorus of Aphrodito, he did it to denounce “the violence which the powerful (archōn) were inflicting upon the poor.”48 To make clear what he stood for, he showed up at the imperial palace dressed like a beggar, and then proceeded to humiliate a powerful senator before an amazed emperor.49 We do not know what—if any—the results of this mission were. We only know that he would often recall it with pride:
I have said this about those who came up to me on the hill (i.e., the monastery) in the night with their document saying, “Your brothers do violence to us”: If I have crossed the sea to the comitatus on account of those who do violence and we are the ones doing it, how great will God’s judgment against us be?50
On a day-to-day basis, however, the emperor was a distant presence and only a last-resort solution. The imperial authorities typically approached by Shenoute were the military and civilian governors of the Thebaid (usually called the dux/comes and the hēgemōn, respectively). They play a central role in his writings, and, in marked contrast to the anonymous “violent men” from Panopolis, they have specific names. Shenoute names at least nine military commanders, nine civilian governors, and one Augustal prefect of Alexandria.51 It was in the person of these provincial governors that Shenoute focused, first and foremost, his hopes for “vertical solidarity.” For it was they who made the emperor’s will a reality in Upper Egypt, and it was from them, above all, that Shenoute could expect protection from his enemies in Panopolis, justice for the “poor,” and, potentially, financial aid.
The central role of provincial governors is a well-documented aspect of the political life of the later Roman Empire. It is related to the new political structure of the empire, in which the unit of government was no longer the autonomous city, but the small province. The provincial capital now assumed an unprecedented weight in political life and eclipsed every other city in the province.52 In the case of Upper Egypt, this was the city of Antinoe, or rather the “twin cities” of Hermopolis and Antinoe. The aristocracy itself—made up not only of civic notables but also of the members of the governor’s staff and above all of former magistrates (the so-called honorati)—was now organized on a provincial and no longer on a civic level, and its life was focused on the provincial capital. There they would meet and welcome the military and civilian governors, both of them foreign individuals (at least in the sense of being foreign to the province) who would keep their position for only brief periods of time—so much so that they were advised not to bring their wives.53 Shenoute points out, as a remarkable feat, that a particularly righteous governor had obtained his position for three consecutive years, and this without paying any bribes.54
In
