Monumental Lives

From the Roman Forum to Mount Rushmore, material monuments not only commemorate a community’s heroes but concurrently become contested displays of power, memory, and identity. Christian leaders in Late Antiquity similarly worked to commemorate their saints, sometimes at the sites of their bodily remains but also through written narratives. Eusebius in the early fourth century and Theodoret in the early fifth argued, for example, that written stories and bodily imitation were the most appropriate ways to memorialize Christian saints. In the decades after the controversial imperial Council of Chalcedon (451 CE), though, anti-Chalcedonian miaphysite leaders John Rufus (fl. 500–518 CE) and John of Ephesus (507–588/89 CE) blurred the distinction between texts and monuments by representing their texts themselves as public memorials. This essay argues that in contrast to other late antique narrative collections of saints’ stories, these miaphysite authors who experienced the imminent threat of imperial exile were unusual in coopting the vocabulary of material iconography by explicitly commemorating their saints in language that called to mind the imposing stone, bronze, and wood memorials of other Roman heroes. In the face of sporadic persecution, John Rufus and John of Ephesus creatively coopted the iconographic vocabulary associated with Roman monuments to memorialize their miaphysite heroes, inscribing portable textual narratives as “public monuments” and “engraved memorials” for their struggling and exiled communities.