Klassisches Altertum, Spätantike und frühes Christentum
Klassisches Altertum, Spätantike und frühes Christentum. Adolf Lippold zum 65. Geburtstag gewidmet. Herausgegeben von Karlheinz Dietz, Dieter Hennig und Hans Kaletsch. Würzburg 1993. 635 S. ISBN 3-927894-14-1.
ARCTOS 29 /1995
This anniversary publication in honour of Adolf Lippold consists of thirty articles written by his friends, colleagues and disciples. There is a useful bibliography od Lippold’s works at the beginning of the book. The articles are arranged in chronological order. The articles treating classical antiquity vary from the ancient theories about the geography and ethnography of Africa and ancient utopias to the fall of the hellenistic world and the relationship between war and politics in republican Rome. I found G. Pfister’s article about Lusus Troiae especially interesting. The history of the Roman republic and empire is well represented.
The main emphasis, however, is on late antiquity and early Christianity. A. Demandt discusses the relationship between economy and politics in late antiquity and surveys various explanations for the fall of the Roman empire. K.M. Girardet considers the role of Constantine the Great in the council of Nicaea in 325 and shows how Constantine followed the preceding tradition fulfilling his munus principis and taking care of the political and religious unity of the oikoumene.
K. Rosen analyses the anonymous poem An quendam senatorem ex Christiana religione ad idolorum servitutem conversum (CSEL 3,3, 1871, 302-305) He offers the text edited with a German translation and compares various similar anonymous polemical poems. H. Kaletsch discusses the chronology used by Orosius in his historical work and places him in the Hellenistic and Roman tradition of universal histories.
The focus of the end of the book is early Christianity in its various forms. I mention only a few of the articles. R. Klein discusses the social problem of slaves as priests in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. G. Waldherr’s article deals with a Christian inscription in Rhetia and surveys the different possible meanings of the formula martiribus sociata.
M. Clauss discusses the relationship between the church and the state in the age of Justinian. K. Christ’s article about the Constitutum Constantini is concerned with the history and ideology of falsifications. His purpose is to study the image of Constantine the Great which the Constitutum Constatini is based on. He shows that even a falsification can reveal the aims of contemporary politics, so that we can speak of ”die Wahrheit der Fälscher”.
Maijastina Kahlos