For late antiquity witnessed the final and complete success of the process of Hellenization in the Near East. Graeco-Roman civilization sank its roots so deeply that its effects would be felt there for centuries after the Muslim conquest. One only needs to look at the architecture of late antique Syria, the sculpture and textiles of late antique Egypt (“Coptic art”), or the mosaics of late antique Palestine to be convinced of this. It is common to speak of these characteristic products of late antique art as expressions of “local cultures,” but their iconography—Dionysus, Aphrodite, Romulus, Aeneas …—derives almost entirely from Greek and Roman models. Far from representing the rebirth of ancient indigenous traditions, this Near Eastern art illustrates—to use the apt words of Peter Brown—how “Greece had gone native. The classical inheritance had become a form of folk art.”33
The triumphal march of Graeco-Roman culture did not stop at cities but reached far into the countryside, reducing thereby the stark contrasts that had characterized classical civilization and producing a “flatter” world. The changing relationship between Alexandria and the Nile valley illustrates this process very well. The Roman conquest had changed the relationship of Alexandria to Egypt “from the basic model of royal capital of the kingdom to, initially, that of city (polis) and administratively dependent territory (chōra).”34 Alexandrian aristocrats owned large estates in what they called the chōra, the economic and cultural hinterland of their city, and took turns acting as governors (stratēgoi) of the nomes, small districts that were not deemed worthy or capable of self-government. In the Nile valley itself, Egyptian priests preserved and developed a native cultural tradition that claimed to be largely autonomous and prided itself on being untouched by Hellenism.35 Graeco-Egyptian art, with its characteristically incongruous juxtaposition of purely Hellenistic and purely Egyptian elements, defines this period’s culture.
This situation had already started to change gradually in the second century, when, for example, the position of stratēgos came to be filled more and more frequently by inhabitants of the towns of the Nile valley (although not in their own towns).36 Further administrative and social transformations in the third century—in particular the introduction of city councils by the emperor Septimius Severus—helped to bridge the large gulf separating city and chōra. But it was only in the early fourth century that these transformations gathered a decisive momentum and resulted in a dramatic turnaround.
To put it in a few words: Upper Egypt, a cultural backwater that had had a very limited participation in the intellectual life of the Graeco-Roman world,37 became the center of Greek poetry in the later Roman Empire and produced teachers, grammarians, lawyers, and historians who pursued successful careers both in Egypt and in the empire as a whole.38 Abundant literary and educational papyri, in both Greek and Latin, show how eagerly the inhabitants of the Nile valley were making Graeco-Roman literary culture their own. Recent discoveries in the isolated villages of the southwestern oases of Egypt—almost two hundred miles from the Nile valley—have drawn attention to this extraordinary diffusion of Greek education: classrooms with rhetorical examples written on the walls, a codex of wooden tablets containing three orations of Isocrates, and—to take just one example—a letter from a mother demanding to be sent, from the Nile valley, “a well-proportioned and nicely executed ten-page notebook” for her son, “for he has become a speaker of pure Greek (hellēnistēs) and an accomplished reader.”39
It is important to stress two crucial aspects of this development. In the first place, it was not an exclusively urban phenomenon. The distinctive products of late antique religion, literature, art, and architecture have been found in villages as much as in cities. All the Manichaean texts found in Egypt, for example, have been discovered in villages.40 In the second place, this development has to be seen in the context of a new relationship between state and society in southern Egypt and elsewhere. The reason late antique Egyptians were so enthusiastic about learning Greek and Latin literature is that this traditional education was the door to a host of new opportunities that had opened up. To take, once again, the well-known example of Dioscorus of Aphrodito: Jean-Luc Fournet has shown that Disocorus was not simply an amateur, self-taught poet who attempted hopelessly to master Greek poetry for fun. For Dioscorus, poetry was above all a vehicle to communicate with the state. Every one of his petitions to the imperial governors and to the courtiers of Constantinople was accompanied by a poetical version of the text.41 The reason the case of Dioscorus is so significant is precisely the fact that he was so mediocre and average. He stands for thousands of little poetasters all over the Near East who now felt—to the dismay of classical scholars—that they had the capacity to express themselves in the language of Homer, to speak as if they belonged.
The ever-increasing role of Roman law in provincial life points in the same direction. The legal documents that have survived in Egyptian papyri are eloquent evidence for this process of cultural integration and for the state’s role in it. We know now that no such thing as “Coptic law” ever existed. The law in use in late antique Egypt was Roman imperial law, and it became more and more Roman throughout late antiquity.42 A vivid example of this is a document from as late as 646, in which an illiterate peasant from the deep south of Egypt, “not versed in legal matters” (so he claims), rejects a document presented by his opponent, an urban deacon from the town of Edfu. The document, he argues, does not follow the rules set up in the laws of Justinian for legal documents, rules that he quotes and claims to have learned from “those who know.”43
Many of the farmers met by an urban notable around Antioch—or anywhere in Palestine or in the Nile valley—were therefore far from being savage rustics who had never had any contact with Graeco-Roman civilization. What the urban landowner or tax collector faced in these recalcitrant, “audacious” farmers were individuals who were far more similar to himself than he would have liked to admit: people who knew how to write petitions, how to appeal to different and competing instances of power, even how to use Roman law to their benefit. And this must have been all the more obnoxious.44
Set against this historical background, the figure of Shenoute of Atripe takes on more familiar contours. For Shenoute may have been an otherworldly prophet with the fiery temperament of an “erupting volcano.” But he is also a particularly well-documented example of late antique “rustic audacity.” Shenoute’s “audacity,” which his enemies denounced as violence, but he called parrhēsia—that is, fearless and truthful speech on behalf of the poor—is proudly displayed and magnified throughout his works. As we shall see, he liked to define his role in society in terms of a principled opposition to the city of Panopolis and its civic elite. As patron of the countryside against the interests of this urban elite, he complained about urban tax-collectors,45 relentlessly defied and denounced urban landowners and their oppressive practices, and—if we believe in his enemies’ complaints—even intercepted and appropriated some of the surplus that these landowners extracted from the countryside around their city. We have unfortunately no contemporary records for the opinions and attitudes of the elite of Panopolis, but Shenoute’s replies leave no doubt that some of them must have felt about him the same way Libanius felt about those military men who protected and fostered the “audacity” of the rural population.
Like the village of Aphrodito in respect to Antaeopolis, Shenoute’s “audacity” threatened the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the elite of Panopolis over the political, economic, and cultural life of its region. He usurped traditional civic functions: he intruded on the relationship between urban landowner and rural tenant; he preached like a bishop to monks and laity alike—something not common for monks in Egypt; he built, spent, and gave like a civic benefactor, but on his own monastery and for the “poor.” Like Dioscorus of Aphrodito (whose father founded a monastery, just like Shenoute’s uncle), he interacted constantly with the imperial governors and claimed a privileged relationship to them, arousing, thereby, the suspicions and jealousy of the local elite; again, like Dioscorus and his father, he traveled all the way to Constantinople to complain about the poverty of the “poor” and about the “violence” they suffered. Last but not least, he took
