The Palladium and the Pentateuch: Towards a Sacred Topography of the Later Roman Empire

H ISTORIANS OF RELIGION IN LATE ANTIQUITY tend to adopt one of two perspectives. Either we seek to understand Christianization, a process ultimately reducible to acts of individual choice whose aggregate effects can be described in purely demographic terms, or we investigate the demise of paganism, a set of discrete rituals and practices, some of which survived in Christian Europe, robbed of their religious significance through cult acts and conciliar decrees. Understood in these terms, the Christianization of the Roman empire passed a milestone in the early fifth century, the last age attesting a senator who publicly professed paganism. Similarly, paganism was either dying from the moment of its conception, as its constituent practices fell into abeyance, or it survives to this day.1 The self-understandings of these religions, developed in fractious dialogue with each other, thus yield incompatible narratives and inconsistent periodizations. Assuming rather than interrogating the ontological integrity of their taxonomies, historiography grounded in these perspectives can be erudite but it cannot explain anything.2 If we are now to forge histories of religious change in late antiquity that do more than count Christian conversions or pagan survivals, we must avoid conceptual categories derived from the failed apologetics and willfil misconstruals of pagan-Christian dialogue. We must also shun easy reliance on the distorted and misleading claims to novelty of Christian hagiography, a modern counterpart to the faith that late-antique ecclesiastical historians placed in Providence. We should have asked long ago whether the transfer of charisma from one individual to another did in fact constitute a change in the locus of the sacred. Insofar as that transfer did not require contemporaries to reconceptualize the holiness of individuals or the nature of divine immanence, the answer is no. Change in the religious mentality of late-antique Europe should instead be charted first at an epistemological level, one prior, as it were, to religious or doctrinal commitment. This essay adumbrates such an approach by juxtaposing and conjoining two famous problems: the surge in antiquarianism in the west in the early fifth century and the contest for supremacy between Rome and Constantinople. Scholars have tended to assume that Christians and pagans thought about the sacralization of landscape in very different ways: insofar as paganism consisted of rites bereft of theological significance, pagans (it is assumed) sacralized space through ritual

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