Posted by Richard Flower
27 January 2025The latest entry in our ‘spotlight’ series takes us outside our traditional ‘medieval’ chronological scope, as we voyage into the world of Late Antiquity. We’re fortunate at the Centre to have among our members several colleagues whose work challenges straightforward boundaries between disciplines, and their contributions to medieval studies — broadly defined — greatly enrich the work that we all do. In this light, we’re very grateful to Prof. Richard Flower, of the Department of Classics, Ancient History, Religion, and Theology, for sharing his work with us.
I focus on late antiquity, a period of great change traditionally associated with the ‘decline and fall’ of the Roman empire.
I always really enjoy finding something that strikes me as very alien to my own culture and experiences. People often draw parallels between antiquity and the present day, based either on continuing influence or ideas about human nature. It’s therefore great fun to come across something that makes you realise how an earlier society thought differently about an aspect of life you’d previously taken for granted. In particular, I enjoy working on ‘late antiquity’, which as a term has been around for a few decades now and cuts across periods that are also sometimes called ‘late Roman’, ‘early medieval’ and ‘early Byzantine’. It is commonly used for the regions covered by Roman empire and adjacent territories from roughly the third to the seventh centuries, but is quite a flexible term and people often make compelling arguments for expanding its chronological and geographical scope.
I arrived here more than a decade ago to start work as a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History. I really liked the department from the very start. There’s so many different people with a wide array of specialisms and you always end up having interesting conversations.
Lately I’ve been reading quite a few heresiologies, which are late-antique catalogues of Christian heresies. I find it fascinating what groups different authors choose to include or exclude and also how they try to give order and authority to their writing. One heresiology I’ve been spending a lot of time with recently is the Panarion, written by Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, in the 370s. It’s an enormous compendium of eighty heresies arranged in order from Creation down to his own day, with the number intended to reflect the eighty concubines mentioned in Song of Songs. The text is packed with all sorts of little fascinating details and goes off on apparent tangents, as well as preserving some ‘heretical’ texts that would not have survived otherwise. I also do quite a bit with invectives, which are texts attacking personal, political and religious enemies. They can be pretty fierce things, even when directed against living Roman emperors.
I’ll usually have some teaching, either a big lecture course such as Roman History, a third-year or MA seminar on late antiquity or a language class, as I teach quite a bit of Latin. There can often be meetings with dissertation or PhD students, as well as office hours when I might see personal tutees or when other people I teach might pop into my office with questions. There’s also usually meetings with colleagues and, of course, lots of emails!
Featured image: Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion 51.22-23 in the edition of Holl and Dummer (Berlin, 1980, page 291).