Monks and Circus Factions in Early Byzantine Political Life

1Eastern monks were sometimes as active outside the walls of their caves and communities as they were inside them. Their service to churches and charities drew them into the public sphere in modest numbers. Their keen religious sensibilities brought them out suddenly and in large crowds.1 Modern scholars have long taken an interest in these phenomena, notably for the late Antique and early Byzantine centuries, and particularly in regard to the various political activities of monks. These political activities took a range of different forms - from the behind-the-scenes lobbying of local bishops, patriarchs and imperial officials; to peaceful marches and rallies in the streets and public squares of prominent cities; to violent public demonstrations in city and countryside. The monk’s instinct for politics, and especially religious politics, was already present in the fourth century, when the monastic movement had just begun. With the passage of time a fairly distinctive political vocation of sorts took hold. Among the many testimonies to this development are the monastic protests of the very early Byzantine age surrounding the Christological controversies and against lingering pagan beliefs, as well as those of later times against imperial-sponsored iconoclasm.2

2Although the motivations for many of these monastic protests and the facts surrounding them are well-documented, less attention has been directed to the question of whether and how monks organized themselves once the decision to pursue a public action was taken. In some instances, an extraordinarily gifted holy man stepped forth of his own accord to define and dictate terms. Such figures as Anthony of Egypt and Symeon the Stylite acted out this role more than once in the course of their lives, and the reasons for their political success has been intelligently studied.3 Keeping holy men in focus is fine. But to understand where research can go from here, we may want to rekindle our appreciation of more or less ordinary monastic groups. For as many group actions undertaken by monks are attested to as those by individual holy men and women, and only a portion of them were led by such outstanding figures as Anthony and Symeon. Without a renown holy person involved, one can imagine that the question of who was in possession of a higher degree of spiritual authority - one group of monks or their opponents - got particularly ambiguous, notably when the conflict was religious in nature and involved monk on monk, each with respectable ascetical credentials but no fame. In fact, this was the case in so many of the religious disputes of the early Byzantine age.4 For these lesser monks, therefore, the anonymous ones and their less famous leaders, the political challenges ahead were of quite a different order altogether. Simply put, it is likely that they needed to play politics by entirely different rules. The question is what were those rules, and how did ordinary monks hope to prevail over others when they had no arbiter of public opinion in the person of a famous holy man to come forth and lead them?

3The object of this paper is to test that middle ground - between the actions of individual holy men, on the one hand, and the dynamics of political life at large as ordinary monks and their communities experienced it, on the other. Even when they were not famed for their holiness, monks were still a special case when they entered the public arena; for in the first instance, they were monks (and not soldiers, nor merchants, nor common folk and slaves), and in the second, the issues they cared about were in some sense noble ones, since they normally did not stand to benefit in any direct, material way from their actions. At the same time, however, monks had a lot in common with other groups who entered the public arena, including the fact that they could be a nuisance to authorities and a source of public disorder, and further that despite being men and women under religious orders they were not spared imperial punishment and pressures when their activities were perceived to be excessive. Taken together, all of these considerations suggest that these monks looked a bit like other politically-minded groups whenever they saw fit to champion some cause beyond the confines of their monastic community and bring their issues into the public arena. It is therefore tempting to measure them, not against the politically-active holy heroes of their generation, but rather against other groups (religious and non-religious alike) who entered the public arena to press a cause and faced some of the same challenges that they did. These challenges included the logistics of managing a group, the prospect of winning sympathizers and contracting alliances with others, the need to sustain group momentum, and the dangers of overstepping boundaries and alienating the wrong people. These were all problems that both monks and other groups needed to confront, be it within the chaotic hours of an urban riot, or through struggles, protests and exiles lasting years. Hence it seems useful to ask what, if anything, we can learn about political monks by measuring them against non-monastic groups who were, generally speaking, in the same business.

4The test case proposed here is a comparison between monks and the factions, or more precisely between monastic groups and their followers over and against the professional circus factions and their partisans. In a number of ways these two subgroups in society had little in common with one another, or indeed stood on different ends of the spectrum of early Byzantine society. Most obviously, the one was a loosely organized part of the late Antique and early Byzantine civic entertainment industry, while the other evolved into a fairly well-defined lay religious movement with a history of firm opposition to secular culture. Hence they had different historical beginnings and quite different perspectives on themselves and their world, and their membership was also differently constituted. These basic distinctions between monks and factions were as clear to contemporaries as they are to students today, and predictably they held up most of the time. Yet not unlike so many other formal social distinctions of an earlier age, there were certain conditions and circumstances which tended to break them down. Just such a breakdown had occurred in the late Republican and Imperial periods of Rome with a narrowing in the gap between the life of the gladiator and the philosopher, the gladiator and the soldier, and the gladiator and the Christian martyr. In that instance the impressive growth of the gladiatorial games over time together with some long-term shifts in Roman society and self-consciousness brought about the change,5 whereas in the case of monks and factions of the late Antique and early Byzantine centuries three main factors played a role.

5The first of these was the politicization of monks and factions generally, a process which for both groups reached its peak from the middle fifth through sixth centuries. Strictly speaking, neither group was transformed into a political bloc or party as the result of this development. Nor were their traditional ministries abandoned - for monks, a commitment to saving their own and nearby souls, and for factions their participation in the games and imperial ceremonies. It is clear, however, that the politicization had a powerful if periodic effect on the outlook and activity of each group. Now and again, they even crossed paths as they moved from their normal pursuits to the more visible and explosive world of religious and imperial politics. This occurred in Constantinople during the Nike Revolt (532) when monks came to the rescue of some factional leaders who had gotten themselves into trouble with imperial authorities and were about to be publicly executed.6 Some decades earlier, too, in Antioch, the reverse pattern was seen when a violent attack on the city’s Jewish population began with monks but before long drew in members of the Green faction.7 Such incidents serve to show that monks and factions periodically shared some of the same urban space in early Byzantine cities and from time to time saw their interests converge. The latter episode in Antioch also suggests that monks engaged in violent behavior as readily as the circus factions did. Indeed, according to one modern authority: “It was the monks, not the factions, who elevated urban violence into one of the major problems of the late Roman world...[and]... accustomed both the inhabitants and authorities of late Roman cities almost to expect a certain level of violence during popular disorders.”8 Whether or not this statement is strictly true, the larger point to make here is that politicization changed monasticism as much as it did the circus, leaving the adherents of both groups with some common behavioral patterns.

6Once monks and factions entered the public arena there was a second and more basic condition common to them both, namely their similar gender and life-cycle profiles. Both were overwhelmingly male in membership, and both were in all likelihood quite young in their respective age-structures. Alan Cameron has shown these features to be typical of the factions, concluding that youth and gender combined to produce a hooligan spirit among circus groups.9 Men were also most certainly in the majority among those people under religious orders who became active in politics,10 and there may be reason to suggest that they were for the most part young men, too.11 On either or both accounts, monks were therefore more like their circus counterparts than they would have supposed or imagined; for they were both living in a world that placed certain expectations upon young men like themselves merely by reference to their age and gender.12 The fact that the two stood in very different vocational positions in other respects must have altered their perspectives somewhat, but it did not necessarily make them immune to more general social and biological forces.

7In a third convergence between the two groups, the very nature of circus and monastic activities invited comparisons between them that to a degree transcended their obvious differences. For example, both were united in their love of combat and competition, and both in turn fed upon representations of their activities in this light. The surviving epigrams and inscriptions regarding life in the circus offer a testimony to this spirit among charioteers13, just as monastic hagiography, sermons and meditations do for holy men and women.14 Most of the time the parallels went no further, and consequently each group was left to practice its activities and represent them to others in its own specific terms. Yet occasionally there were also convergences, notably in the case of monks who pictured their ascetical struggles with reference to the world of the circus. One of these is to be found in John Moschos’ Spiritual Meadow when a certain abbot Marcellus described how his vocation drew inspiration from the experiences of a charioteer in his home town of Apamea.15 The same abbot also invoked the ceremonial activities of circus parties as a way to describe the monk’s duty to chant the Psalter,16 while in another episode from Moschos a dream sequence is introduced which involved an amphitheater, a prospective monk’s mortal combat with an awful demon, and a group of shouting onlookers seemingly reminiscent of circus fans.17 Perhaps charioteers and their fans dreamed about monks, too. But the more basic point is that contemporaries themselves drew conscious parallels between these two very different worlds. To speak of sympathy between the two groups would be stretching the evidence too far. The evidence points instead to some degree of mutual identification at the level of self-perception and ideals.

8These three factors taken together indicate that the two groups occupied some of the same territory, were subject to comparable biological and some similar social forces, and engaged in a series of compatible activities, be it as occasional and sometimes violent protagonists in the public realm, or in their ordinary lives as individuals joined in the strong belief that the rewarding things in life required an extreme, uncompromising struggle. Whether such convergences amounted to something more - from real historical links or alliances between the two groups around particular issues, to more specific patterns of action that they held in common generally - is a more complicated matter. The likelihood that a person’s membership within a given circus party implied his adherence to a specific set of religious doctrines is, in fact, remote.18 Consequently it is almost impossible that they teamed up in a meaningful way with one monastic group or the other in any of the many religious struggles in the age. The reverse is equally true, and arguably in even stronger terms: monks clearly did not support or even take an interest in circus manifestations as a matter of course, and they surely condemned any of their members who did. At the same time, there is evidence that some monks transgressed these rules and slipped off to theaters and the horse-races nonetheless.19 Likewise, faction members occasionally saw their attention and energies diverted from the games to any number of religious and political issues of the day.20 All of this reinforces the idea that the world in which politicized monks and politicized factions lived was not as neatly organized and delimited as might be imagined. Both groups lived instead in a face-to-face society in which people from different neighborhoods and different walks of life could not help but cross paths and interact with one another.21 So, in sum, there seem to be some good reasons to compare monastic groups and factions at various levels, and less reason than one might at first imagine to dismiss the coupling. The comparison is especially interesting in regard to the one pursuit which they held in common, but which was germane to the ideals of neither group: the public protest. Both groups must have needed to learn how to conduct public protests effectively in this realm, which in turn suggests that they may have needed to borrow and adapt their techniques from others, or indeed perhaps from one another. In what follows, the focus is on the practical strategies of protest employed by monks and factions, respectively, with the aim to understand to what degree the common ground between the two groups extended to this sphere of activity and with what implications and consequences.

9Let us begin with the factions. It is regrettable that their own eulogists were not nearly as inclined to recount the movement’s political activities as were monastic hagiographers and preachers the exploits of their heroes. Otherwise we might have a greater appreciation of the strategies they employed. Some basic points of protocol are known, however, the first being that most demonstrations began with the acclamation. The organization of acclamations was both the privilege and the duty of factional leaders from the fifth century onward, and they took place on various occasions and in several urban locales, notably the Hippodrome and main thoroughfares of imperial cities. To be heard by their target audience - above all, the emperor - organizers incorporated large numbers of their followers as chorus and cheerleaders. Once begun, the message of the acclamations themselves was typically laudatory, but it could also weave in specific grievances against imperial and ecclesiastical officials.22 An unfriendly demonstration by the factions may end with the acclamation and go no further. Yet the mere occasion of the acclamation itself, including the gathering of the factions together for circus games, could ignite a larger round of protests and riots in which normal protocol and procedure went completely awry. The history of factional activity largely bears this last point out: once ignited, the protests of faction leaders and their followers quickly lost focus, and indeed frequently thundered out of control. A common scene included the throwing of stones and burning of buildings. In the absence of other intervening events - things that might bring the protests back into focus and order - disaster typically followed. The riots either collapsed under their own inertia, or imperial officials stepped in and finished them off with executions and exiles.23

10Some factional protests endured longer and were ultimately more successful. This was typically the case when the issues at hand were well-defined and easily understood, as was evident during the protests in Constantinople and Antioch in 579 against a certain magistrate Anatolios, who was eventually executed by popular demand on charges of pagan activities.24 A number of other variables also came to play a role in those demonstrations that proved to be more effective and of longer duration. First, it was smart to introduce a higher authority into the mix, such as the Antiochenes did when a famous charioteer named Porphyrios Kalliopas, now in retirement, showed up to lead the Greens on a rampage against Jews in the year 507.25 Second, it was a mistake to abandon the well-worn tradition of public acclamations too quickly, given that these acclamations could maintain a sense of order and interest amongst the street crowds, and at the same time they sent a message to authorities about what was actually at hand. A famous episode in the Nike Revolt (532) illustrates, in fact, the potential efficacy of acclamations in two ways: in the one, as a vehicle for factions to vent their grievances against the government and propose a remedy; and in the other, as a real stimulus for them, once the hope of compromise was lost, to press their case more forcibly than they were typically able to do in the past.26 Third and finally, the factions were at their best on those few occasions when they thought to introduce a prop - and especially a human one - to make a political point about the nature and direction of their protests. In principle they adopted this tactic whenever they attempted get rid of one emperor simply by producing his pretender, on the streets and in the flesh.27 However, as a means of persuading authorities and provoking them to a specific action rather than just threatening them, they used it quite rarely. The few examples include the demonstrations in Constantinople of 493 when the factions dragged statues of Anastasios and his queen through the streets,28 or the famous scene in 600/601 when they produced a look-alike of emperor Maurice, crowned him in garlic and sent him on parade atop a donkey, shouting insults and warnings along the way, all of this in order persuade the emperor to be less arrogant and more open.29 In these instances, as in the Nike Revolt and Antioch riots, the factions were all the more effective for having grounded their demonstrations in some sort of strategy.

11Although monks turned to a similar language of protest in their many struggles with church and state, they arguably did so more often and with better skill and consistency than the factions did. Naturally some monastic groups were slow to learn how to manage their protests effectively. Among them was the renowned Akoimetai monastery of Constantinople, which staged a series of bold but ultimately doomed actions at different times in both the early fifth century and early sixth centuries.30 Other monks and monasteries of the early Byzantine era were better equipped to cope with public action, however, and hence proved to have a real and lasting impact on their times. In the longer term, too, they succeeded in advancing the development of a characteristically monastic style of public demonstration that would serve many in the movement for centuries to come.

12One feature of their protest strategies was not unlike that of the factions: the christening of an important person as figurehead for any given demonstration. Modern historians have rightly drawn attention to the important role played by the holy man in the many controversies of the age. Indeed there can be no question that famous, charismatic holy men and women could give a sense of legitimacy and an emotional boost to the efforts of a given monastic party, and in some instances such individuals were even responsible for getting a monastic political movement initially under way. Yet in this regard it is worth remembering that in certain cases the great heroes needed to be recruited and then persuaded by lesser individuals to enter the fray. This was true, for example, of Daniel the Stylite when he took the helm of the protests in Constantinople against the emperor Basiliskos in 476.31 It was to an extent also true of the sixth century abbot Theodore of Chora,32 as well as Ioannikios in the mid-ninth century.33 Transforming a posthumous figure into the identifying symbol of a movement - and preferably people who had become famous for their suffering - was a much-used tactic too.34 Such cases begin to show how monks gravitated to a strategy of protest not unlike that used by the factions. Both groups used this adopt-a-hero strategy to good effect, with the difference that historically monks used it more often, more conscientiously and with greater effect still. If the monk’s role in politics endured much longer than that of the circus factions, therefore, this may be one of the many explanations why.

13Another explanation is to be found in the effective use of public prayer, processions, chanting and singing in monastic political movements. From the fourth century onward a formal system of public processions, accompanied by communal prayer and song, was a regular part of the ceremonial life of the late Antique and early Byzantine church.35 Over time, the church’s secular clergy also went on to lead many mass protest movements through the streets and squares of imperial cities, often underpinning them, as it turned out, with these very same vehicles of religious expression, though now re-employed for a new purpose. This latter development was quite remarkable, indeed, since it effectively transformed the clergy’s regular, ceremonial order of business into an extraordinary tool of protest and persuasion, on the one hand, and cast the clergy into a role somehow analogous to that of the circus factions, when their own laudatory acclamations turned to scorn and criticism in times of trouble, on the other.

14The chronology and precise circumstances of the monk’s initiation into the orderly cycle of peaceful, public processions in cities is less certain, as is their own adoption of the procession accompanied by song and prayer as tools for political protest. Both developments were well under way by the middle fifth century, however, by which time the use of litanies, cycles of the psalms, and solemn processions had already become a characteristically monastic way of conducting political movements. In orienting their protests in this direction monks were merely adopting a strategy of resistance and protest which others were using, be it political churchmen or politicized factions. Yet the genius of monks lay in their exploitation of similar tools, which they then employed in different ways and with a different sense of timing. For example, while acclamations were typically the pretext for protests and riots in the case of the factions, they were the protests for monks. The fierce clashes in Constantinople in 512 over the introduction of the Trisaghion illustrate the point. Monks had refused orders to include this phrase in their litanies, but instead, quoting from Theophanes: “They came out [in public] and sang another psalm. And on seeing them the crowds chanted, ’Welcome to the Orthodox”’.36 Similarly, in an anti-iconoclast demonstration from some centuries later, the Stoudite monks of Constantinople also turned to song and procession as vehicles of protest.37 The lesson of these and similar episodes was that demonstrations of this kind could catalyze and sustain a protest as long as the song was intelligently crafted, well targeted and delivered in such a way as to invite bystanders to join along in, all without necessarily provoking a direct confrontation with the prevailing church and imperial authorities. It should be said that such a measured strategy of protest was less a recipe for instant success than it was security against the kinds of sudden tragedy and failure experienced by the factions and their followers whenever their protests spun out of control and ended in rampant violence. It was a strategy, moreover, that suited religious leaders in general and monastic leaders in particular because of their ability to muster large numbers of people together who could speak (or sing) with a common voice, while importantly grounding their message in the authoritative voice of holy scripture. What made monastic groups superior to the rest in this endeavor was the fact that these large numbers were often ready at hand and swift to mobilize, and their knowledge of the scriptural and hymnal material well-practiced.

15Monks were arguably superior to other groups in one final area, too, namely the use of props and proxies as political weapons. The factions were familiar with this tactic, as we have seen, but they employed it rather sparingly and often clumsily. Church leaders occasionally reverted to it as well, notably when their own powers and authority were put to some great test, such as occurred in a famous incident from early seventh century Constantinople when the patriarch Sergios sought desperately to defend the city against invading enemies, bringing forth an icon of the Virgin to support his cause.38 For monks, it was sometimes the case that they invoked symbols of this sort out of a similar need to demonstrate more power and legitimacy than they actually possessed, while on other occasions they broadened their scope in order to make a more complex political point. In either case, they used the technique regularly and with effect. Some of Anthony of Egypt’s successors employed the tactic successfully, for example, when they escaped persecution from the Arian bishop Lucius, first by producing a man whom they had cured of paralysis just as Lucius’ soldiers were about to arrest them, and then by driving the demon from a young pagan woman to win their full freedom.39 The clairvoyant dream experiences of otherwise ordinary monks could serve a similar purpose by sanctioning the claims of a particular group by reference to a miraculous event by one of their members, and by spurring on their supporters onward as a result.40 Yet it is also understandable that such high-risk appeals to a higher power did not always work.41 At other times, therefore, a more immediate, touching and human display sufficed, such as that used by Monophysite monks in Constantinople during the age of Justinian and Theodore when they won the imperial couple’s sympathy and protection after presenting themselves at court in awful, threadbare clothes - in other words, as the very embodiment of suffering and persecution.42 Monks readily turned to any number of other props in other sorts of political actions as well, including the one led by Stoudite monks in ninth century Constantinople, noted above,43 which integrated icons into a procession with religious song, or in a series of incidents from some centuries earlier which apparently involved the employment of crosses and relics as tools for dissuading average people from indulging in secular pleasures in the Empire’s public buildings.44 This last episode may have served the more specific purpose of challenging and criticizing those emperors who allowed such things to occur. In other respects, however, it was very much like so many other demonstrations of its kind which cleverly sought to divert attention from the weaker aspects of monastic political movements, such as their lack of status and legitimacy relative to other social groups, or their sponsorship of controversial causes. Like other monastic actions of this sort, too, it strategically employed various props and proxies - animate, inanimate and linked to the divine - as a way to gain attention, understanding and sympathy from a select audience of people.

16There was a language of the street in early Byzantium, and part of that language had to be learned and practiced by all people who took it upon themselves to spearhead a political campaign in support of some specific cause. Different types of political causes naturally called for somewhat different strategies of campaign and protest. Moreover, the social status, professional standing and personal associations of any person or group obviously conditioned the precise way in which the action went forward, while in the case of groups in particular there was also the added question of whether the specific character and internal dynamics of a given community equipped them better for one kind of action than another. In this paper, it has been suggested that within this obvious diversity of factors and considerations at work in one type of political movement relative to another, there was also a considerable amount of common ground. Indeed, upon closer inspection of the behavior of two otherwise quite different social groups over time, the circus factions and monks, it has been found that they often steered their political campaigns into a quite similar direction, sketching out comparable strategies and employing similar political tools and weapons. Since these two groups remained different in so many other ways, there is no need to press the point of their parallel histories too far, except to observe that an examination of their common experiences brings to light some of the basic rules and challenges of political life in early Byzantium, while also suggesting how monastic groups grew and developed historically in their political vocation in ways that the factions did not. The truth is that the core vocation of both groups lay elsewhere, which meant that neither group was ever truly at home and operating from a position of strength when it so happened that they were thrust into the political arena. Over time, however, monks generally made more of the challenges inherent to this situation than the factions did by developing a political repertoire that they had borrowed from a common pool of habits and traditions but then reworked, on and off through the early Byzantine period, into something typically monastic in character. This was no small accomplishment in a number of respects, not least the fact that monastic political movements persevered into later centuries, and sometimes even flourished, even when other popular-based groups had long since ceased to matter.