Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory

SHAW/JUDICIAL NIGHTMARES 533

Journal of Early Christian Studies 11:4, 533–563 © 2003 The Johns Hopkins University Press

Judicial Nightmares andChristian Memory

BRENT D. SHAW

An institution whose effects were as traumatic, mundane, spectacular, andordinary as the Roman trial necessarily left its imprint on the consciousness,both waking and unwaking, of the empire’s subjects. The experience of goingto court provoked a recursive dynamic in which images of the judicial processwere recalled and replayed. Memories of trial and punishment became a kindof recollection that was an ekphrasis of the experience. Since Roman courtswere so central to their history and to their ongoing experience, Christians,and their texts, especially reflect this imperial subjectivity. The judicialnightmare was a rhetorical form that both enabled memory and configuredresponse. The dreamworld of Christian consciousness reveals what wasnecessary to the making of this kind of subjectivity, and the necessary qualitiesof the memories themselves.

Louis Ferdinand Maury was one of those intriguing nineteenth-centuryérudites whose curiosity about antiquity provoked him to write on Greekreligion, astrology, and magic.1 His fascination with astrology and relatedmatters led him first to Artemidorus and other ancient dream-interpret-ers, and then to the subject of dreaming in general. In 1861 he composedwhat is arguably the work that stands at the head of modern “scientific”dream analysis—Le sommeil et les rêves.2 Like many such oneiric re-searchers, then and now, Maury relied in no inconsiderable part on personal

1. L. F. A. Maury, La magie et l’astrologie dans l’antiquité et au moyen âge, ouétude sur les superstitions païennes qui se sont perpétuées jusqu’à nos jours (Paris:Didier, 1860); Croyances et légendes de l’antiquité applique à quelques pointsd’histoire et de mythologie (Paris: Didier, 1863)—amongst other such works.

2. L. F. A. Maury, Le sommeil et les rêves: études psychologiques sur cesphénomênes et les divers états qui s’y rattachent, suivies de recherches sur ledéveloppement de l’instinct et de l’intelligence dans leurs rapports avec le phénomènedu sommeil (Paris: Didier, 1861). It was reprinted in many editions; the one quoted byFreud, below, was the fourth edition of 1878.

Mary Botto

534 JOURNAL OF EARLY CHRISTIAN STUDIES

recollections of nightly visions. Here is how one of his dreams has beendescribed:3

Maury was ill and lying asleep in his bed, with his mother seated besidehim, when he dreamt that it was during the Reign of Terror. Afterwitnessing a number of frightful scenes of murder, he himself was finallybrought before the revolutionary tribunal. There he saw Robespierre, Marat,Fouquier-Tinville and the rest of the grim heroes of those terrible days. Hewas interrogated by them, and, after a number of incidents which were notretained in his memory, he was condemned and, surrounded by an immensemob, was led to the place of execution. He climbed onto the scaffold andwas bound to the plank by the executioner. It was tipped up. The blade ofthe guillotine fell. He felt his head being separated from his body.

Maury then woke up in what is reported to be “extreme anxiety.” Heobtained some relief by the discovery that a board from the top of the bedin which he had been sleeping had fallen down and struck his neck in justthe way that the blade of a guillotine would have done. The description ofthis dream is by Sigmund Freud, who returned to Maury’s juridical night-mare several times in the course of his Interpretation of Dreams.4 InFreud’s work, as well as those of his immediate predecessors and succes-sors, Maury’s report led to much learned and inconclusive debate over“real-time” sequencing in dreams. I merely wish to note the embedding inthe subconscious nonawake mind of images of national punishment, inthis case dreamt by a Frenchman two or more generations after therevolutionary guillotine had completed its nasty work.5

3. The original is found on p. 161 of the fourth edition of 1878: “J’étais un peuindisposé, et me trouvais couché dans ma chambre, ayant ma mère à mon chevet. Jerêve de la Terreur; j’assiste à des scènes de massacre, je comparais devant le tribunalrévolutionnaire, je vois Robespierre, Marat, Fouquier-Tinville, toutes les vilaines decette époque terrible; je discute avec eux; enfin, après bien des événements, que je neme rappelle qu’ imparfaitement, je suis jugé, condamné à mort, conduit en charrette,au milieu d’un concours immense, sur la place de la Révolution; je monte surl’échafaud; l’exécuteur me lie sur la planche fatale, il fait basculer, le couperet tombe;je sens ma tête se séparer de mon tronc, je m’éveille en proie à la plus vive angoisse,et je me sens sur le cou la flèche de mon lit qui s’était tombée sur mes vertèbrescervicales, à la façon du couteau d’une guillotine.”

4. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vols. 1–2, Eng. tr. of Die Traumdeutung(Leipzig-Vienna: F. Deuticke, 1900), ed. J. Strachey, London, 1953 [vols. 4–5 of TheStandard Edition, on Maury at 4:26–27] (the same dream is also discussed at 64,495–98, and 575). Such “legal dreams,” including an arrest in a restaurant (494–95),a man arrested for infanticide (155–57), and visits by police inspectors (417–18),seem to be rather rare (he speaks, at 67, of a Roman emperor who had a man put todeath because he had dreamt that he had assassinated the ruler; cf. Plato, Rep. 9.1f).

5. Maury, it might be noted, had a propensity to dream in this conservative mode.Given suitable prompting—the sharpening of a pair of scissors, a hot iron being held


Less rêve than cauchemar, Maury’s vision was centered on an incidentof trial and punishment. For the subjects of the Roman empire, theexperience of witnessing and participating in a trial was arguably thequintessential civic experience of the state. It was the most intense andwidespread public and ceremonial imperial presence found in a myriadlocal venues in the provinces of the empire. In the management of theconcerns that struck most directly at the state and its subjects, urgentproblems were resolved in the forum of the civil trial that was staged in apublic and dramatic fashion by elite officials of the state. The formalrituals and frightening apparatus of the court and public punishment hada powerful effect on persons caught up in the direct confrontation withthe authority of the state. It is the manner of this impact upon the humanpsyche as reflected in the (relatively) unconscious reflection of visions ofthe type that frightened Ferdinand Maury many centuries later that is ourconcern here. The Roman state consciously intended its punishments tobe public and strikingly visual precisely in order to achieve the terror-effect that was to provide the desired deterrent. The public trials stagedby Roman governors were calculated to be preventative spectacles, visualsights that were meant to startle: an ekphrasis of administrative powerand of undisguised coercion so riveting that it was further developed ininternal pictures of the mind. Hence the significance of judicial dreamsand punitive nightmares. They are symptoms of a collective picturing andmemory of a specific kind of power.6

Maury’s dream was about a past occurrence that was open to interpreta-tions of what these events signified about one’s past mental and psychicdevelopment. This was not the case with another dream of punishmentthat I now wish to examine, a vision seen by a woman in prison who wasawaiting execution by the Roman state as represented in the person of theacting-governor of the proconsular province of Africa. Her name wasVibia Perpetua. She had been arrested with several companions on thecharge that they were Christians. The charge was true. In any event, thecriminals had no wish to deny their crime. Indeed, they were happy toadmit it and to face the consequences. While in prison, Perpetua had a

close to his face—he dreamt, respectively, of the terrible days of 1848 and then thatthe “chaffeurs” of the Vendée had made their way into a house where they wererobbing the inhabitants in their usual mode of forcing the victims’ feet into the hotcoals of the heating brazier (see Maury, Sommeil et les rêves, 154–56).

6. Obviously, I am exploiting the idea in the sense developed by MauriceHalbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and tr. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1992).


series of incandescent visionary dreams, the third of which related to herforthcoming punishment, which was to take place in the arena in Carthage.Her dream of punishment is necessarily more dramatic than Maury’s to thedegree that some Roman punishments were theatrically staged events thatwere purposefully designed to double as a kind of public entertainment.7 Inher own words, originally part of her prison diary, Perpetua reported that:8

. . . the day before we were to fight in the arena, in a vision I saw thefollowing things: Pomponius the deacon came to the entranceway of ourprison and began to knock furiously on the gate. I went out and opened theprison gate for him. . . . He said to me: “Perpetua, we’re waiting for you—come along.” . . . At last, almost out of breath, we arrived at theamphitheater and he led me into the center of the arena. . . . I looked at thehuge roaring crowd. Since I knew that I was condemned to the beasts, I wasastonished when no wild animals were sent out against me. Instead, therecame out against me an Egyptian, a man of repulsive appearance, togetherwith his assistants, to fight with me. . . . We circled each other and thenbegan to hit each other with our fists. My opponent wanted to get hold ofmy feet, but I made a mess of his face by kicking him with my heels. Thenwhen I was hoisted into the air, I began to hit him even though I wasn’t ableto step on the ground. Then when I noticed a break in our fight, I joined myhands by knitting my fingers together and put a hold on his head. He fellface-down on the ground. I put my heel on his head. The crowd began tocheer and my supporters began to sing my praises. . . . I walked in triumphto the Gate of Life.

Having been condemned to die in the arena, in her dream Perpetuareconfigured her death sentence to a different and potentially more win-nable confrontation. She later understood the dream to interpret her fu-ture: “Then I woke up. I realized that it was not with wild animals that Iwould fight, but with the Devil. And I knew that I would win the finalvictory.”9 The dream is different from Maury’s in a critical, but typical,sense. In antiquity one’s dreams were not invariably about past events, andthey did not always reveal the significances of past occurrences. Rather,they were often dramas that had future consequences and predictive power.10

7. K. Coleman, “Fatal Charades: Roman Executions Staged as MythologicalEnactments,” JRS 80 (1990): 44–73, is the by-now classic study; see also D. Potter,“Martyrdom as Spectacle,” in Theater and Society in the Classical World, ed.R. Scodel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 53–88.

8. Passio ss. Perpetuae et Felicitatis, 10.1–13 (SC 417:134–40).9. Passio ss. Perpetuae et Felicitatis, 10.13–14 (SC 417:140–42).10. S. R. F. Price, “The Future of Dreams: From Freud to Artemidorus,” Past &

Present 113 (1986): 3–37; see, however, the important warnings by G. W. Bowersock,“The Reality of Dreams,” chap. 4 in Fiction as History: Nero to Julian (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1994), 77–98.


That is how Perpetua responded. Her experience might well be much likeMaury’s in another sense, however, in that she already dreamt in literaryconstructions. Her hand-to-hand struggle in the arena cannot be identifiedwith any precise type of martial combat known in the Roman world: itwas neither a gladiatorial contest nor a pankration, but rather a literaryamalgam of these and other forms of physical contests which she had seenand about which she had read or heard.11

We know that judicial processes constituted a social field of rule-drivenbehavior that seems to have necessitated all sorts of recourse to “illogical”devices, from formulaic magical prayers to the use of magical curse tab-lets, to have some effect on, or perhaps merely to cope with, a process thatseemed so formally removed from day-to-day logic.12 That people in theRoman world should have dreamed of, or, more appropriately, had night-mares about courts and judicial punishment is therefore hardly surprising.Standard dream-interpretation manuals from antiquity, notably that ofArtemidorus of Daldis, featured characteristic annotations on the connec-tions between dreaming and punishment.13 Artemidorus offered interpre-tations to those who dreamt of various forms of judicial punishment,including imprisonment, hanging and beheading, and the three great deathpenalties—burning alive, being thrown to wild beasts, and crucifixion—the fatal triad of the Roman summa supplicia.14 He also interpreted thesignificance of ordinary dream themes to various forms of punishment.15

For example, a dream of dancing, if the dreamer was a slave, signified thathe would be beaten; if a man in bonds, that he would be set free; if a

11. As pointed out long ago by Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri, “La passio ss. Perpetuaeet Felicitatis,” Römische Quartalschrift, Supplementheft 5 (Rome, 1896), 37–39 (=Scritti Agiografici, vol. 1 [Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1962] =Studi e Testi, no. 221), 41–154, at 60–62.

12. For a selection and analysis of both see J. Gager, ed., Curse Tablets and BindingSpells from the Ancient World (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);H. S. Versnel, “Beyond Cursing: The Appeal to Justice in Judicial Prayers,” chap. 3 inMagika Hiera: Ancient Greek Magic and Religion, ed. C. A. Faraone and D. Obbink(New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 60–106.

13. I. Hahn, Traumdeutung und gesellschaftliche Wirklichkeit: ArtemidorusDaldianus als sozialgeschichtliche Quelle (Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1992).

14. Artemidorus, Oneirocritica: imprisonment or placing in bonds (1.40), behead-ing (1.35); the summa supplicia are included at the end of a section (2.49–54) whichdeals seriatim with various forms of punishment: death, strangulation, having one’sthroat cut, being burned alive, crucified, and exposed to wild beasts (in that order).

15. Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.39 (horns = you will be beheaded), 1.48 (walking on thespot = imprisonment); 1.70 (meat = to a slave, it signifies torture and whipping); 1.77(crowns of ivy and vines = imprisonment for ordinary persons; for criminal it meansbeheading because such plants are cut with iron).


criminal, that he would be crucified, because, says Artemidorus, of theoutstretched position of the hands while in the act of dancing. Then thereis singing in the bath. When one sings in the bath, Artemidorus noted,one’s voice becomes indistinct. Hence, many people have been condemnedto prison after such a dream.16 He also considered the significance ofdream themes for involvement in litigation.17 Again, the type of the dreamsignified potential outcomes of trial scenarios. For example, walking onwater: “This is . . . good for a man who is involved in a lawsuit. For he willbe superior to the judge and will naturally win the trial. For the sea alsoresembles a judge, since it treats some people well and others badly.”18

From such notices, and a host of comparable materials, we can deducewithout much fear of contradiction that the possibility of being involvedin a public spectacle, either a trial or a public display of physical tortureand punishment, was one of the imminent hazards of life that was deeplyembedded in the conscience of the ordinary people of the time—enoughto evoke the nightly apparitions that were regularly commented on in thedream-interpretation manuals of the time. It seems equally significant tonote that in circumstances where the provocations of Roman trial andpunishment were absent, the dream images seem to have been adjustedcommensurately. Which is to say that dreaming about judicial trial, tor-ture, and punishment was not a necessary given. In the Oneirocriticon of“Achmet,” for example, a Byzantine dream-interpretation manual cast asan orientalist fantasy, and dating perhaps to the tenth century, dreams ofjudicial trial and torture are few and their images seem pale and mechani-cal by comparison with the themes of judicial punishment reported byArtemidorus.19 And if it eventually became a fact that the Roman em-peror could be defined as someone who was “free from the constraints ofthe law” (legibus solutus), then it is equally interesting to note thatemperors, not being subjects, did not suffer from judicial nightmares.20

16. Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.76.17. Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.60, wrestling signifies a court case over land; 1.67,

eating certain types of vegetables signifies lawsuits; 1.72, cakes signify bad results forpersons involved in lawsuits; 2.32, a gladiator signifies that you will become involvedin a lawsuit, struggle, or some such type of battle.

18. Artemidorus, Oneir. 3.16.19. S. M. Oberhelman, The Oneirocriticon of Achmet: A Medieval Greek and

Arabic Treatise on the Interpretation of Dreams (Lubbock: Texas Tech UniversityPress, 1991); for the dating and provenence see 11–14; for the few parallels see §§ 15–16 (92–93); §§ 89–90 (118–20); § 120–21 (129–30), some of these being drawnrather artificially from Artemidorus.

20. G. Weber, Kaiser, Träume und Visionen in Prinzipat und Spätantike (Stuttgart:Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000), 569–73, compiled an exhaustive catalogue. The judicial


That the spectacle of the court was so impressive as to affect deeply themental disposition of those brought before it was a fact of which themembers of the Roman ruling order were well aware. Consider the fol-lowing example from the letters of Seneca, one of the first in the Romanimperial mode who ruminated at length about the nexus of the humanbody, judicial trial, punishment, torture, and mental disposition:21

Our judicial procedure is a spectacle that surrounds itself with fiery torches,iron chains, and the claws of wild animals that are unleashed to tear outhuman innards. Consider what you see in the place of trial: the prison,crosses for crucifixion, the torture rack, the iron claw, the stake driven sofar through the middle of a man that it juts out from his mouth, the limbsof a human body wrenched apart by chariot wheels drawing them inopposite directions, the so-called “fiery shirt” laced with pitch and acid, andother instruments of savagery that I have not yet mentioned. So it isn’tsurprising, is it, that there is such a great fear of all this process in whichthere is such wonderful variety and such a terrible apparatus. The torturerdoes not have to do much more than simply set out the instruments of pain.The defendants are mentally overcome by the mere appearance of thosethings which they would have resisted with physical endurance. In fact, theinstruments with which torturers subjugate and dominate our minds aremore efficient to the precise degree that they are simply displayed.

Note that it was accepted that the process was designed to induce fear inwhich onlookers would be mentally overwhelmed.22 Recognition of thispowerful mental impact of courtroom spectacle, and premonitions ofpunishments, were commonplace observations, not just amongst deni-zens of the ruling class like Seneca, but also for a Christian bishop,Cyprian of Carthage, who, two centuries later, was to die in one of thefirst empire-wide state-directed persecutions of Christians.23

nightmare does not appear, save for one exception: Maximinus Daia, who has afictitious vision foisted on him by Lactantius (de Mort. Pers. 49.5); see 468–71.

21. Seneca, Ep. 14.2.22. Of course, it need not be state-engendered fear that would produce the dream;

so Aug. Serm. 161.6 (PL 38:880): “The man who’s going to kill you, whom you fear,who terrifies you, whom you’re running away from, dread of whom won’t allow youto get any sleep—if you see him in a dream when you’re asleep, you’re paralyzed withfright—what’s he going to do to you?”

23. Cyprian, Ad Donatum 10 (CSEL 3.1:11–12): Incisae sunt licet leges duodecimtabulis et publico aere praefixo iura proscripta sint: inter leges ipsas delinquitur, interiura peccatur, innocentia nec illic, ubi defenditur, reservatur. Saevit invicemdiscordantium rabies et inter togas pace rupta forum litibus mugit insanum. Hastaillic et gladius et carnifex praesto est, ungula effodiens, eculeus extendens, ignisexurens, ad hominis corpus unum supplicia plura quam membris.


See Donatus: the laws of the Twelve Tables are engraved on tablets ofbronze, but the law is violated in their very presence. Innocence is overcomein the place where it should be most protected. Adversaries rage againsteach other, wars flame out amongst citizens in togas, the forum resoundswith a great clamor. Here is the lance and the sword, the executioner readyto apply torture, the claws of iron, the rack of torture, the burning irons,and other tools to break and to pull apart, more instruments of torture, in aword, than the human body has limbs.

Cyprian asks his interlocutor to behold, to see, to envisage the sights ofcourt and punishment. The ekphratic nature of the impressions that he isattempting to evoke in the reader is manifest. That the description of thefacts of a trial was intended to be so visual shows how the force and theimpact of judicial ritual was intended to strike the viewer. The majestyand the fear of the law imparted by the spectacle of court procedure wasrecognized as a continuing function of the courts themselves in the trialsof ordinary criminals in the centuries after the empire had become Chris-tian and Christians themselves were no longer being hauled before thecourts on the charge of being a Christian.

When the late-fourth-century writer of an anonymous Arian commen-tary on the gospel of Matthew turned to the subject of the passionnarrative, the preacher was able to appeal to visual recollections that heassumed would be shared by his parishioners.24

The judge who will hear the cases of criminals in public, places his tribunalin a high location . . . and you will see there the officials arranged in their

24. The Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, usually collated with Chrysostom’sworks, is in fact pseudo-Chrysostomic; see M. Meslin, Les Ariens d’Occident, 335–430 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 152–63, and J.-P. Bouhot, “Remarques surl’histoire du texte de l’Opus Imperfectum in Matthaeum,” VC 29 (1970): 197–209.Opus imperfectum in Matthaeum, Hom. 54.31 (PG 56:941): Criminosas personasiudex auditurus in publico, tribunal suum collocat in excelso, circa se constituitvexilia regalia, ante conspectum suum ponit super mensam calliculam, unde tribusdigitis mortem hominum scribat aut vitam; hinc inde officiales ordinate consistunt; inmedio secretario ponuntur genera horrenda poenarum, quae non solum pati, sed etvidere tormentum est. Stant iuxta parati tortores, crudeliores aspectu quam manibus.Tota iudicii facies cuiusdam schematis terrore vestitur. Et cum ad medium productaefuerint criminosae personae, ante interrogationem iudicis ipsius, iudicii terribilidiscutiuntur aspectu. Similiter et Dominus se ad iudicium venturum promittit similitercum tremore, non cum simili terrore. Nam et bona et mala similiter ordinata sunt interra sicut in caelo, non tamen similia. Ergo videntes in terra poenas, et glorias, nonsimiles putare debemus in coelo; sed cum sint talia super terram, multo maiorasuspicari debemus in caelo. Quantum enim Deus distat ab homine, tantum caelesteiudicium a terreno. Istius enim iudicii splendor in schemate, illius autem iudiciimaiestas in veritate, testante propheta. . . .


proper order: in the middle of the judicial hearing chamber are placed thehorrible devices of punishment, which are painful not just to suffer, buteven to see. There stand close at hand and at the ready the torturers them-selves, crueler in their appearance than ghostly apparitions. The wholeappearance of the court is clothed in the dress of terror. When the criminalsare lead into the midst of this scene, even before any interrogation hasactually begun by the judge, they are already broken by the terrible sight ofthe court itself.

Note that the writer is speaking about a strong continuity that longoutlasted the persecution of Christians, but which is here recalled in thecontext of his discussion of the trials and execution of Jesus son of Josephas remembered in the gospel of Matthew. Once again, the visual elementsare paramount. It is another judicial ekphrasis.

Calculating the known effect of seeing dramatic presentations, Romanauthorities deliberately used the spectacle of trial and punishment as apiece of theater that had to be witnessed by numbers as large as possibleto inculcate in them precisely this effect.25

After a few days [the governor] Anullinus ordered his heralds [praecones] totravel through the neighboring rural districts and cities so that the people inthem would come to witness the spectacle of the martyrs. Hearing theannouncements, and out of fear of punishment, all the people came fromevery possible direction to the spectacles—and those who did not wish tocome were urged to do so by the governor’s officials.

Here it is not of particular significance that it is an invented Anullinuswho has been made the fictional bearer of Christian memories, but it isimportant how the images are construed. The actions are reported in amartyr act of dubious authenticity, but they surely depict a not unusualoccurrence. Whether local townsfolk were urged on or not, the news ofthe governor’s tribunal being set up in the forum traveled by word ofmouth throughout the neighboring quarters of the town and drew largenumbers of spectators to the sights. The consistent reports found even inthe “genuine” acta confirm that the trials were witnessed by huge crowds

25. Passio s. Mammarii 5. The text can be found in Jean Mabillon’s Veteraanalecta, new ed. (Paris: Montalant, 1723; reprint, Farnborough, Hants.: Gregg,1967), 178–81, at 178: Post dies autem aliquot, iubet [sc. Anullinus proconsul]praecones per regiones et civitates, ut ad spectaculum sanctorum venirent. Audientesvero universi populi prae timore poenarum undique ad spectacula veniebant; et quivenire nolebant ab officialibus urgebantur. See also E. Le Blant, Les actes des martyrs:supplément aux Acta Sincera de Dom Ruinart = Mémoires de l’Institut National deFrance, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 30.2 (1883): 57–348, at 108(§ 11).


who behaved as if they were attending an impressive event of publicentertainment.26 And these same martyr acts, even the more fictitious ones,also betray the clear cognizance of the Roman officials themselves thatthe mere sight of such a spectacle was sufficient thoroughly to terrifydefendants.27

The Christian martyrs dreamed accordingly.28 Perpetua’s dream of herown punishment prompts us to consider other local accounts, such asthat of Marianus and Jacobus, in the generations following her death thatalso include dream sequences modeled on hers.29 Set in 259, the final yearof the persecution of Christians ordered by the emperor Valerian, thestory of their martyrdom is marked by a certain imitation of style, form,and content established by Perpetua’s account of her experiences in prison.30

Marianus, a reader (lector), was arrested along with Jacobus, a deacon, ata rural villa near a place called Muguae on the outskirts of the city ofCirta. Marianus, Jacobus, and the anonymous author of the narrativewere then escorted by a centurion and his soldiers to a hearing before themunicipal magistrates of Cirta. Here they were interrogated in a trialsequence which, although only briefly alluded to in the letter of theirimprisoned “brother” that forms the core of the narrative of their arrestand martyrdom, must have had a profound impact on them. While inprison at Cirta, before their transfer to a hearing before the governor ofNumidia at Lambaesis, but following the brutal tortures to which theirbodies had been subjected, the martyrs had a series of prophetic visions.Marianus was the first of these. After the torture of his body, he lapsed

26. Acta s. Cypriani 3 = Musurillo, The Acts of the Christian Martyrs, no. 11, 172–73; Passio S. Philippi Heracl. 5 (Ruinart, Acta sincera, 214).

27. Acta ss. Timotheii et Maurae 1 (AASS, 1 Maii): the governor, in order to breakthe Christians, says to them: “Don’t you see the instruments of torture all aroundyou?”

28. E. Le Blant, “Les songes et les visions des martyrs,” chap. 8 in Les persécuteurset les martyrs aux premiers siècles de notre ère (Paris: E. Leroux, 1893), 89–97.

29. Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi = P. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, La Passio ss. Mariani etIacobi = Studi e Testi 3 (Rome: Tipografia Vaticana, 1900); for recent interpretations,see J. Aronen, “Marianus’ Vision in the Acts of Marianus and Jacobus,” WeinerStudien, n.s. 18 (1984): 169–86.

30. Franchi de’ Cavalieri, Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi, 13, noting how Schultzeregarded the similarities between the Acts of Montanus and those of Marianus andIacobus: “Questa somiglianza dimostra—così egli ragioni—l’esistenza nell’Africasettentrionale di una sorta di schema, principalmente foggiato sugli Atti di s.Perpetua, per chiunque volesse esercitare la sua penna nel campo dell’agiografia.”Franchi de’ Cavalieri admits this influence as “natural,” but he argues that it actuallydetermined the bare facticity of the later martyrs who used Perpetua’s story as atemplate for their own narrations.


into the peace of a deep sleep. Through “divine favor” there was revealedto him a vision, the contents of which he retold to his fellow prisonersafter he awoke.31 He recounted his dream as follows:32

My brothers, I was shown the sublime construction of a very high, shiningjudicial tribunal on which, in the place of the Roman governor there sat ajudge of sublime appearance. There was a judicial platform for thedefendant facing the tribunal—not the usual low one which is mounted byonly a single rising step, but one which was furnished with a whole series ofsteps and which could be reached only by a long, celestial ascent. Theindividual ranks of those who had confessed moved forward, and the judgeordered them to be taken to the sword. This also happened to me. Then Iheard a great clear voice saying: “Summon Marianus.” I ascended thejudicial platform for the defendants. . . . Then, all of a sudden, behold!Cyprian appeared seated at the right hand of the judge, and he stretchedout his hand and raised me to a higher place on the platform, smiled, andsaid: “Come, seat yourself here beside me.”

Then the other groups of defendants’ cases were heard, while I wasseated in an advisors’ position [on the tribunal]. Then the judge rose and wewere taken to his headquarters. Our route took us through a pleasant placeof meadows and densely leafed forest glades, made dark by cypress treesrising together to great heights and pine trees that touched the sky. Youwould imagine the place was surrounded on all sides by luxuriant woods,but there was an open place in the center where waters flowed plentifullyfrom a clear spring. . . . And at this point the judge suddenly retired fromsight. . . .

This sort of judicial dream became part of the narratives of Africanmartyrs that followed Perpetua’s, although in the elaborate story of the

31. Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi 6.5 (Franchi de’ Cavalieri, 53): Etenim Marianopost illam vexationem corporis altius in soporis tranquilla resoluto quid divinadignatio ad fiduciam spei salutaris ostenderit, expergefactus nobis sic ipse narravit. . . .

32. Passio ss. Mariani et Iacobi 6.6–13 (Franchi de’ Cavalieri, 53–54): Ostensumest, inquit, mihi, fratres, tribunalis excelsi et candidi nimium sublime fastigium, in quoad vicem praesidis iudex satis decora facie praesidebat. Illic erat catasta non humilipulpitu, nec uno tantum ascensibilis gradu, sed multis ordinata gradibus et longosublimis ascensu. Et admovebantur confessorum singulae classes, quas ille iudex adgladium duci iubebat. Ventum est et ad me. Tunc exauditur mihi vox clara et inmensadicentis: Marianum applica. Et ascendebam in illam catastam. Et ecce ex inprovisomihi sedens ad dextera eius iudicis Cyprianus apparuit et porrexit manum et levavitme in altiorem catastae locum et arrisit et ait: Veni, sede mecum. Et factum est utaudirentur aliae classes, me quoque assidente. Et surrexit ille iudex, et nos eumdeducebamus ad praetorium suum. Iter autem nobis erat per locum pratis amoenumet virentium nemorum laeta fronde vestitum, opacum cupressis consurgentibus inexcelsum et pinis pulsantibus caelum, ut putares eum locum per omnem circuitusambitum lucis virentibus coronatum. Sinus autem in medio perlucidi fontis uberantibusvenis et puris liquoribus redundabat. Et ecce subito ad oculis nostris ille iudex recessit.


martyrdoms of Montanus and Lucius, who were also executed at Carthagein the final year of the Valerianic persecution, the dream is more abbrevi-ated in scope.33 From actual dreams and literary evocations of them,therefore, we know that the judicial process impressed itself upon theindividual consciousness of defendants of the time. The behavioral symp-toms of guilt that were induced in accused persons by judicial rituals werewell known and were signaled in public by a pervasive body language ofblushing, sweating, shuffling, bowing, scraping, weeping, and so on.34

That was the behavior of persons who were convinced of their own guiltby the overpowering presence of the court and awe of the law. Tertullian,who reports these reactions, does so only to insist that the bodily move-ments and gestures of Christian defendants did not signal guilt but ratherthe reverse, and hence an implicit condemnation of the imperial system.But it was surely bodily involvement in the steps and procedures thatimprinted these experiences so vividly in the mind.35

It is also known that the dreams and remembrances of trial and punish-ment were already following an internal imperative, as it were, within theChristian community, where the process of trial and punishment hadprovoked discussion about the new values to be attributed to those whosuffered. It was such a novel and pervasive inversion of norms that itsrepercussive effects were felt within the individuals who were subscribingto the new social values. Perpetua’s dreaming of her future punishmentwas imitated not just by other lay Christians and priests, but also byCyprian, the bishop of Carthage himself. As reported in Cyprian’s biogra-phy by the deacon Pontius, the judicial dream had now become a stereo-typical and necessary literary artifice.36

33. Actio et Visio Martyrum Luci, Montani et ceterorum comitum, 5.1–2 = F.Dolbeau, “La passion des saints Lucius et Montanus: Histoire et édition du texte,”REAug 29 (1983): 39–81, at 69–70: Tunc Reno qui nobiscum fuerat adprehensus,ostensum est ei produci singulos, quibus prodeuntibus lucernae singulae praeferebantur;cuius autem lucerna non praecesserat, nec ipse procedebat. Et processimus nos cumlucernis nostris, et expergefactus est. Et ut nobis retulit. . . .

34. Tert. Apol. 1.1.10–13 (CCL 1:86–87), and his discussion of the emotions oftimor, pudor, tergiversatio, paenitentia and deploratio ordinarily displayed by accusedpersons.

35. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1989), 72–74, emphasizes the importance of common physical involvement inrecursively repeated ritual-like events to the formation of collective memories.

36. Vita Caecilii Cypriani 12 (CSEL 3.3cii–civ): . . . admirabilem visitationem Deinon praeteribo, qua antistitem suum sic in exilio esse voluit de secutura passionesecurum . . . “eo enim die quo in exilii loco mansimus . . . apparuit mihi,” inquit,“nondum somni quiete sopito iuvenis ultra modum hominis inormis: qui cum mequasi ad praetorium duceret, videbar mihi tribunali sedentis proconsulis admoveri. Is


I will not pass over God’s wonderful visitation by which he desired that hispriest would be certain in exile of his passion that was to happen . . . for onthat day when we first took up residence in the place of exile [the city ofCurubis] “there appeared to me,” he said, “when I was deep in sleep, ayoung man of unusual height who conducted me to the governor’s head-quarters where I was led before the tribunal of the proconsul who wasseated on his dais. When he looked at me, he began at once to note downon his tablet a sentence which I did not know since he had, as yet, askednothing of me with the usual interrogation. But the young man who wasnow standing at his back very anxiously read what the governor hadwritten down. Because he could not announce it openly in words, he triedto indicate to me by a hand gesture what was contained in the writing onthe tablet. For, with his hand, expanded and flattened like a blade, heimitated the stroke of the usual punishment and expressed what he wishedto be understood by his signal as clearly as by any speech. I understood thefuture sentence of my passion. I began to ask and to beg immediately thatat least one day’s grace should be granted to me, until I could arrange to getmy property affairs in order. When I had urgently repeated my request, thegovernor began to make some new annotations on his tablet which I couldnot see or know. But I understood from the calmness of his facial featuresthat the judge’s mind had been moved by my petition, since it was a justand fair one. Moreover, the young man, who had already revealed to mewhat my passion was to be by gesture rather than by words, hurried tosignify repeatedly by a secret signal, by twisting one of his fingers behindthe other, that the delay till the next day had been granted. So, although theactual sentence had not been read, although I rejoiced with a very gladheart with joy at the delay that had been granted, I still trembled with fearover the uncertainty of my interpretation that the remains of this fear stillset my heart beating with excessive agitation.”

ut in me respexit, adnotare statim coepit in tabula sententiam quam non sciebam,nihil enim de me solita interrogatione quaesierat. Sed enim iuvenis qui a tergo eiusstabat admodum curiosus legit quidquid fuerat adnotatum. Et quia inde verbisproferre non poterat, nutu declarante monstravit quid in litteris tabulae illius ageretur.Manu enim expansa et complanata ad spatae modum ictum solitae animadversionisimitatus, quod volebat intellegi, ad instar liquidi sermonis expressit. Intellexisententiam passionis futuram. Rogare coepi et petere continuo, ut dilatio mihi velunius diei prorogaretur, donec res meas legitima ordinatione disponerem. Et cumpreces frequenter iterassem, rursus in tabula coeperat nescio quid adnotare. Sensitamen de vultus serenitate iudicis mentem quasi iusta petitione commotam. Sed et illeiuvenis, qui iam dudum de passionis indicio gestu potius quam sermone prodiderat,clandestino identidem nutu concessam dilationem, quae in crastinum petebatur,contortis post invicem digitis significare properavit. Ego quamvis non esset lectasententia, et sic de gaudio dilationis acceptae laeto admodum corde resipisco: metutamen interpretationis incertae sic tremebam, ut reliquae formidinis cor exultansadhuc toto pavore pulsarent.”


Once again, it is important to note that the dream is clearly interpretedaccording to the prophetic psychology of the times: it is not read back-wards as revelatory of the formation of Cyprian’s psyche. Rather, asPontius himself puts it: “What revelation could be more manifest? Whatmore happy than this recognition? In this way everything was predictedto Cyprian which in fact later happened to him.”37

On occasion, it is true, nightmarish visions were recorded in which thelines of power inherent in the rituals of trial and punishment were re-versed. One such narrative concerns the judicial hearing and torture of anAfrican Christian named Maximian in a dramatic scene set in the perse-cution of dissident Christians (“Donatists”) in Africa in the year 347.Following his arrest, interrogation, and torture, Maximian was throwninto prison to await his final sentencing and punishment. In prison, hehad a dream that foretold his “release from all prisons.” Apparently, likePerpetua, he was sentenced to die in the arena, and, like her, Maximianpreplayed his forthcoming punishment in his dream. In the arena, how-ever, Maximian does not battle a dark man construed as Satan, but rathersomeone whom he immediately recognizes as the emperor. He fights asavage hand-to-hand combat with the supreme ruler of this world; vio-lently laying his hands on the prince, he wrenches the emperor’s eye out ofits socket. In this way Maximian was able to rejoice—in his dream—as agreat victor, and, ascending heavenward in his apotheosis, he heard thevoice of an “old man” thundering out three times: “Woe to you, O world,for you are perishing.”38 The Christian preacher who was rememberingthis episode and commenting on the dream took the significance of thevision to be obvious. By gouging out the emperor’s eye, Maximian lefthim as blind to the truth as he was. He had thereby overcome an evilforce. Such subversive readings of the judicial process, even in dreams,however, are very rare occurrences in the existing martyr narratives. Inboth senses, it seems, Maximian’s dream was a minority view.

The more normal judicial dream, if we might call it that, became astaple of Christian rhetoric in periods long after the state persecutionswere a thing of the distant past. In their replaying of imperial authority,such dreams functioned less as a judgment of the social order than as acognitio of the self. In the midst of a long letter that the not-so-saintly

37. Vita Caecilii Cypriani 13.1 (CSEL 3.3civ): Quid hac revelatione manifestius,quid hac dignatione felicius? Ante illi praedicta sunt omnia quaecumque postmodumsubsecuta sunt.

38. Passio Isaac et Maximiani 8.54–10.72, in the new edition by P. Mastandrea,“Passioni di martiri Donatisti (BHL 4473 e 5271),” AB 113 (1995): 39–88, at 81–83.


Jerome wrote to the young Roman aristocrat Eustochium (to advise heron the touchy subject of virginity and celibacy), he reported his now-famous nightmare that is as good an example as any.39 Jerome begins withcontext: he confesses that, although he had become a Christian, he hadcontinued to love “pagan” literature. He was starved without his Cicero.And whenever he perused the books of the Bible he was appalled by theirbarbaric language. Thus tortured and wearied, late one afternoon he fellasleep from sheer exhaustion, a physical lassitude he blamed on theinroads of “that old serpent.” He felt his body becoming cold and remote.Then there was a rush of movement,

. . . when suddenly, taken up in the spirit, I was hauled before the judge’stribunal [ad tribunal iudicis], where there was so much light and such agreat shining from the radiance of those who were standing about that,throwing myself on the ground, I did not dare even to look up. When I wasasked my status [interrogatus conditionem], I replied that I was a Christian.The one who was presiding as judge intoned: “You are lying,” he said,“You are a Ciceronean, not a Christian. Your treasure is there, where yourheart is.” I remained rooted to the spot, tongue-tied. Amidst the lashes ofthe whip [verbera]—for the judge had ordered that I be beaten—I wastortured more by conscience than by any torturer’s firebrands, and Iconsidered that little piece of verse in my mind: Who will confess you in thefires of hell itself? I began to cry and shouted out: “Pity me, my lord, havemercy on me.” Amidst these pleas of mine the lash of the whip resounded.Then the spectators who were standing round about fell on their kneesbefore the tribunal and began to implore the judge that he should have pityon my youth, that he should make allowance and forgive my mistake, andthat he should only impose the penalty of crucifixion if I ever again read thebooks of the gentiles. But I wished to give an even greater promise. I beganto swear an oath and to take his very name as a witness to it, saying,“Lord, if I ever should have worldly books, if I should read them, I willhave wronged you.” Having made this formal oath I was dismissed andreturned to those above [i.e., the living]. I opened my eyes, washed with somany burning tears that transform unbelievers into believers from corporealpain. For that was no mere sleep I experienced or one of those hollowdreams by which we are sometimes fooled. The tribunal before which Iprostrated myself is witness, the court which I feared is witness—may Inever have to face such terrible judicial torture again—so much that I had

39. Jerome, Ep. 22.30 (CSEL 54:189–91). As Dom Paul Antin put it better: “Lesonge de saint Jérôme—c’est l’expression reçue, mais il vaudrait mieux dire lecauchemar.” See “Autour du songe de saint Jérôme,” REL 41 (1963): 350–77, at 350;for interpretive context, see P. Cox Miller, “Jerome and His Dreams,” chap. 8 inDreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1994), 205–31.


bruises covering my shoulders, and I still felt the effects of the blows after Ihad woken up. . . .

Here the whole courtroom experience is replayed in the mind: the ritual-istic obeisance before the raised dais of the tribunal on which the presid-ing magistrate, the governor, sat as judge, and the use of bodily torture toelicit the truth. Here too is the identification of the self before a curiouscrowd of onlookers who intercede with their shouts exhorting the judgeeither to condemn the miscreant or to show mercy and to set him free.The whole thing is a quintessentially Roman experience. Jerome’s literarydream-replay simultaneously assists the social memory of judicial cere-monial and exploits it to persuade his readers: the youthful girl Eustoch-ium, and his third audience, we who read them both. Such texts embed-ded the spectacle of judgment and punishment in the heart of Christiandiscipline.

Jerome’s dream could be thought of as a piece of high-cultural self-fashioning were it not for the fact that all of its principal elements can befound in social circumstances that were profoundly local and entirelyperipheral to the social circles in which Jerome maneuvered. Take the caseof a common man from Hippo Regius, a busy port city in North Africa,as reported by Augustine to his parishioners in a sermon.40

Let me tell your graces a story that I’ve never told you before, somethingthat happened in this congregation, in this church. There was a man here, asimple soul, harmless, a true believer, known to many of you people ofHippo, indeed to all of you—a man named Tutuslymeni. Who of all of you,my fellow citizens, didn’t know him? It was directly from him that I heardwhat I am now going to tell you. Someone refused to give back to himwhat he had entrusted to that person—what that man owed Tutuslymeni.He was relying on that man’s honesty. He was so upset that he challengedthe man to swear an oath. That man swore, so our man lost his property.But while our man lost his property, that man lost his soul. So our Tutusly-meni, a serious and dependable man, told me that later that same night hehad a dream in which he was brought before a judge. With considerableviolence, and terror, he was brought into the presence of this awful andexalted personage, attended by a court of similarly exalted persons. And hetold me that, as he cowered in a corner, the order was given for him to besummoned back again, and that he was interrogated in these words: “Whydid you challenge a man to an oath when you knew that he was going to

40. Aug. Serm. 308.5 (PL 39:1408–10); the date is uncertain, scholarly guessesplacing it in the later era of his preaching, after c. 420. Doubt must fall on thepersonal name “Tutuslymeni”; some indigenous African names, it is true, are unusual,but in this case one suspects problems generated by copyists.


swear falsely?” Our man replied: “He refused to give me back what wasowed to me.” “And would it not have been better,” the answer came, “foryou to lose the property that you were demanding, than for you to destroythe soul of this man with a false oath?” The order was then given forTutuslymeni to be placed on the ground and to be beaten. He was beaten soseverely that we he woke up the welts raised by the blows were evident onhis back. But after being punished, he was told: “You are being spared foryour otherwise blameless life. But take care you do not ever do this again.”Tutuslymeni, you see, had certainly committed a grave sin and was pun-ished for it. But any of you here will be committing a much graver sin, ifafter this sermon of mine and hearing this warning you do anything of thesame sort.

In recounting the sheer physicality of the dream experience before acourt, was Tutuslymeni merely imitating what he had read in Jerome, orwhat had been suggested to him by Augustine, his pastoral bishop? Ithink not. What was being replayed was a vivid personal experience.41 Ofcourse, it was one that Augustine suggests was intentionally inculcated bypreachers in the believer—as, no doubt, it already had been for Tutuslymeni.But this inculcation was also a reinforcement of a common experienceand a common knowledge.

There is no doubt that bishops appropriated the judicial experience andpreached it. The believer was to set up his or her own imaginary courtthat would pronounce judgment on them, announce the appropriatesentence, and inflict the suitable punishment. As Augustine vividly ad-vises in one of his sermons: “Question your faith, lift your soul onto thedefendant’s tribunal [catasta] of your conscience, torture yourself withthe fear of judgment, and then answer the questions: In whom do youbelieve? Why do you believe?”42 Augustine normally configures God, likethe late Roman state and its intrusive officials, as an omnipresent beingwho sees and hears everything. You must therefore already have yourpersonal judge in the secret recesses of yourself; it is an internal dynamicthat logically leads to the Christian analog of the judicial confession.43

Hence the moral frequently preached to his congregation that “each oneof you must sit in judgment of yourself” or “investigate yourself.” Youmust interrogate yourself in every respect to discover what your conscience

41. M. Dulaey, Le rêve dans la vie et la pensée de saint Augustin (Paris: EtudesAugustiniennes, 1973), 171–74, separates the long-term textual elements inTutuslymeni’s dream from those that were drawn from experience with contemporarycourts in early fifth-century North Africa.

42. Aug. En. in Ps. 96.16 (CCL 39:1367–68).43. Aug. En. in Ps. 74.9 (CCL 39:1030–32).


tells you. In short, you are “to hold court over yourself,” “to judgeyourself.”44 In a sermon preached at the shrine (mensa) of saint Cyprianin Carthage on 27 May 418, Augustine made the connection with aRoman trial strikingly explicit.45 He urges his listeners who are consider-ing the merits of public power to sit in judgment on themselves:

. . . first, for your own sake, sit as a judge on your own case [esto iudex inte]. First judge yourself [prius iudica de te] so that from the innermostrecesses of your conscience [de penetrali conscientiae] you may advancewith a clear mind against another person. Return into yourself, arrestyourself, debate with yourself, hold a hearing with yourself. I want you toclear yourself in the court of an honest judge where you will require nowitness. You wish to proceed with power in order to make one tell yousomething that you do not know about another. Before you go to court,however, you must do some judging into your inner self [prius intus iudica].Has your conscience told you nothing about yourself? [Nihil tibi de te dixitconscientia tua?] If you don’t deny it, it has certainly done so. I don’t wantto hear what it said. You yourself must judge, you who conducted thehearing. It has told you about yourself: what you have done, what you havereceived, what sins you have committed. I would like to know what sort ofsentence you have pronounced [on yourself]. If you have conducted thishearing well, if you have conducted it honestly, if you have been just inconducting it, if you have climbed onto the judicial tribunal of your mind[si tuae mentis tribunal ascendisti], if you have suspended yourself on thetorture rack of your heart before your own eyes, if you have applied toyourself the tortures of fear [si te ipsum ante te ipsum in eculeum cordissuspendistis, si graves tortores adhibuisti timoris], then you have heard thecase well—if that is how you held it. And beyond any doubt, you havepunished sin with repentance. So, you see: you have held a judicialexamination, you have conducted the hearing, you have passed the sentence,and you have inflicted the punishment.

What is at stake here, as is manifest in Augustine’s diction, is the newsense of conscientia.46 It is precisely the quality of the linkages betweeninner self, self-awareness, judicial procedure, and the awe of the Roman

44. For example, Aug. Serm. 16A.7 (CCL 41:223), and Serm. 49.5 (CCL 41:617):Iam de iudicio priore dominico disputavi, ut iudicares te ipsum . . . iudica te ipsum,noli tibi parcere . . . iudica inde te . . . Cum ergo iudicaveris te ipsum . . . and so on,throughout the sermon.

45. Aug. Serm. 13.7 (CCL 41:181–82).46. It is only necessary to consider the range of meanings in sections (ii) and (iii) of

the entry for “conscientia” in TLL 3:364–68, to sense the general shift in meaningfrom one of a shared knowledge with others about something, often pejorativelyabout a crime, conspiracy, or such, and the later sense, in which the usage of Christianauthors dominates, of a sense of knowledge about the inner self.


trial that we have seen refracted in the interpretations of dreams andvisions. These visions reveal the typical ways in which the ordinary pro-cess of Roman judicial force was embedded in the mind. In a letter inwhich a correspondent of Augustine was at pains to emphasize distinc-tions between the provincial culture of Spain and North Africa, he de-scribes a series of complex machinations involving one Syagrius, thebishop of Huesca in Spain. Syagrius gets caught up in a web of lying anddeceit, and he enters “a period of acute anxiety” during which he tries tofind a way out.47

Suddenly that very same night, terrified by a miraculous vision of our LordJesus Christ, he saw himself in distress standing before the tribunal of thefearful judge, after having received the severe sentence for his part in such agreat crime, and then, in terror, he awoke with a jolt and was struck withsuch consternation of mind that . . .

upon awaking, he decided to make a clear breast of his nefarious activi-ties and involvements—which is to say, to confess them.

The intense personal experience of judicial spectacle imprinted onmemory was subject to imitation and parody in a constant replay thatcontinued to the end of antiquity. But it needed a literary text. From theembedding of the spectacle of punishment in the consciences of persons ofthe time, we must therefore move to the wider implications of socialmemory.48 Here there are some manifest indications of the way in whichthe nature of Roman judicial procedures and punishment were remem-bered: the martyr acts and the narrative accounts of the trials and execu-tions of Christians, such as those of Perpetua, Marianus and Jacobus,Montanus and Lucius, and many others. The very existence and continu-ity of this form of memory, however, is itself a problem. As studies of thespectacular punishments vented on criminals during the high Romanempire have emphasized, a good deal of what can be reconstructed of the

47. Aug. Ep. 11*.15 (CSEL 88:63) dated to about 419: . . . cum subito eademnocte domini nostri Iesu Christi mirabili visione perterritus vidit se ante tribunalmetuendi iudicis constitutum tristem pro tanto conscientiae crimine suscepissesententiam moxque trepidus consurrexit tantaque animi consternatione percussusest. . . .

48. J. Fentress and C. Wickham, Social Memory (Oxford: Blackwells, 1992), 49–51, 106–7, although commenting on oral memory, draw attention to the type ofsequencing and “narrative” that is important for the kind of legal drama that is beingrecollected here, and how it is complicated by the presence of texts in a way that “setsinto relief the issue of who controls commemoration in any given society,” rightlydrawing attention to the determinate role played by local literary élites (in this case,in the Brazilian Northeast).


nature of judicial process in criminal cases in the period, as well as of thewhole story of the instruments of torture that were routinely used in thepursuit of the truth for those courts, comes from these very same martyraccounts. The attempt to stand outside them and to find a comparablebody of independent evidence that is as detailed and coherent is a ratherdifficult undertaking. This specific utility of the martyr narratives de-pends on the fact that they themselves were a new kind of writing cen-tered on the spectacle of trial and punishment. Judicial processes specifi-cally contributed to a literary genre that was invented within the contextof the Roman imperial state.

Dreams of trial and punishment are a barometric measurement of theweight with which the imperial judicial drama imposed itself upon thesouls of persons of the time. But the extensive record of such dreams inChristian writers raises a larger problem. There is every reason to supposethat the majesty of the law elicited similar responses from nonChristianslong before the coming into existence of martyr narratives. The extensive“pagan” dream interpretation literature guarantees as much. Even so, thepre-Christian remembrances that are on record seem neither as vivid noras frequent in their replaying of judicial dreams. This simple observationdraws our attention to the obvious fact that the Christian dreams arereplayed in peculiar kinds of written records and that it is through themthat there subsists an unusually detailed record of Roman judicial proce-dure and its experience by defendants. Some of the distinctive coloring ofthis new literature is surely the result of the written remembrance of awider social range of defendants and their experiences, not just the storiesof those “born to honest rank,” but the narratives of other less fortunatepersons as well.

No matter how much the scenes of judicial terror imposed themselveson individual minds, even to the point of producing dreams about them,the more difficult problem is therefore one of what has been called socialmemory. As long as such individual impressions were only thought andspoken, they remained in a sphere of instant-performance oral culturethat was not likely to leave much in the way of permanent records. But itis this exceptional preservation of memory that the written records of theChristian martyr acts achieve. This achievement was no accident, since itwas the declared intent of those who preserved such records that they bemaintained in order to encourage and edify the faithful in times of perse-cution and to serve as a record of the injustices perpetrated on the Chris-tians. As the men and women executed with Perpetua indicated whenthey entered the arena, by means of facial expressions and hand gesturesdirected at the Roman governor: “Now, us—then, you.” When that Final


Court was held at the end of time, the persecutor would face an indeliblewritten record for which he would be held personally accountable. Giventhis narrative impulse, it is perhaps not surprising that the only othermajor example of the isolation of judicial memories in the realm of oraldiscourse is to be found in the world of fiction. Matters of arrest, courtprocedure, and trial and punishment are central to the plots and storiesthat constituted the narratives of the novel, from Petronius and Apuleiusto the romances of Achilles Tatius and Heliodorus. Scenes of criminalactivity, investigation, arrest, detention, formal hearings, torture, andpublic punishment are core elements of the novels, and hence they repre-sent one of the manifest interfaces between fiction and history. This isprecisely why it has been so tempting to exploit the novels in reconstruct-ing the “real life” scenarios entailed in trial and punishment in the Romanworld.49

Apart from the fictions in the novels, however, much of what is knownabout actual Roman court procedure, including the critical areas of ar-rest, detention, interrogation, torture, sentencing, and punishment—inshort, the spectacle of the law—is known through Christian texts thatcarefully preserved a record of the confrontation between Christians andthose who hauled them before the courts for trial and punishment. So, forexample, the arrest, trial, and execution of the apostle Paul constitute oneof the very rare, attested examples of the appeal procedure (provocatio adCaesarem) available to Roman citizens.50 Almost all of our knowledgeconcerning the processes of interrogation of accused persons rests on thedetails preserved concerning the trials of Christians. Indeed, the wholearea of criminal trials and capital punishment would remain a rather aridset of rules attested in the law codes were it not for the details containedin hundreds of different Christian martyr texts and related genres thatdescribe these processes in vivid detail. The actual experience of trial andpunishment in the Roman world is something for which we depend, invery great part, upon the narrative literary forms in which it was remem-bered by Christian rhetoric.51

49. See F. Norden, Apuleius von Madaura und das römische Privatrecht (Leipzig:Teubner, 1912); R. G. Summers, “Roman Justice and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses,”TAPA 101 (1970): 511–31; and, more generally, F. Millar, “The World of the GoldenAss,” JRS 71 (1981): 63–75.

50. See P. Garnsey, “The Lex Iulia and Appeal under the Empire,” JRS 56 (1966):167–89, at 176, 182–85; for Paul’s own story, see Acts 22.25–26; 23.27; 25.6–22.

51. It is very difficult to find anything comparable from “Roman” pre-Christiantexts to match the detail of experience that can be culled from these sources, or,indeed, to imagine what our knowledge of the experience of the judicial process


But the process of preservation depended on the raw materials anddrama of a judicial spectacle to be remembered. A well-known commenton the process is found in the late-fourth-century Christian poet Prudentius.In the first poem in his Book of the Martyrs’ Crowns (PeristephanonLiber), a hymn composed to honor the soldier-martyrs Emeterius andChelidonius (of whom, notably, nothing else is remembered or known),Prudentius notes that one of the first strategies of Roman authorities,governors who were filled with envy of the heroic achievements of mar-tyrs, was to take from them the privilege of memory by denying them thefinal coup de grâce : a public trial and execution. Failing this kind ofdenial, however, as in the case of Emeterius and Chelidonius, the gover-nor would do the next best thing: he would make a deliberate attempt toefface the written records of the trial that would enable a permanentmemory to be maintained.52 Prudentius bitterly records this of his martyrs:53

O destructive forgetfulness of an ancient silenceby which we are enviously begrudged the facts andby which the fame of those events is gradually extinguished.That blasphemous governor destroyed the recordsso that later ages could not learn in tenacious books, andkept the sequence, timing, and measure of their sufferingfrom spreading in sweet words to the ears of men in later times.

The tactic is attested to in many of the martyr texts, such as that ofVincentius of Saragossa in which it is stated that the Roman authorities

would be like if the Christian sources were missing: P. Allard, “Les procès desmartyrs,” and “Les supplices des martyrs,” chaps. 7–8 in Dix leçons sur le martyre(Paris: V. Lecoffre, 1913), 233–308; Le Blant, Les actes des martyrs, passim; and therelevant studies included in Les persécuteurs et les martyrs. It is also clear from thenumerous micro-studies on judicial procedure, punishment, and torture made by PioFranchi de’ Cavalieri in his editions of the acts of the martyrs. The rich vocabularyrelating to these matters is accessible through P. Künzle, V. Peri, and J. Ruysschaert,Indici agiografici dell’opera di Pio Franchi de’ Cavalieri pubblicata in ‘Studi e Testi’(Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1964).

52. J. Petruccione, “The Persecutor’s Envy and the Rise of the Martyr Cult:Peristephanon Hymns 1 and 4,” VC 45 (1991): 327–46, at 328–30; he finds a closeparallel in Passio S. Vincentii Martyri: V. M. Simonetti, “Una redazione pococonosciuta della passione di S. Vincenzo,” RAC 33 (1956): 219–41, where the “oldenemy” (i.e., the devil) did not wish the story of Vincent’s martyrdom to be writtendown (p. 342, no. 7); cf. Jerome, In Zachariam 2.8, and Eusebius, HE 8.2, whoprovide other examples.

53. Prudentius, Peristephanon 1.73–78 (CCL 126:254): O vetustatis silentisobsoleta oblivio! / Invidentur ista nobis fama et ipsa extinguitur, / chartulas blasfemusolim nam satelles abstulit, / ne tenacibus libellis erudita saecula / ordinem tempusmodumque passionis proditum / dulcibus linguis per aures posterorum spargerent.


ordered that no written records be kept of the proceedings. “We wouldhave no recourse to a trial transcript; the enemy thus wished that nothingwould remain as a record of his defeat.”54 Christian fears that such arepression of records was being instituted purposefully in order to destroymemory were pervasive. But the claim, asserted in a dubious martyrnarrative, that Roman authorities actually did not keep records of thetrial for this reason is probably not credible. The Christian charge thatRoman magistrates were deliberately attempting to repress the court actain order to prevent Christians from getting hold of them, thereby prevent-ing the making of their own memory, however, is repeated again andagain in the more fictitious of the martyr accounts precisely because itwas such a real fear.55

The confrontation itself, the implication of local communities andagents of the Roman state in persecution, produced these relicts of memory.It has been noted that one of the critically enacted scenes that separatesthe concept of Christian martyrdom, and the manner in which it is re-membered and recounted, from similar pre-Roman antecedents is thecentrality of the criminal trial: “In Christian martyr acts, despite all thedifferences in form, the kernel is the authentic documentation of the legalhearing.”56 There can be no doubt that the experience of judicial persecu-tion contributed greatly to the configuration of Christian memory andthat it also had a critical impact on Christian theodicy. For central toChristianity’s eschatology was the conception of a “last” or “final” court,a trope which is singularly absent from the central Jewish inheritance ofthe Christians, from the core texts of “national resistance” in Daniel and1–2 Maccabees to later apocalyptic and pseudepigraphical texts.57 It is inthe Pauline and deutero-Pauline texts of the New Testament that therefirst emerges a clear sense of the idea that just as he or she might face trialand punishment in this world, so each Christian will have to render anaccount of his or her actions before a divine court.58 It is with the martyr

54. Passio s. Vincentii Levitae 1 = T. Ruinart, Acta Sincera, 366; cf. Le Blant, Actesdes martyrs, 66.

55. Le Blant, Actes des martyrs, 71, citing Passio s. Firmi et Rustici (Maffei, Istitut.Diplom., 310); Acta Martyrii s. Alexandri episcopi, 14 (= AASS, 21 Sept.); Acta S.Victoris Mauri (= AASS, 8 Maii).

56. J. W. den Boeft in Die Entstehung der jüdischen Martyrologie, ed. J. W. vanHenten (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 221, cited by G. W. Bowersock, Martyrdom and Rome(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 27.

57. J. Rivière, “Jugement,” in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique 8 (1925):1721–828, at 1744–50, reviews the earlier literature.

58. The texts are cited in Rivière, “Jugement,” 1751–63.


acts from the mid-second century, and in the defenses, explications, anddebates connected with these texts by early church Fathers like Tertullian,that the interplay between the actual court days faced by Christian defen-dants and the development of the concept of a divine tribunal becomesmore and more explicit. The relationship between the Christian and hisor her God came to be configured as a judicial one. Fairness and justice,vengeance and retribution became the principal qualities of God theJudge. And the final judgment was seen as a court in which Christ was toact as our intercessor or defense attorney. Of course, the same role couldalso be filled, perhaps with even greater sympathy, by those mortals whohad actually suffered in the judicial process.59 Finally, it was also a theodicyin which the present persecutors were eventually to be held accountableby the very same legal means that they themselves had used to arrest,interrogate, torture, and execute Christians.

Tertullian is but the first of a long and continuous line of Latin Chris-tian ideologues who, when commenting on the nature of “pagan” spec-tacles, emphasize that the final judgment, and the resurrection of the bodyto face trial before God’s tribunal, will be, as he puts it, “our spectacle.”60

“But what a spectacle is now at hand—the coming of the Lord . . . yes,and there are still other spectacles to come—that final and eternal day ofcourt . . . how vast will be the spectacle of that day,” Tertullian announcesexcitedly. He then climaxes in one of his more lurid passages by imagininghow he will be able to gaze joyfully on the cosmic punishments vented onphilosophers and their students, and on other such sinners, whose bodieswill literally liquefy in burning rivers of fire. Images like these continuedto be deployed down to the end of the fourth and the early fifth centuries.Ambrose, for example, reports the typical words of the Roman judge to aguilty defendant as the same words God the Judge will use at his finaltribunal: “I am not judging you, rather it is your own actions that con-demn you. . . . I myself am not acting against you personally; rather, I amproceeding against you according to the rules of the court.”61 Ambrose,

59. Tert. Adv. Marc. 1.26–29 (CCL 1:469–74).60. Tert. de Spectac. 30.1–3 (CCL 1:252): Quale autem spectaculum in proximo est

adventus Domini. . . . At enim supsersunt alia spectacula, ille ultimus et perpetuusiudicii dies. . . . Quae tunc spectaculi latitudo! Cf. de Resurr. Mort. 14 (CCL 2:936–37).

61. Ambrose, Ep. 20 (ex-77).11–12 (CSEL 82.1:151–52), the first paragraph ofwhich reads: Constitue aliquem reum coargutum et convictum criminis, non astruentemdefensionis genera, sed deprecantem ac volventem se ad genua iudicis. Respondet eiiudex: “Non possum a me facere quisquam. Iustitia in iudicando, non potentia est iniudicando. Ego non iudico, sed facta tua de te iudicant, ipsa te accusant, et ipsacondemnant. Leges te adiudicant, quas iudex non converto, sed custodio. Nihil ex me


who had himself been a Roman governor (iudex), was perhaps familiarwith this rhetoric from personal experience. One suspects that he musthave uttered much the same words to some poor defendant facing histribunal. They were part of an official paean to the impartiality of the law,to the judge and his decisions as founded on unbiased legal norms.

The throne of the divine judge and the apostles who serve as hisassessores are therefore metaphors drawn directly from Roman trial pro-cedure.62 Unlike much later mediaeval and post-mediaeval visions of agrand collective judgment of all Christians at the end of time, the judg-ment that the Roman Christian was to face was a solitary one of theindividual hailed before an impartial court on a specific set of charges.63

The image is also attested to by the Christian iconography of the period,one of the better guides to the visual realities of Roman courts on whichwe are otherwise not particularly well informed. Scenes of court dramas,of trial and judgment, beginning with the archetypical trial and executionof Jesus son of Joseph, that are found on the wall paintings in the cata-combs of Rome, or carved in the elaborate relief sculptures on Christiansarcophagi, emphasize the centrality of judicial proceedings before a Romanmagistrate.64 Almost invariably, they picture the individual defendantfacing a magistrate seated on his curule chair, mounted on a tribunal, sur-rounded by his assessores.65

As was the case with the fictions in the novels of the time, there is alsoa manifest interplay between these Christian visual memorials of trialand punishment and the popular Roman iconographic depictions of pun-ishment in the arenas and amphitheatres of the empire. Such punishmentswere seen not just as a spectacle, but a spectacle to be remembered andcelebrated, not only in the elaborate and brilliant mosaics that decorated

ego profero, sed ex te forma iudicii in te procedit. Secundum quod audio, iudico, nonsecundum quod volo; et ideo iudicium meum verum est, quia non voluntati indulgeo,sed aequitati.”

62. Ambrose, Exposit. In Luc. 10.49 (PL 15:1908–9).63. Rivière, “Jugement,” 1763–64, 1776–77, 1784–86, 1801, 1812–26; see C. W.

Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York:Columbia University Press, 1995), 188–89.

64. H. Leclercq, “Le jugement de l’âme,” § 8 in “L’âme,” DACL 1.1 (1907): 1502–13.

65. J. Wilpert, “Le rappresentazioni del giudizio,” chap. 19 in Le pitture dellecatacombe Romane: Testo (Rome: Pontificio Istituto di archeologia cristiana, 1903),360–83, and J. Wilpert, “Scene della passione di Nostro Signore,” chap. 3 in Isarcofagi Cristiani antichi, volume secondo, testo (Rome: Pontificio Istituto diarcheologia cristiana, 1932), 314–20.


the houses of the wealthy, but also in a wide range of minor objets d’art,such as trinkets, amulets, lamps, and medallions decorated with scenes oftorture and execution. These latter items were, it has been argued, thefare of popular art: they were, quite literally, souvenirs of the event.66 Thepictorial representations themselves then played back into literary de-scriptions of them in the traditional mode of ekphrasis in which thewriter struggled to evoke the visual power of the image in readers’ mindsby the superior power of his verbal description. A typical example isfound in a sermon by Asterius of Amasea in which he is describing afresco that he had seen at Chalcedon that depicted the trial of the martyrEuphemia.67

The judge is seated on a high tribunal. He looks sharply at the young girlwith a harsh eye. Art is thus able, whenever it so wishes, to express angerwith dead materials. Around him stand the governor’s personal guards[doryphoroi] and numerous other soldiers. And there are the notaries of thecourt [hypomnêmatôn hypographeis] holding their tablets, their pens poisedready to write. One of these men, having raised his hand from his waxenwriting tablet, is looking intently at the female defendant, turning his facefully towards her as if to command her to speak more distinctly, so that hemight avoid all error in the transcription of her replies to the judge’squestions. The young girl stands clothed in a shining chiton and himation,showing, as it seemed to the painter, that she is a philosopher with anurbane countenance—but, it seems to me, rather as a woman radiating asoul filled with virtue. Two soldiers are leading her to the governor, onedragging her from the front, and the other pushing her from behind. Theyoung girl’s appearance is marked by modesty and a sense of resolve. She iscasting her glance groundwards, blushing, in order to avoid the gaze of the

66. Le Blant, “De quelques monuments antiques relatifs à la suite des affairecriminelles,” chap. 24 in Persécuteurs et les martyrs, 271–96; Potter, “Martyrdom asSpectacle,” 68–69, citing G. Lafaye, “Criminals livrés aux bêtes,” Mémoires de laSociété nationale des antiquaires de France (1893): 97–116, at 111, who suggestedthat the small decorated terracotta pots had been manufactured as souvenirs for thegames.

67. Asterius Amaseansus, Hom. 11.3; text: C. Datema, Asterius of Amasea,Homilies I–XIV, text, introduction, and notes (Leiden: Brill, 1970): “xi. TheEcphrasis of Euphemia’s Martyrdom,” 149–55, at 154; cf. Le Blant, Actes desmartyres, 65, and Pérsecuteurs des martyrs, 2. The dates of Asterius are in dispute;Datema, ibid., xvii–xxiii, gives the following estimates: Asterius’ time at Chalcedon(when he claims to have seen the picture), 355–80 c.e.; bishop of Amasea, c. 380–390. Latin versions of his ekphrasis are reported as part of the proceedings of theSecond Council of Nicea (787 c.e.): see PL 129:279–80 and 425–29 [= Mansi, 13,16–18 (Acta concilii Nicaeni, sessio iv) and Mansi, 13, 308–09 (Acta concilii Nicaeni,sessio vi)], where they were raised as part of the iconoclastic controversies.


males. She stands quite unmoved and not showing any signs of sufferingfrom the terrible contest [agon deilon].

As I myself have praised other painters, I was reminded of the story [todrama] of that woman of Colchis, who wished to murder her own childrenwith the sword, her visage divided between a look of pity and another ofrage, with one of her eyes showing anger while the other showed motherlycompassion and concern. So I am now transforming that wonder [thauma]of artistic representation to this written account. Indeed, I greatly admirethat artist, since he modulated the manner of emotions, at once mixingmodesty and manliness [aidô te homou kai andreia], emotions that arehostile to each other by nature. Indeed, when our picture is viewed moreclosely, one can see that the nude public executioners [dêmioi], dressed onlyin brief tunics, are beginning their work. One of them, having grabbed theyoung girl by her hair and forcing her head backwards, is exposing her faceto the other man for punishment. The other executioner, standing in frontof her, strikes her in the teeth. The hammer [sphyra] and the other sinisterinstruments of torture are clearly visible. I began crying at this point, andthe suffering cut off my account. The painter has depicted the streams ofblood so brilliantly that you would say that they were actually dripping,and you go away, transfixed with grief.

This remains by far the dominant scenario, fixed by actual Roman judi-cial drama to the end of antiquity. The possibility of a general massjudgment at the end of time, an idea that gradually developed frommarginal eschatological remarks in the New Testament and the earlychurch Fathers into a more elaborate conception, is not actually envis-aged iconographically in the Christian West until the eleventh century.68

Funerary epigraphy confirms the impression that this model of judicialprocedure had on the minds of Christians, high and low. The wealthy andpowerful Cinegius is spoken of as a man who will be safe with the holyFelix as his patronus when he is “brought before the court on the daywhen, at the terrible blast of the trumpet, human souls return again totheir containers.”69 Others were like the sixth-century noblewoman

68. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 197, citing G. Voss, Das jüngste Gericht inder bildenden Kunst des frühen Mittelalters: Eine kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchungen(Leipzig: Teubner, 1884), and B. Brenk, Tradition und Neuerung in der christlichenKunst des ersten Jahrtausends: Studien zur Geschichte des Weltgerichtsbildes (Vienna:H. Böhlaus, 1966).

69. ILCV 3482 = CLE 684 = CIL 10.1370 (Cimitile near Nola): [patronus pl]acitolaetatur in hospite Felix, / [sic et tu]tus erit iuvenis sub iudice Christo, / [cum tubaterri]bilis sonitu concusserit orbem / [humanaque ani]mae rursum in sua vasaredibunt; / [Felici merito] hic sociatur ante tri[bunal], / [interea] in gremio Abraham[cum pace quiescit]; cf. the comments by G. B. de Rossi in BAC, 2nd ser., 5 (1874):31.


Honorata, who warned persons not to touch her body nor to violate hertomb unless they wished to defend themselves when she would prosecutethem before the eternal tribunal.70 Or a similar caution from Rome wherethe owner of the tomb threatens violators that they will “have to go forinterrogation before the tribunal of Our Lord.”71 On tombstone inscrip-tions this final day of judgment is often referred to in reverential andfearful terms as “that day of court” (illa dies iudicii), the “coming day ofcourt” (dies futuri iudicii), or “on the fearful day of court” (per tremendamdiem iudicii).72 Just as litigants in secular and earthly courts, the deceasedpray to have powerful patroni who will intercede on their behalf andplead the case in their defense, so the woman Dalmata hopes that in thatfuture court the martyrs (sancti) will act as her intercessores.73 Thus, asdefendants, they hope to avoid the penalties that the judge will impose.74

Such pictures of God or Christ draw on earlier biblical allusions like thosein Deuteronomy or the Psalms that refer to God as “great and powerful”or “long-suffering.” But the novel aspect that they add is that Christ isalso to be a iudex, a judge. Such revised formulations therefore refer to an“all powerful Christ, venerable and terrible judge” (omnipotens Christus,iudex venerabilis atque terribilis); or to “God, a just, hard, and long-suffering judge” (deus, iudex iustus, fortis et longanimis).75

These modes of remembrance, however, though more persistent thanthe individual humans who produced them, were themselves transitory.The iconographic depictions of trial and punishment in the frescoes andreliefs of the catacombs did not outlast the fifth and sixth centuries, andmuch the same is true of the relief sculptures on the Christian sarcophagi.It was therefore the written texts of the martyr acts that remembered inreal and fictive detail the nature of the Roman judicial spectacle. In themid-thirteenth century (about 1260), when Jacob of Voragine penned

70. ILCV 3864 = CIL 5.7793 (Albigauni Ligurum): . . . ne me tangas nec sepulcrummeum / violis name ante t[ri]bunal aeterni iudicis mecum causam dicis (she died at 40years of age and was buried on 1 Feb. 568); cf. ILCV 3849 = CIL 11.325; ILCV3853 = CIL 11.329 (Ravenna); and ILCV 3859 (Ariminum) for similar sentiments.

71. ILCV 3865 (Rome): abea inde inquisitionem ante tribunal d[omi]ni n[ost]ri.72. See ILCV 3862–63, 3866, 3869A, and 3879B for examples.73. ILCV 3845 = CIL 12.1694 (In Agro Vocontiorum): et diem futuri iudicii

intercedentibus sanctis lectus spectit.74. ILCV 3879 (Aquileia): in dei iudicii inmones a penes abadas [= immunis a

poenis evadas].75. ILCV 61 = CLE 302 = CIL 13.3256 (Basilica S. Agricola Remensi), lines 11–

12; compare Vulg., Deut. 10.17 (deus magnus et potens et terriblis); Ps 102.3 hasdominus longanimi, where the Roman Psalter, 7.12, has the addition of the wordiudex.


what was surely the most popular and widely-read book in westernEurope after the Bible itself, his Golden Readings (Legenda Aurea), it wasfilled with the accounts of martyrs that recalled in loving detail the proce-dures and practices of Roman trial and punishment.76 Preserved through-out Europe in hundreds of manuscripts and transmitted by dozens oftranslations into local vulgar languages, it achieved a massive “successwhich is still not fully comprehended.”77 It taught a Roman code of trialand punishment that had been maintained in European memory for athousand years by means of these wonderful fictions.78

For its creative origins, however, this memory, whether fictitious ortrue, depended on the existence of a specific type of confrontation be-tween the state and the accused that produced the requisite creativeimpulses, whether in the form of the romantic novel, the sacred biogra-phies we call gospels, or the stories of the martyrs. The martyr tales, ofwhich the gospels are both forerunners and parallels, constitute, “a whollynew literature, that was as exciting to read as it was edifying.”79 It was agenre of literature created by dramatic encounters with the instruments ofthe civil power of the Roman state that were implanted everywhere in theempire. The frequent intrusion of trial scenarios into the fictional roman-tic novels of the time, and here too even in dream sequences, show thattrials provided ready-made narrative constructions, preadapted for ser-vice in creative writing. Recollecting dreams in narrative was therefore akind of ekphrasis of the mind. Seen as a narration, the trial required thecompleted actions of all the parties to create a possible basis for memory.Otherwise, solitary defendants, no matter how innocent or just, wouldhave no stage on which their drama could receive a completed meaning.That is why, in some cases at least, Roman governors purposefully soughtto avoid using public and theatrical venues of trial and punishment.80

And, as Prudentius realized, shorn of the possibility of the public spectacle

76. Jacobus a Voragine, Legenda aurea vulgo historia lombardica dicta, ed. Th.Graesse (Leipzig: Arnoldiana, 1850 (1890) [reprint: Osnabrück: Zeller, 1965]);Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints, 2 vols., tr. W. G.Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

77. A. Vernet, “Survivances et innovations dans la littérature latine de l’Occidentmédiéval,” Comptes rendus de l’Academie des inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (1993):889–98, at 896.

78. G. Huot-Girard, “La justice immanente dans la Légende Dorée,” Cahiersd’études médiévales 1 (1974): 135–47.

79. G. W. Bowersock, “The Written Record,” chap. 2 in Martyrdom and Rome,23–39, at 29.

80. Potter, “Martyrdom as Spectacle,” 59–61, provides some examples.


of trial and punishment, especially the latter, there would be no memory,or at least a severely impaired one.

The most heightened cases of memory therefore required more thanjust the dramatic impulses of a trial. They also needed the judicial punish-ment. Take one example. In the early 30s c.e., in the Roman province ofJudaea, one Jesus son of Joseph (Yeshua ben Yusef) was causing problemsin the city of Jerusalem. He was an itinerant holy-man and wonderworkerwho walked the city’s streets, preaching apocalyptic messages. He pre-dicted the destruction of the Temple. Not unnaturally the ruling elite ofJewish society saw in him a dangerous troublemaker, a threat to them-selves and to their social order. They had him arrested. They had himinterrogated and humiliated. They took him before the Roman governorand insisted that he be put on trial and executed on the grounds ofseditious activities. The trial of Jesus son of Joseph before Pontius Pilatus,the Roman governor of Judaea, and his subsequent execution by crucifix-ion offered precisely the possibility of a complete narration. We all re-member him.81

But there was another Jesus.82 About a generation later, one Jesus sonof Ananias (Yeshua ben Anania), an “idiot rustic” (idiotês agroikos), wascausing problems in Jerusalem. He was a sort of itinerant holy-man andwonderworker who walked the streets of the city, uttering apocalypticwords. He even stood in the midst of the Temple and predicted its end.Not unnaturally, the members of the ruling elite (episêmoi tines) of Jewishsociety saw in him a troublemaker, a danger to themselves and to theirsocial order. They had him arrested. They humiliated and interrogatedhim. They took him before the Roman governor and insisted that he beput on trial and executed on the grounds of seditious activities. Lucceius

81. It is perhaps not without significance that judicial dreams intervene even here,even if indirectly. The wife of the Roman governor, Pontius Pilatus, was involved:“While Pilate was seated on his tribunal, his wife sent word to him: ‘Have nothing todo with that good man, for I have suffered much over him today in a dream.’” (Matt27.19).

82. Josephus, BJ 6.300–309; The incident is dated to the time of the Festival of theTabernacles (Sukkoth) “four years before the war” so in the fall of 62 c.e. Albinuswas procurator for the years 62–64. For those who are interested, Josephus reportsthat this Jesus continued to recite aloud his message of doom in the city of Jerusalem,oblivious to those who beat, harassed, and cursed him. One day, after the Romansiege of the city began, he was struck with an artillery stone from a Roman ballistaand died with the words “Woe to the city, woe to the people, woe to the Temple, and. . . woe to me,” on his lips.


Albinus, the Roman governor of Judaea, interrogated this Jesus at length.83

He considered the matter. He issued his decision. He was not going to putthis Jesus on trial. After all, it was plain for everyone to see that the manwas simply mentally deranged (katagnous manian). Albinus ordered thisJesus unceremoniously to be thrown back onto the streets of Jerusalem.No public trial, no spectacle. No execution, no story. No one but academ-ics like me remember Jesus son of Ananias.

Brent D. Shaw is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies,University of Pennsylvania

83. For the identification of the governor as “probable,” see E. Schürer, TheHistory of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. F. Millar and G. Vermes(Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1973), 1:468 n. 50.

Judicial Nightmares and Christian Memory

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