Acknowledgments
This monograph took shape, by fits and starts, over the course of ten years—a tumultuous decade by any measure, and one only made not only bearable but fruitful thanks to the friendship, encouragement, collegiality, and support of people too numerous to catalog. Nevertheless, I hope the gratitude expressed here conveys some sense—however inadequate and incomplete—of all the debts I owe.
This project would not exist without the opportunity afforded me by two dear colleagues: Ophir Münz-Manor and Ra’anan Boustan. At their invitation, I presented at the Society for Biblical Literature International Meeting in 2012 on the topic of performance in late antique Jewish literature. What seemed initially an impossible subject to research—one that by its very nature defied the kinds of sources upon which I relied—soon proved itself a rich vein of inquiry. Following that initial, hesitant exploration—conceived of more as a lark than a serious line of study—I realized that these questions opened up a new approach to the study of piyyutim, and one which leveraged my work in translation quite elegantly (particularly as I realized how my need to gloss written translations could be understood as analogous to the decisions made in live performance). My fellow students of hymnography, including Georgia Frank, Derek Krueger, Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Michael Swartz, and Michael Rand (gone too soon) fostered occasions where I could continue to develop and expand this nascent project. The enthusiasm and support of these friends has been invaluable, and their insights texture every page of this volume. Indeed, the scope of this volume—its ambitions to address Christian as well as Jewish and Samaritan poetry—reflects their influence and my desire to integrate the study of Hebrew and Aramaic hymnody into the rich and vibrant scholarly conversations concerning Greek and Syriac textual traditions into which these colleagues so generously invited me. Similarly, my colleagues in the field of Targum Studies, especially Willem Smelik, Eveline van Staalduine-Sulman, and Margaretha Folmer, along with the collaborative network of the Medieval Hebrew Poetry Consortium, especially Elisabeth Hollender and Tova Beeri, and my colleagues at the University of Regensburg (including Tobias Nicklas, Harald Buchinger,
and Stephanie Hallinger) have all shaped my work by offering me a sense of having an intellectual home and welcoming me to share my speculative projects at every stage and in any number of venues.
Indeed, the scope of this volume echoes the hospitality of friends and colleagues who work in early Christianity, particularly those whom I came to know through my affiliation with the Elizabeth A. Clark Center for Late Ancient Studies at Duke. I am indebted to all those who, as faculty, guests, and students, have made the Center such a remarkable hub of intellectual joy. The Center is in many ways my academic home, and its denizens my dearest collaborators: Annabel Wharton, Tolly Boatwright, James Rives, Clare Woods, Cassandra Casias, Luk Van Rompay, and Jenny Knust have offered a generous welcome to the study of late antique Judaism and modeled ways in which comparative work and projects that strive for synthesis can, and should, be done. I am also grateful to all the graduate students from and with whom I learned so much, including Julie Lillis, Taylor Ross, Erin GalgayWalsh, Nate Tilley, Jillian Marcantonio, and Nick Wagner; and those alumni of the Center—the innumerable “children of Liz”—among whom I consider myself lucky beyond words to have nosed my way into “stepchild” status.
In addition to the community of support just outside my door, this project benefited tremendously from gatherings of scholars in less proximate places. I am particularly grateful to Rod Werline, who routinely gathered an international group of scholars working in liturgy on the idyllic campus of Barton College. I am grateful to Rod for all his hospitality, and to Rick Sarason, Anathea Portier-Young, Daniel Falk, Angela Harkins, and Frances Flannery for all their feedback on this project at various stages and iterations. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Jörg Rüpke and Claudia Bergmann at the Max-Weber-Kolleg who hosted me for a summer research fellowship at the Research Centre “Dynamics of Jewish Ritual Practices in Pluralistic Contexts from Antiquity to the Present” at Universität Erfurt in 2019. Their gift to me of time, collegiality, and a magical setting proved instrumental in seeing this project to completion.
I also recognize that I am profoundly lucky to be part of an inspiring intellectual community, one that encourages ambition and innovation. I will always be grateful to my colleagues here at Duke, including Eric and Carol Meyers, whose decades of energy and effort made Duke such a remarkable place in which to pursue my particular field of study; I hope to be half as productive before retirement as Eric and Carol are today. I am also deeply thankful for the privilege of working with Ellen Davis, from whom I learn
so much even as we teach together, and with Abdullah Antepli, who makes our campus so much richer through his genial presence and incisive wit. My colleagues in religious studies, including Marc Brettler, Richard Jaffe, Mark Goodacre, David Morgan, Larissa Carniero, Mark Chaves, Mona Hassan, and Anna Sun, have fostered a community of collaboration and collegiality; I particularly wish to single out Leela Prasad, with whom I discussed “performance” in our very first meeting; please, Leela, always save me a seat in department meetings.
Duke has fostered a distinctly vibrant research space in the humanities, and this project has benefited tremendously from friendships in multiple other departments, including Classical Studies, Romance Languages, German Studies, Asian and Middle East Studies, and Slavic and East European Studies. Kata Gellen, Stefani Engelstein, Saskia Ziolkowski, Beth Holmgren, Shai Ginsburg, Ellen McLarney, William Johnson, Lauren Ginsberg, Erika Weiberg, Josh Sosin, Alicia Jiménez, Micaela Janan, and Kate Morgan all make my home institution a place where work can be truly a joy. I am also grateful to the many administrators at Duke whose support for my research enabled me to devote significant time and energy to this project, including Valerie Ashby, Gennifer Weisenfeld, and Sally Kornbluth, as well as Laurie Patton (who now leads my dear friends at Middlebury College) and Kevin Moore, whose sage council on navigating daily life at Duke was unerring, deadpan, and humane.
I could not have written this book—or taught classes, or raised children, or found the energy to get out of bed in the morning—without the encouragement and support of too many friends to name. Maria Doerfler has been a second sister to me, as has Ellen Haskell; my cousin, Andrea Lieber, quite truly is the big sister I never had but always wanted; and Debbie Green remains my better half. Clare Rothschild and Meira Kensky kept me laughing, and laughcrying, during some impossible days (and years), while Beth Posner kept me from sinking into myself. Meghan Pollard’s friendship has been a blessing—a mom friendship that flourishes alongside the lifelong bond our little guys share. And Serena: a debt impossible to articulate, let alone repay; a gift of friendship and loyalty, laughter and ferocity, for which I am grateful not just every day, but every hour.
As much as I owe to the communities of friends, colleagues, and collaborators who sustain me and nurture my work, I am also deeply indebted to my many teachers and mentors. I would not be here today without the example of my beloved Doktorvater, Michael Fishbane, both as a teacher
and a scholar—the model against whom I will always measure myself at every step, secure in knowing that he is not similarly measuring me. Nor could I have completed this project without the exacting training I received from Stephen Kaufman, whose student I am always so proud to be; it would be poorer had I not had a brief conversation with Steven Fine on Samaritan piyyutim that turned into a subsequent book on the topic, and a component of this project. When I read poetry, I also always wish myself in the company of Susan Einbinder, who never lost sight of the real human beings implicit in textual traditions, and who taught me to appreciate the poetry of “my people”—Ashkenazi Jews—even when its aesthetics were not my own.
In the course of working on this project, I rediscovered my love of Roman theater and ancient popular culture, a topic in which I first seriously dabbled as an undergraduate student of David Fredrick at the University of Arkansas, with whom I read Plautus and Terence (and Anne Carson), and learned of the cultural context of ancient novels and their readers. Indeed, I can trace this project back even further, to my formative first year seminar on Roman comedy at Grinnell College with Dennis Hughes, who tasked our class with defending or refuting the hypothesis that the film Risky Business was a retelling of Plautus’ Mostellaria. I cannot remember what I argued then, but I know what I would argue now.
This project has also benefited from what I learned from teachers, formal and informal, who welcomed me in more recent years: I am deeply honored by the collegial friendships of Paul Flesher, Wout van Bekkum, Joseph Yahalom, and Ruth Langer, who invited me as a very shy junior scholar into their circle and have allowed me to stay, now as a still shy, but somewhat older, scholar. And perhaps most profoundly, this project owes a debt to Peter Cole, who helped me recognize that translation—a pragmatic necessity I approached with great reticence—was itself a mode of performance, an insight that stands at the core of this project, in my mind. I regret that I cannot share this volume with teachers who left this world before it could see the light of day: Menachem Brinker, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, and Joel Kraemer. Their fingerprints are upon every page, because they formed me into the scholar I am, and in their teaching offered me master classes in a form of performance essential to this volume. I also wish I could share this book with Kalman Bland, whose advice to let my next project find me, and to ignore the gremlins of imposterism, gave me the courage to wait until I knew this project was all I hoped it could be. Each one of these teachers opened doors
and taught me to ask hard questions of myself and my material. The quality of the answers I attempt is, of course, not their responsibility, but mine alone. Of course, my first teachers were my parents, Mike and Eileen Lieber, and I remain eternally grateful for the gift of being born into a family where eyewatering laughter was valued alongside grades, high culture alongside the deliciously middlebrow, and books being the one thing we could always talk an adult into buying. The cluttered, intellectual, chaotic noise of Lieber-dom did not become complete until the arrival of my sister Debbie (whose online chat is my writing-day companion), and it has felt incomplete since the loss of our brother, Ken (whom I miss every day). Now with a family of my own, I can say that children have encouraged me to think about play, playfulness, and performance in whole new ways, and every page of this book was written or revised amid the joyful chaos of raising Julian and Daniel, each a dramatic actor in his own way. Yet if I have succeeded as a scholar or a mother, it was due in large part to the daily support and guidance of Judy Mehl—the nanny who became Nana to my boys, and who was unflappable while I (how else to say?) flapped—and Joyous Wells, whose flexibility and generosity enabled us to weather over a year of remote schooling. It is also a gift to parent “my” boys with their father, Norman Weiner, and his parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Families are who we make them, and I am grateful for all of mine.
Finally, while this book (and its author) owes debts beyond reckoning to those listed here and those whose absence I will only realize too late, I dedicate this work to two figures to whom I owe particular thanks. The first is Elizabeth Clark: this project, in its scale and ambition (if not its execution), reflects a vision for the study of late antiquity and for being a scholar that I gained from the gift of being in Liz’s company from my arrival at Duke in 2008 until her death in 2021. I wish she had lived to see the publication of this book, so much a testimony to the intellectual and collegial atmosphere she fostered at Duke and in her home. Her memory is an enduring blessing, and a North Star guiding me. As much as Liz inspires me from the past, I am grateful to my partner, Scott Strain, for all that we were (and weren’t) in our youth, all we are in the present, and all that the future holds.
Abbreviations
CAL Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (online resource): cal.huc.edu
CIG Corpus inscriptionum graecarum. 4 vols. Berlin 1828–1877
DJBA Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic and Geonic Periods (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002)
DJPA Michael Sokoloff, A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic of the Byzantine Period, 2nd ed. (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2002)
DSA Avraham Tal, A Dictionary of Samaritan Aramaic, 2 vol. (Leiden: Brill, 2000)
H-R The Mekhilta, ed. Shaul Horovitz and Israel Avraham Rabin (Jerusalem: Bamberger and Ṿahrman, 1960)
JPA Jewish Palestinian Aramaic (dialect of Aramaic language)
JPA Poem # Text from: Shirat Bene Ma’arava (Jewish Palestinian Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity), ed. Joseph Yahalom and Michael Sokoloff (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1999
LCL Loeb Classical Library
LOT Ze’ev Ben-Hayyim, The Literary and Oral Tradition of Hebrew and Aramaic amongst the Samaritans, 3 vol. (Jerusalem: The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 1957–1977)
LSJ Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones, and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)
Ma’agarim Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (online resource): https://maagarim.hebrew-academy.org.il/Pages/ PMain.aspx
O P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, Sancii Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963)
PG Patrologia Graeca
PL Patrologia Latina
T-A Midrash Bereshit Rabbah, ed. Julius Theodor and Chanoch Albeck, 3 vols. (Jerusalem: Wahrmann Books, 1965)
Prologue
Choosing a Script and Learning Lines
But in an orator we must demand the subtlety of the logician, the mind of the philosopher, a diction almost poetic, a lawyer’s memory, the voice of a tragedian, and bearing like that of the consummate actor Accordingly, no rarer thing than a finished orator can be discovered among the sons of men . . .
Cicero, De Oratore 1.128
In the summer of 2015, archaeologist Jodi Magness and her team uncovered a number of remarkable mosaics adorning the floor of the fifth-century ce synagogue at Huqoq, in the lower Galilee. Among the many images clustered in one panel were figures identified as winged putti (cupids) and what appear to be theatrical masks, both elements of iconography associated with the cult of Bacchus, patron of wine and theater.1 Putti and masks were common decorative motifs in the ancient world, and yet previously unattested—and to a modern mind, wholly unexpected and even jarringly incongruous—in a synagogue.2 What could theatrical imagery, especially elements associated
1 This portion of the dig has not yet been formally published but is discussed in an official press release of the University of North Carolina: https://college.unc.edu/2015/07/2015-mosaics-find/ (accessed June 10, 2022). This article describes a scene that has strong links to theater and performance: “New digging reveals that the inscription is in the center of a large square panel with human figures, animals and mythological creatures arranged symmetrically around it, Magness said. These include winged putti (cupids) holding roundels (circular discs) with theater masks, muscular male figures wearing trousers who support a garland, a rooster, and male and female faces in a wreath encircling the inscription. Putti and masks are associated with Dionysos (Bacchus), who was the Greco-Roman god of wine and theater performances, she said.”
2 It bears remembering that the identification of images is hardly a simple matter, let alone understanding the significance such visuals may or may not have had for the community. See Steven Fine’s analysis of the interpretation of symbols in Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), esp. pp. 198–207.
Staging the Sacred. Laura S. Lieber, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190065461.003.0001
with “pagan” religious practices, have to do with the sacred rites and rituals of the most quintessentially Jewish of buildings? Or does our surprise at these figures in such a context reveal more about our own preconceptions and prejudices about categories of “sacred” and “profane”—biases rooted in a deep cultural suspicion of theater as deceptive and its denizens as licentious? Could it be that putti and theater masks would seem conventional, unremarkable if aesthetically pleasing decorations to the Jews whose bodies and voices filled this space in antiquity? Perhaps theater and related spectacles were so ubiquitous that imagery from that milieu had become commonplace, simply part of a larger culture that could be incorporated into synagogue decorations, an indication—whether intentional or unconscious—that the Jews were thoroughly at home in and at ease with late antique culture, including its culture of performance.
The Huqoq mosaics offer a visual suggestion of how theater may have permeated sacred spaces; likewise, literary works also bear witness to this synthesis. A liturgical poem by the great hymnographer of Constantinople, Romanos the Melodist, brings the world of the theater into the Christian sanctuary, through words rather than images:
It is good to sing psalms and hymns to God, and to wound the demons with reproaches; they are our enemies forever. What do we mean by this “wounding”?
Whenever we make a comedy of [χωμῳδοῦμεν, “we ridicule”] their fall, rejoicing.
Truly the devil bewails whenever in our assemblies we represent in tragedy [τραγῳδῶμεν] the “triumph” of the demons.3
The poet here explicitly evokes the paired icons that even today constitute a visual shorthand for theater and entertainment—the twinned masks of comedy and tragedy, the two major modes of performance—and he does so
3 Text from P. Maas and C. A. Trypanis, eds., Sancti Romani Melodi Cantica: Cantica Genuina (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 81 (henceforth “O”); this text is O #11, strophe 2. On the language of comedy and tragedy, see Grosdidier de Matons, Romanos Le Melode: Hymnes, 5 vols (Paris: Cerf, 1967–1981), 3:57, and the discussion in Derek Krueger, Writing and Holiness: The Practice of Authorship in the Early Christian East (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 167–168.
in an explicitly, emphatically religious context. Of the theater-based imagery in this poem, Derek Krueger observes:
While the invocation of comedy and tragedy in this stanza are not evidence of presentation in the form of a play, the language of the theater reveals an explicit understanding of liturgy as performance, as reenactment with the power to reproduce the results of the original. By singing the fall of the devil, the devil falls once again; the service itself parries the enemy.4
Romanos assumes, without preamble or expression of self-consciousness, that his listeners are well acquainted with the world of theater: its plots, conventions, and dynamics; and, furthermore, its power. Song, theater, acting, performative re-enactment: the lines distinguishing liturgical performance from the world of popular (“secular”) entertainment seem blurry indeed. Images such as the actors’ masks uncovered at Huqoq visually demonstrate the interpenetration of theatricality and monotheistic religious ritual in late antiquity, even as liturgical texts articulate the connection or take it for granted. Indeed, while these two examples are unusually explicit in merging sanctuary and stage, affinities between various forms of public entertainments and worship can be easily teased out, in large part because performance as a mode of engaging in the public realm was, itself, omnipresent. Theater and public oratory (particularly declamation), in all the diversity of their styles and performative settings, constituted and shaped baseline elements of the common culture of the ancient world: tragic plots drew on the canon of great literature, while orators alluded to famous and infamous figures and scenes; actors and orators attracted celebrity and scandal, both fame and infamy; actors’ techniques informed the most skilled of public orators, the politicians. And religious performers—including homilists and hymnographers—absorbed both a sense of effective techniques and performative convention. Preachers and liturgical poets in antiquity were well aware of the commonalities connecting their work to other forms of performance, even if they were not uniformly at ease with the comparisons. As Basil of Seleucia, writing in the fifth century, observed in the opening of his homily on Lazarus:
Were someone to say that the Church is a theater (θέατρον ) common to both angels and men, he would not be mistaken. It is a theater in
4 Krueger, Writing and Holiness, 168.
which Christ is praised both by invisible and visible nature, a theater in which the Lord’s miracles are woven together for our ears as delightful hymns . . . 5
In a world saturated with performance, the church—or, by extension, the synagogue—triumphs over theater by excelling at theatrical arts, hymns among them.
All performances were not equivalent, however, either in the details of delivery or (perhaps even more significantly) in their social location and cultural esteem; in particular, the popularity of theater did not signify universal respectability. Orators, reflecting the biases of cultural elites, expressed ambivalence when reminded of how much their profession resembled that of actors and how greatly their craft benefited from a study of the stage. Religious authorities, for their part, railed against attendance at popular, public entertainment, seeing its performances as seductive, impious falsehood—literal hypocrisy, as the Greek term for actor was hypokrite. Orators and preachers wished to borrow the effectiveness and popular appeal of theater but to evade its associated whiff of disrepute. And yet, the sheer popularity of theater manifests not only in literature but also in infrastructure. The appearance of theatrical images within a synagogue and mention of them in a Christian hymn simply underscore the pervasive presence of spectacle in late antiquity and manifest in visual form the very real synergy among different forms of performance. In the ancient world, as today, audience appeal was essential; like actors in the theater and orators at the rostrum, homilists at the pulpit could only succeed if people came to hear them. And if actors and orators knew how to attract an audience, hold their attention, and energize their participation, even as that made them rivals to religious forms of spectacle, it meant that they had tools worth using. Theater and other forms of performance in late antiquity were ubiquitous, both too commonplace and too popular, for anyone—least of all anyone in the business of persuasion—to ignore. Liturgists and their communities may well have taken the performative elements of prayer and ritual in their houses of worship for granted, both because they reflected a way of connecting speakers and audiences that would have seemed natural and because the absence of such things would have been conspicuous (and possibly off-putting). But those same elements of live,
5 Basil of Seleucia, “Homily on Lazarus, 1,” in Mary B. Cunningham, “Basil of Seleucia's Homily on Lazarus: A New Edition BHG 2225,” Analecta Bollandiana 104 (1986), 178. I am indebted to Georgia Frank for this reference. See discussion in Chapter 1, (p. 43).
in-the-moment drama, re-enactment, and ritual can be among the hardest for us to recover from the written traces that have survived the centuries and come to us. This study attempts to recover and reconstruct the atmosphere that the people of late antiquity did not even necessarily notice, the air they rarely realized they breathed.
For the purposes of the present study, I define “late antiquity” in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean world as the late third through early seventh centuries ce: a period loosely bounded by Constantine on one side and the Caliph on the other. Christian emperors in Constantinople held political authority, but in the far southern and eastern provinces, late Roman Hellenistic culture continued to provide a common cultural baseline. Indeed, while phrases such as “the Christianization of the Empire” and “the period of Muslim rule” suggests epoch-shifting breaks and clear chronological delineations—moments with clean and legible “before” and “after” significance—from the perspective of daily life lived and popular culture produced and consumed, the experience would have been largely one of continuity.6 As such, the approach to the history of this period must be one that accounts for continuity across religious identities and commonality over time as well as space.
Theatrical performances and declamation were crucial components of this late antique culture. Social elites were trained to deliver speeches in competitive settings, and theatrical performances were ubiquitous. Both orators and actors relied on the classical canon as sources of plots and characters, whether in detail or as cultural shorthand, but by late antiquity, the performances were not those of “classical” Greco-Roman theater; the most popular theatrical performances were mime and pantomime. In pantomime, especially, the classical corpus was streamlined, distilled, perhaps distorted excerpts from the classical canon, while the set pieces associated with mime constituted a comedic canon of their own. Such performances were, in the eyes of many of the literati, vulgar and base, or at the very least faint shadows and pale imitations of the originals. The plays these performances offered consisted of excerpts from canonical works—racy, bloody, dramatic, or funny highlights—performed by actors (masked or unmasked) and dancers,
6 Among the works addressing the subtleties of such “epochal shifts,” see Michael Penn, Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians and the Early Muslim World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), a work itself shaped by important re-examinations of the narrative of “the parting of the ways” between Judaism and Christianity (e.g., Adam H. Becker and Annette Y. Reed, eds., The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages [Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2003]).
often with scandalous props and striking physical mannerisms. So distinctive were the conventions of these performances that mythic scenes in mosaics can often, upon closer examination, reveal themselves to be images of the stage. Orators and homilists, for their part, understood and acknowledged that their audiences knew this informal “canon” as mediated by public performance. Theaters shaped and taught traditions even as those who spoke to the people about sacred traditions drew upon ideas and techniques learned in the performative world.
Of course, much of what we know about theater in late antiquity comes from sources critical of it: professional orators (politicians and lawyers) and religious authorities. Each party had its own reasons for denigrating theater. Orators resisted the comparison of their profession to theater, for what might be described as issues of class distinction: the former possessed family connections, formal education, aspirations to power, and pretenses of refinement, all of which the latter was presumed to lack. Actors, speaking broadly, were dismissed as mastering artificial “techniques” in service of frivolity while orators possessed “skill” and “talent,” employed for public good. And yet, as we will see, famous actors and dancers were lauded for their gifts, and elite public speakers certainly were keenly aware of how effective theatrical techniques could enhance their own performance. Not only did public speakers acknowledge their own appreciation for actors’ methods for getting and holding attention but they also advised their students to study the same.
Religious authorities regarded public entertainments (including theater and games) and their denizens as leading virtuous communities astray, as luring them away from sacred service to debased entertainment and even idolatry; at the very least, such spectacles encouraged the pious to associate with the impious and seduced them to their frivolous and insidious ways. By late antiquity, opposition to theater, and public entertainments more broadly, gave prominent authorities in Jewish, Christian, and civic circles a common antagonist. Entertainers responded in kind, adding elements to their works that mocked their opponents, thus confirming for the orators, preachers, and politicians the correctness of their opposition. When political and ecclesial authority converged, with the promulgation of the Council of Trullo in 691–692, conventional theater was (at least in theory) banned.
We may think of theater as a literary form—we read the plays of Sophocles and the comedies of Plautus, and we study the writings of Aristotle and Cicero about theater—but monumental structures bear witness perhaps even more
eloquently, and more evocatively, than texts. In Roman towns, throughout the Empire, theaters, often still visible today, were ubiquitous, emblems and necessary elements of culture. These structures—surprisingly capacious venues suggestive of significant attendance—can be found in cities large and small, no matter what the majority population of the area was. The seating capacity of these venues bear mute but eloquent witness to the popularity of these entertainments: they could accommodate significant percentages of an entire population. Furthermore, beyond the tangible infrastructure of performance, we know that both theater and religious ritual often spilled out into the streets, in the form of spontaneous or orchestrated processions.7 The ubiquity of theater means that it shaped—consciously or unconsciously— not only the writings that would become the popular bedrock of the liturgical worlds of Judaism, Samaritanism, and Christianity but also the spaces in which they were performed: theaters, or technologies developed to improve purpose-built performance sites, influenced the architecture of some religious spaces.8 If theater was liturgy’s rival, then one way for prayer to succeed was to borrow a page from the orators and co-opt theater’s most successful strategies and tools.
7 Both Tertullian (De Spec. 7; LCL 250, pp. 248–250) and The Life of Pelagia describe the processions associated with spectacles. Tertullian writes, “The pomp (procession) comes first and shows in itself to whom it belongs, with the long line of images, the succession of statues, the cars, chariots, carriages, the thrones, garlands, robes. What sacred rites, what sacrifices, come at the beginning, in the middle, at the end; what guilds, what priesthoods, what offices are astir—everybody knows in that city (i.e., Rome) where the demons sit in conclave (see Rev. 18:2).” The Life of Pelagia offers an even more detailed description: “Now while we were marveling at his holy teaching, lo, suddenly there came among us the chief actress of Antioch, the first in the chorus in the theatre, sitting on a donkey. She was dressed in the height of fantasy, wearing nothing but gold, pearls and precious stones, even her bare feet were covered with gold and pearls. With her went a great throng of boys and girls all dressed in cloth of gold with collars of gold on their necks, going before and following her. So great was her beauty that all the ages of mankind could never come to the end of it. So they passed through our company, filling all the air with traces of music and the most sweet smell of perfume. When the bishops saw her bare-headed and with all her limbs shamelessly exposed with such lavish display, there was not one who did not hide his face in his veil or his scapular, averting their eyes as if from a very great sin” (PL 73, 664b–665a; translation from Benedicta Ward, “Pelagia, Beauty Riding By,” in Harlots of the Desert, a Study of Repentance in Early Monastic Sources [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, Inc., 1986], 67).
8 Epiphanius, the Bishop of Salamis, wrote in the fourth century, “There is also a place of prayer at Shechem, the town now called Neapolis, about two miles out of town on the plain. It has been set up theater-fashion, outdoors in the open air, by the Samaritans who mimic all the customs of the Jews” (Panarion 80.1.5; Reinhard Pummer, trans., Early Christian Authors on Samaritans and Samaritanism [Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2002], 132–133). The steps outside the synagogue at Chorazin (built in the third century ce, destroyed in the fourth, and rebuilt in the sixth) are themselves suggestive of theater and may indicate an exterior communal space; see Z. Yeivin, The Synagogue at Korazim; The 1962–1964, 1980–1987 Excavations, Israel Antiquities Authority Reports (Jerusalem: Israel Antiquities Authority, 2000), and discussion in Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 92. This structure is discussed in Chapter 5.
If the comparison of hymnody to theater and other forms of entertainment seems jarring—even today, comparing a religious ritual to a theater performance can be taken as offensive, indicating superficiality or a lack of commitment9 it may be in part because of the success of the anti-theater polemic by religious authorities in late antiquity. To be sure, theater, oratory, and liturgical poetry served different purposes and appealed to distinctive constituencies by means of particular conventions. Differences in function and setting granted, approaching hymnody—here understood as the communal performance of song in religious settings and as part of statutory liturgies and rituals—through the lens of engaging performance helps modern readers recover and appreciate subtle elements of these works that no doubt contributed to the development and popularity of these publicly performed and communally engaging works.10 By viewing hymns, from their composition to their delivery, through the lens of “religious theater,” I intend to evoke neither the ancient Greek origins of theater in the Dionysian cult nor the medieval productions of religiously themed mystery plays; rather, I wish to focus on the looser but still useful idea of “theatricality” as a way of understanding the performer–audience dynamic that is so essential to liturgical ritual broadly conceived. Indeed, the need to capture and hold an audience’s attention, to engage and entertain, creates a common ground among all the diverse modes of performance considered here: theater, oratory, and hymns. The concept of “theatricality” also provides a deep contextual basis for discussing religious works that differ significantly in terms of structure, theological orientation, and even language. The content of the vessels may differ substantially, but the vessels themselves—constructed from societal norms of what constitutes appealing
9 See the discussion, with significant resonances for late antiquity, in Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in NineteenthCentury America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
10 The term “hymn” is used in this volume in a fairly expansive sense, in order to accommodate the range of poetic genres in multiple languages; other authors use the term in a more limited sense, and the challenges of nomenclature reflect larger trends in studies of the history of liturgy and an increasing appreciation among Christian and Jewish historians for the fluidity of religious ritual, scripting, setting, and so forth. For an overview of the challenges of nomenclature and life setting, written with regard to a single poet but easily applicable beyond, see Gerard Rouwhorst, “The Original Setting of the Madrashe of Ephrem of Nisibis,” in Let Us Be Attentive! Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of the Society of Oriental Liturgy (Prešov, Slovakia), 9–14 July 2018, ed. Harald Buchinger, Tinatin Chronz, Mary Farag, and Thomas Pott (Münster, Germany: Aschendorff, 2020), 207–223. Robert Taft notes the popularity of psalmody and singing, observing that “the laity were more enthusiastic for the psalmody than the clergy” (Through Their Own Eyes: Liturgy as the Byzantines Saw It [Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press, 2006], 57).
entertainment and efficacious ritual—come from the same workshop and can bear the weight of significant comparison.11
For the purposes of this study, religious performance—specifically hymnody, although homilies, too—constitutes a third mode of “theatrical” public entertainment, alongside oratory and theater. Composers of homilies and hymns employed techniques held in common with “civic” orators, and public actors may reflect highly intentional and conscious compositional and performative decisions by the poets as skilled, professional artisans in their own right. It is possible that some of the poets examined in this study possessed formal education in the techniques of performance and oratory—schooling in the wisdom of the progymnasmata, handbooks of oratorical training composed in antiquity and used long after. But key to my inquiry is the idea that the ubiquity of performance and its conventions rendered it legible to all, whether formally educated or not.
Indeed, we must recognize that we have no explicit evidence of hymnographers possessing “professional training”—that is, education specifically in the composition and performance of hymns—and it is possible that liturgical poets benefited from the hymnographic equivalent of “a good ear”—that is, their compositions may reflect less formal and more intuitive understandings of modes of communication—one acquired through careful attention to the exemplars in daily life and an instinct for what was effective rather than a specific curriculum and exercises practiced in the classroom. Then as now, ideas about effective ways of speaking can be gleaned informally, through attentiveness to the kinds of communication in one’s midst and an instinctive understanding of what techniques work. The progymnasmata themselves can be understood to emerge from a dynamic between practitioners and theorists: the handbooks distill insightful observations about effective rhetorical techniques into discrete, practicable exercises that serve to train public speakers to impress their audiences. Audiences, in turn, learn from witnessing these examples (and perhaps practicing themselves, if they received some education) how they are best entertained and engaged; similarly, orators studied actors and actors critiqued orators, all as professionals consciously refining their craft and as practitioners moving between the
11 Wout J. van Bekkum addresses the early stages of Jewish poetic idiom and its social context, with astute awareness of early Christian parallels, in his short, elegant article, “Qumran Poetry and Piyyut: Some Observations on Hebrew Poetic Traditions in Biblical and Post-Biblical Times,” Zutot 2 (2002): 26–33.
roles of performer and audience.12 Through these organic “feedback loops” of practice and experience, aesthetics were continually refined, and a kind of performative literacy, by which tones, postures, and gestures were understood, was acquired. While less systematic and perhaps more haphazard, self- or lesser-trained writers and speakers could achieve the same insights and refinements and bring them to bear when they were, themselves, in the audience. In short, we need not argue that every writer in late antiquity, every composer of hymns and poems, experienced formal rhetorical schooling in order to have a broad sense and sound intuition for how to make use of the techniques codified in the handbooks and conveyed through formal education. Informal education was everywhere.
A word on nomenclature is important here: the present study uses the term “theatrical” to refer to an author’s evident awareness of audience engagement in a public venue. In many cases, the analysis teases apart three distinct threads integral to performance, examining them individually even as they entwine with each other: the author, who created the work (who may, in practical terms, be more than a single individual, particularly if scribes updated written texts to reflect later conventions); the performer, who translated the text into a living experience for listeners; and the audience, who not only witnessed the delivery but explicitly or implicitly offers feedback on its success or failure.13 This definition brings the rhetorical worlds of oratory and declamation into the discussion along with theater proper, and it encompasses both performative and receptive elements of a work— that is, the perspective of both actors and audiences, the persuasiveness of
12 Scholars in the field of Greek tragedy have broken important ground recently in the area of “choral mediation” in Greek tragedy. See, for example, the essays assembled in Marianne Govers Hopman and Renaud Gagné, eds., Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and in Joshua Billings, Felix Budelmann, and Fiona Macintosh, eds., Choruses, Ancient and Modern (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See, too, Felix Budelmann, The Language of Sophocles: Communality, Communication and Involvement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), esp. Chapter 5, “The Chorus: Shared Survival” (195–272); Simon Goldhill, Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), esp. Chapter 7, “Generalizing about the Chorus (166–200); and Claude Calame, La tragédie chorale: poésie grecque et rituel musical (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2017).
13 Every author has an audience in mind before he or she begins to write, and every work, when it is received, can be understood to undergo a kind of performance. What distinguishes “theatricality” from these related ideas is, in particular, the staged nature of the assumed performance— the significance of the gaze. On the importance of “the gaze” in religion, David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), esp. pp. 25–115, is an essential starting point. Also note Shadi Bartsch, Actors in the Audience: Theatricality and Doublespeak from Nero to Hadrian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). This definition of “theatrical” distinguishes the theatricality of liturgical and paraliturgical works, which were in some sense “staged” from other forms of writing in antiquity.
role playing and a common repertoire of characters, the language of the body and importance of acoustics, and the reciprocity of voice and gaze.14 Viewed through this lens, the concept of theatricality offers a way of approaching religious performance with an eye toward successfully engaging the listeners. Performance constituted a common, “nonpartisan” element of late ancient culture—neither high nor low, neither pagan nor Christian nor Jewish. A consideration of late ancient theatricality in general terms sheds light on the performative elements of specifically religious poetry and situates them not only within a specific religious context but more broadly as well. This study examines religious integration and internalization of widespread late ancient cultural practices and aesthetics.
The liturgical context of the hymns makes them especially compelling to examine from the perspective of theatricality. Theatricality, as used here, refers to the dynamic of self-consciousness between a performer and his audience, particularly an author or performer’s awareness of his audience’s gaze.15 In the context of ancient exegesis, it is useful to think of a continuum of performativity and theatricality: while liturgical poetry may be especially theatrical, homilies and sermons also display a concern for audience, as do prose prayers and antiphonal litanies. Every text does.16 Even a text read silently is, implicitly, performed, as readers encountering a written work in solitude imaginatively and unconsciously make decisions about how they see and hear voices and actions, becoming audiences to their own intuitive productions.17
14 Among recent works on the subject of theatricality, see esp. the volume Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., Theatricality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Davis and Postlewait resist offering any fixed definition of the term—“the domain of theatricality cannot be located within any single definition, period or practice” (3)—but in the introductory chapter (pp. 1–39) provide a fine, concise history of various meanings of the term.
15 For an initial consideration of the performative elements of early piyyut, see Laura S. Lieber, “The Rhetoric of Participation: The Experiential Elements of Early Hebrew Liturgical Poetry,” Journal of Religion 90.2 (2010): 119–147. More recently, see Laura S. Lieber, “The Play’s the Thing: The Theatricality of Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity,” Jewish Quarterly Review 104 (2014): 537–572.
16 The idea that every text should be read as having an audience applies even if the only audience is an imagined one—an ideal reader or listener in the mind of the author. Foundational in this regard is Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Also see Robert deMaria Jr.’s essay, “The Ideal Reader: A Critical Fiction,” PMLA 93.3 (1978): 463–474, which offers a useful history and overview of the concept and a presentation of how it manifests in the works of theorists including Frye, Culler, Fish, and others.
17 Modern readers have likely experienced the phenomenon of seeing a written work adapted for the screen, and the common response of judging that the adaptation looks or sounds “wrong,” even in cases where the original work does not indicate appearance or tone with any precision. The filmmaker or television director’s imagination—visual, acoustic, and emotional—has brought the text to life in a way that does not align with another individual’s unspoken, interior “staging.” See Timothy L. Hubbard, “Some Anticipatory, Kinesthetic, and Dynamic Aspects of Auditory Imagery,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Imagination (2 vols.), ed. Mark Grimshaw-Aagaard, Mads
Throughout this volume, one particular facet of a common late antique culture is fundamental: the pervasiveness of performance. The present study builds upon and expands the recognition that Jews, Christians, and Samaritans in late antiquity lived alongside and among each other, with common public spaces and diverse sites of interchange—a shared civic infrastructure.18 Within these shared spaces emerged common aesthetics and practices, including those of performance. Indeed, so ubiquitous was performance—all the world truly was a stage—that it can be considered a defining aspect of late antique culture. Reading liturgical works through the lens of performativity integrates religious experiences into the wider society and its norms while providing additional data for cultural historians, by demonstrating that yet another matrix of spaces provided venues for energetic and creative theatricality.
A cultural foundation of performance awareness constitutes a deep substrate of communal assumption and commonality that unifies not only the literary traditions of late antiquity but also the routine, lived experience of being Jewish, Samaritan, or Christian in this pivotal time period when all three traditions were developing striking and enduring new forms of creative self-expression. It is at this moment—specifically, the period beginning in the fourth century ce that we witness the sudden flowering of rich literary traditions across all three communities: the Hebrew poetry of Yose ben Yose, the Samaritan Aramaic poetry of Marqa, and the Syriac Aramaic poetry of Ephrem. And it is, likewise, in late antiquity—in the sixth century ce that major poets including Romanos, Yannai, Eleazar ha-Qallir, Narsai,19 and Jacob of Sarug flourished. By and large, poets have been studied within the confines of their religious affiliations: Romanos has been studied through the lens of Ephrem and the Church Fathers, and Yannai in light of Yose ben Yose
Walther-Hansen, and Martin Knakkergaard (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 149–173. In the same volume, also note the essay by Marco Pellitteri, “The Aural Dimension in Comic Art,” 511–548.
18 Raimo Hakola provides an excellent survey of recent treatments of this topic, from both literary and material perspectives, in “Galilean Jews and Christians in Context: Spaces Shared and Contested in the Eastern Galilee in Late Antiquity,” in Spaces in Late Antiquity: Cultural, Theological and Archaeological Perspectives, ed. Juliette Day, Maijastina Kahlos, Raimo Hakola, and Ulla Tervahauta (London: Taylor and Francis, 2016), 141–165.
19 Narsai, a figure increasingly understood as important but whose works (primarily metrical homilies [memre]) remain understudied, compared with Ephrem and Jacob of Sarug. See, however, the recent volume Aaron M. Butts, Kristian S. Heal, and Robert A. Kitchen, eds., Narsai: Rethinking His Work and His World (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). For those who wish to explore his works in translation, see R. H. Connolly, The Liturgical Homilies of Narsai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1909).
and rabbinic writings. Rarely have these poets been studied as culturally specific instantiations of a widespread hymnographic phenomenon that crosses confessional and linguistic boundaries.20 And yet, the endeavor to link the poets and their writing to each other in a deeply comparative way—to discern points of contact, connection, influence, or inspiration—must be done cautiously, and with awareness of the cultural dynamism that works such as these texts manifest. Any attempt to pull out distinct threads of influence that yoke one poet or type of poetry to another suggests that one could unravel the poems back to a point, or points, of origin. To presume “an origin” would, however, obscure or even suppress the breathtaking complexity of each body of writing as approached within its own tradition, on the one hand, and deny the importance of the shared cultural background common to all these bodies of writing, on the other. Rather than looking to establish a common vorlage or prototype of hymn—thereby implicitly crediting a single poet, tradition, location, or community with ownership of the entire enterprise—this project seeks to understand the common soil from which these distinctive blooms emerged, into a riotous garden filled with wildflowers of song.
Poets writing within Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan traditions produced remarkable bodies of poetry in a range of languages, including Hebrew, Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Samaritan Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek. The forms of composition ranged from the simple alphabetical acrostic to extended verse homilies to symphonic, multi-movement cycles. They wrote for major holidays and weekly Sabbaths, on the lectionary and on thematic topics. We know less than we would like of how these works were performed in the churches of late antiquity, and even less of Jewish and Samaritan synagogues, but we have no doubt that they were tremendously popular across the board. This project seeks to explore from a broad cultural perspective what techniques the poets used, or could have used, to help popularize and publicize their compositions.
The expansive scope of this volume speaks to the ubiquity of performance in late antiquity. In this volume, I draw liturgical poetry by
20 Previous generations of scholars often sought to discern directions of influence, either arguing that Jews adopted the aesthetic conventions of the majority Christian population, or that Christians borrowed from Jewish models. See the discussion in Hayyim (Jefim) Schirmann, “Hebrew Liturgical Poetry and Christian Hymnology,” Jewish Quarterly Review 44.2 (1953): 123–161. A recent exception would be Ophir Münz-Manor, “Liturgical Poetry in the Late Antique Near East: A Comparative Approach,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 1.3 (2010): 336–361. Also note the discussion of comparative work in the important review essay by Wout J. van Bekkum, “The Hebrew Liturgical Poetry of Byzantine Palestine: Recent Research and New Perspectives,” Prooftexts 28.2 (2008): 232–246.
