Anathema

 

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τοῦ Ἰούδα [καὶ τῶν λέγοντων]
ἆρον ἆρον σταύ[ρωσον αὐτὸν]
. . . of Judas [and those saying]
Away with him! Cru[cify him!]
John 19:14

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A year ago I wrote about a late antique tombstone found near Argos. It is now Lent in both the Eastern and Western rites, and a good time to revisit the Argos tombstones at a more serious level. 

The image here is from the Byzantine Museum in Athens, but it represents six of the fourteen or fifteen Christian epigraphs from the 5th and 6th centuries in Argos. It is a small thing: all but one of these Argos epigraphs are somewhat smaller than a piece of printer paper, 2/3 the width of my computer screen.  

In the ancient world, grave-entering -- robbing or using someone else's grave -- was an impious act of major importance, and the guilty were to pay fines to the municipal treasury. For a thousand years before Christianity, Jewish, Greek, and Roman epigraphs had called on the gods of the Greeks and Persians, on enraged Apollo, and on the iron broom and the flying sickle to punish the guilty. Constantine's divorce law of 331 considered grave-entering grounds for divorce. In 447 a law of Valentinian said that one who would harass the buried dead was an enemy of light itself. Some thought the clergy were particularly guilty of grave-entering, others said it was the people who carried the body to the grave.

Christian gravestones took up their own warning, often the anathema, or the curse of God on Judas and on those who cried Crucify him! when Pilate asked what to do with Jesus. Significantly, they used the form found in the Gospel of John, the most anti-Semitic of the gospels, and a longer form than those used in the other three. This anathema was quite popular in the Justinianic period, with the Greens using it in their court oaths and shouting it at the Blues. Justinian included the anathema in his law about perjury in 535.

What is striking here is the percentage of Christian epigraphs from Argos that use the anathema -- 6 out of fourteen or fifteen.  There is another from Hermione, in the Argolid.  None have been found at Sparta. We are dealing with survivals, but counting the Corinth epigraphs, I found only 2 out of 162, and at the Argos rate there should have been 50.  I found three from Athens, and at the Argos rate there should have been dozens. The anathema shows up very rarely in epigraphs from Italy, twice out of the thousands from North Africa, one from Asia Minor. [I did this work 10 years ago: it is likely that many more epigraphs have been discovered since, but someone else will have to do the numbers.] 

The Argos use of the anathema crossed class boundaries.  It is found in a monastic burial vault; on the grave of Rhoda, daughter of Kyriaki who must have been poor; on the grave of a member of the city council; on the grave of a Syrian resident; and on two other working-class graves. We know nothing about what was going on in Argos in the 6th century, except that there may be a clue on the epigraph for a Christian of Jewish origin. It says

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+ κοιμητήριον
Ἀραβάννας ἀγό
ραστον + ὁ ἠγό
ρασεν Σολομών +

+ [this] resting place
of Arabanna [is] paid
for + Salomon,
bought [it]+

Some, but not all of the Christian epigraphs have crosses: this has the most, three.  It also states twice that the grave site has been paid for.  Does these things reflect an uneasiness on the part of Jewish Christians about their status among Greek Christians?  Two other Jewish epigraphs have been found.  One is seriously eroded and has not been reconstructed.  The other, that of Aurelius Joses, quotes the Theodosian Code at 16.8.13 in asking that his tomb not be entered.

It was perfectly possible for Christians to protest grave-entering without vulgarity. 

-->One from Parori, outside Sparta, began with the Trisagion -- "Holy God, Holy Immortal" -- and concludes, "by this power, do not disturb this tomb. ’ Another, from Corinth, says mildly, "Therefore let no one have designs against them and exhume them, and involve themselves in penalties." The Jew, Aurelius Joses, set a standard no Argos Christian met:

I, Aurelius Joses, pray
the holy and great
power of God and the
power of the Law and the
dignity of the patriarchs and
the dignity of the ethnarchs and
the dignity of the sages and
the dignity of the worship offered
each day before God that
no one will break up my tomb
which I built with much labor.

Resting Places

KYMHTHPI
ONANACCTA
CIAC
kymeterion anastasias

resting place of Anastasia

Greek Christians of the 5th and 6th centuries mostly didn't spell very well. Their grave markers were smaller than a piece of typing paper and the lettering on this is much better than most. All we can say about Anastasia is that her parents were Christian because they named her for the Resurrection.

Christian epigraphs sometimes mention occupations, so that among those from Corinth we get teamster, deaconess, servant, pickle-maker, bath attendant, guardsman, city council member, and goatherd. Argos has produced less than a tenth of the epigraphs of Corinth, but among those are anothe rmember of the city council, a maker of lampwicks, and a silentiarios who was a court official from Constantinople but his stone is misspelled and badly carved, and it is difficult to think what he was doing in Argos.

resting place
of Elpid
eforos silenti
arios wherein is
laid the lady of
his house Viola

In Argos there are fewer than twenty Christian epigraphs--"resting place" identifies a Christian grave--and two Jewish, and sometimes small narratives are implied. One tiny stone suggests that Theodote died, and her parents had a stone carved for her, its inscription beginning and ending with a cross. Then her sisters died and their names had to be added. Perhaps there is another explanation, but I think of the shock of parents who have lost three daughters.

†The grave of Theodote † and Agatha
and Theotekna

Rhoda lost a daughter, too, one she had named for Sunday, and that she was poor is suggested by the fact that she had to make use of a stone worn down by use possibly as a stepping stone. Rhoda could, at best, have earned about 5 solidi a year, and she could have made the choice to sell Kyriaki to a brothel for that much. If she had had to buy a gravesite it would have cost her about 3 solidi. Still, her stone suggests something disturbing about Argos. We are talking about survivals, not actual original numbers, but survivals are all we have to work with as historians and archaeologists. There is a higher percentage of anti-Semitic epigraphs from Argos than from any other late antique city.

† The resting place of Kyriaki
daughter of Rhoda if anyone
opens it except for her
heirs let him have
the anathema of Judas†

Which may explain some of the anxiety on the stone of these Christian Jews that requires three crosses and two assertions of payment:

† resting place
of Arabanna paid
for † the pur
chaser Salomon †

Another anti-Semitic inscription was found in the burial space of a monastery that had been established in one of the underground passages of he great baths in Argos:
† these resting places belong to the holy monastery of
the most holy church - - - - - - - - - if anyone should
dare to remove these things from those living in solitude
in this holy monastery, he will have from God his portion with
those saying crucify him †

The monastery was dedicated to the Apostle Paul, and the surviving stones and inscription from the small sanctuary are so beautifully carved that I am tempted to think that Ariadne had been their benefactor. There is something else, quite provocative.

Two generations after establishing their monastery, the monks seem to have acquired part of one of the houses next to the baths, which they used for an entrepreneurial effort. The private bath of the house (attached to a working aqueduct) has produced vast numbers of lamps marked with crosses, and some three hundred glass vials marked with A and a cross.

It looks as if the monks in the Argos baths were selling, or giving in exchange for contributions, water in these vials purported to come from the great spring near the basilica and monastery of the Apostle Paul at Kefalarion. This is perhaps an unfair assumption, based on too little evidence, but Argos had for centuries depended on tourists for income, monks were supposed to be self-supporting, and they did have this stock of three hundred vials, too big for perfume and too small for wine. And they had running water. It is difficult to know what to think.

Ariadne's Brother

This is de Chirico's sleeping Ariadne, perhaps not perfectly appropriate, but a sleeping Ariadne is needed. 

At some time in the 6th century, Ariadne's brother had a gravestone with an inscription carved for her in Constantinople and brought out to a basilica near a magnificent spring on the road near Argos. It was a magnificent spring for thousands of years, the spring of Kefalarion, and was magnificent until nearly thirty years ago when greed and the spirit of modern Greek progress required that it be pumped dry for irrigation purposes.

This basilica, carefully ignored since it was excavated nearly 40 years ago, was dedicated to the Apostle Paul, located near where Pausanias had seen the worship of Dionysios and Demeter. It must have been a splendid place, large enough--45.5 m long and 23m wide--and elaborate--with walls lined with coloured marble, gold tesserae, frescoes, stained glass, and carved sarcophagi--enough to have been an imperial or consular bequest.

Ariadne's brother was Doulkitios. A Dulcitius, proconsul in the sixth century of either Africa or Achaia, is commemorated in a sixth-century epigram by an unknown poet included in the Cycle of Agathias:

“At the high point of his life, the Powers led Doulkitios forth from excellence and glory as a proconsul to bliss.”

This Doulkitios can be dated, within a rather broad period. The writers included in the Cycle have been dated as writing between 530 and 565, which may then suggest the earliest and the latest reasonable dates for his death, and so for Ariadne’s.

Ariadne's Doulkitios provided--and very likely wrote himself--her metrical epitaph with echos of epic verse. It was the way the intellectuals wrote then. One fragment, in the Greek, seems quoted from Andromache in Book 6 of the Iliad: "You, Hektor--you are my father now, my noble mother, a brother too," while two other words seem taken from "willows whose fruit dies young" at the entrance to the world of the dead in the Odyssey--an image one would expect Christians to avoid, but the area of the basilica was thick with willows. "Sleeping Ariadne" itself makes reference to myths of Dionysios, whose worship had been expelled from Argos and Kefalarion about a hundred and fifty years before.

It is tempting to think of Ariadne as young and, naturally, lovely: no evidence compels us to assert that she was not, but she is more likely to have been a mature woman when she died. She had a strong connection to Argos -- the inscription calls her "of the Argeians." Her bones were buried elsewhere first, then moved to an osteotheke in the apse of the Kefalarion basilica.

I prefer to think, with no further evidence, that the proconsul Doulkitios was Ariadne's Doulkitios, and so proconsul of Achaia. Any proconsul had to know the area: going from Corinth to Sparta, which a proconsul would have to do, he would travel the road past the spring, and would certainly stop to cool off there, maybe visit friends. Remains of Roman villas have been found in the vicinity.

This is, in translation, what remains of Ariadne's epitaph.

† Blessed Paul, holy Apostle . . .
sleeping Ariadne [ - - - - - ]
of the Argeians destroyed . . .
taken by the ill fate
of a most noble family
even so her brother - - - - -]
Doulkitios [ - - - - - ]
those I[ - - - - - - ]
fruit of my[ - - - - - ]
] IAISS [ - - - - - - ]
[ - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ]