The household and the bishop: Establishing episcopal authority in Late Antique Rome

During the fourth through seventh centuries CE, the city of Rome was a highly contentious and agonistic environment. The bishop, though an emerging civic and spiritual leader, frequently competed with rivals for political, social and material resources. In this battle for power, the household, I contend, was a central venue of support for and resistance to the pope's attempt to shore up his position within the city. Historians have traditionally construed the development of late ancient and early medieval papal power as an ecclesiastical and administrative phenomenon. This dissertation charts a different course by examining the role of biographical writing and the social imagination in the establishment of the pope's authority both within the Roman aristocratic household and in the city at large.;I argue that Roman episcopal biographies---a varied corpus of vitae, passiones, epitaphs and romances produced and/or consumed within Rome during the fourth to seventh century---mediated a language of legitimacy and an ethos of trust that made the bishop's presence within the household appear natural, historical and necessary for salvation. Purporting to record the activities of Rome's mythic founding fathers, such as Peter, Silvester and the great martyr-bishops of the pre-Constantinian era, Roman episcopal biographies dramatize encounters between bishops and householders that highlight subtle tactics of insinuation. These tactics, which range from the bishop's moderated observance of the social rules of hospitalitas to his timely performance of key liturgical rites, formulate a larger discourse of episcopal authority and identity that carved out a role for the bishop within social structures of the house as its moral and ethical guardian.;This dissertation contains four chapters, the first of which describes the textual history of each biography or cluster of biographies examined: The so-called Acts of Peter, the Actus Silvestri , metrical epitaphs and other epigraphic sources, the so-called Symmachan Documents, the Liber Pontificalis and individual martyr narratives from among the Roman Gesta martyrum. The remaining three chapters offer rhetorical analyses of the biographies, with particular emphasis placed on their narrative interest in the space of the household and the city, and the social relationship between the bishop and the householder.