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In the city of Antioch-on-the-Orontes in 387 c.e. statues of the emperor Theodosius I and his family were destroyed by a crowd angered by a recent tax increase, resulting in a series of imperial punishments enacted upon the city. In the months after the event, two prominent residents, the pagan author Libanius and the Christian priest John Chrysostom, wrote (in the case of Libanius) and preached (in the case of Chrysostom) in response to the destruction of the statues and the ensuing punishments. This article focuses on the varied understandings of the power and presence of imperial portraits written into Libanius's and Chrysostom's texts. In contrast with Libanius's traditional understanding of the statue as a surrogate for the venerable subject it represented, Chrysostom instead argues that the living human is superior to the lifeless statue, as we are created "in the image of God" by the supreme artist himself. By marshaling Neoplatonic ideas and pagan critiques of statuary, as well as Christian doctrine, Chrysostom seeks to convince his congregants and later readers still attached to the imperial statue cult that the faithful, rather than graven images, are what matter. Writing in a period in which Christianity was ascendant, and in which some cult statues of the pagan gods were targeted for destruction, Chrysostom's homilies provide a unique window into late fourth-century conceptions of portrait statues, which though different from statues of divine subjects were potentially problematic sites of animation and veneration. Read closely against each other, Libanius's and Chrysostom's texts supplement our understanding of the factors behind the subsequent decline in the production and display of portrait statues, as well as changing ideas about three-dimensional representation in a Christian empire. [End Page 543] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have begun to examine the potent visual dimensions of the inscribed word in antiquity, texts written onto smaller objects have yet to receive the same amount of attention. This article examines a poem composed by the fifth-century Christian author Sidonius Apollinaris, which its author states is to be written onto a silver bowl in the shape of a shell. While the bowl does not survive, and may never have existed, the poem and its frame within a letter (written by Sidonius to his friend Evodius) force readers to reconsider the flexibility of the ancient relationship between word, image, and object. The epigram creates a verbal–visual icon of its intended recipient, the Visigothic Queen Ragnahild, as a rival to the goddess Venus, but also challenges the queen and other readers. Comparing himself to a silversmith, Sidonius straddles word and image, using the rhetorical techniques of ekphrasis to invite readers to ruminate on the roles of the visual and the verbal—the appearance of the bowl, and the queen’s own appearance, all communicated via text—and on the physical, material, and intermedial modes in which different types of texts were meant to be read. By reading the text of the poem in its multiple contexts—in Sidonius’s letter, on the silver bowl, and in the minds of readers—this article teases out the implications of the visual dimensions of verbal texts in the period, as well as the striking fluidity with which such texts were endowed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]