Interest in the transformation of the city of Rome in late antiquity is an academic boom industry that shows no sign, as yet, of abating. The physical fabric and material culture of the late antique city have received a wealth of attention, long overdue, in the last twenty years.Footnote ¹ Meanwhile, the testimony of the literary sources, for a long time treated in an overly literal fashion by patristic scholars, has also proved to be ripe for re-evaluation.Footnote ² A cultural history of the late antique city remains, as yet, to be written, an account that is alert to both the complex strategies of literary texts and the challenges presented by the material culture. In the meantime, this article focuses on one of the most lively and controversial figures of the period, Saint Jerome, an eloquent if highly partial witness to the transformations undergone by the city of Rome at the turn of the fifth century, a key period when both the image of the city and its pre-eminence were under threat, not just from the pretensions of the new Rome, Constantinople, but also from other competing ideological claims.Footnote ³ This study of a single author aims to unpick Jerome's strategies and to demonstrate what patristic sources can, and cannot, tell us about the late antique city of Rome, a city of ideas and symbols, a city of flesh and blood, as well as a city of brick and marble.Footnote ⁴

To say that Jerome's relationship with the city of Rome was complex would be something of an understatement. The vicissitudes of his personal experiences there, as well as his conflicted engagement with classical and secular culture more broadly speaking, ensure an intriguingly coloured account. Previous scholarship has shown clearly that Jerome's picture of Roman society is not to be trusted as an ‘objective’ historical accountFootnote ⁵ — for instance by showing how indebted his picture is to Roman satire,Footnote ⁶ or demonstrating how far he applied double standards when judging his friends as opposed to his enemies.Footnote ⁷ Other studies, meanwhile, have tried to get to grips with Jerome's views on the ‘idea of Rome’,Footnote ⁸ a trickily nebulous subject, as slippage between Rome as city and Rome as imperium is inevitable, as we shall see. These caveats not withstanding, much can be gained, none the less, from examining Jerome's discussion and description of the city. This article will approach Rome as a symbolic city, as, we shall see, did Jerome himself. I shall argue that although Jerome tried to mobilize the symbols of his immaterial city, to make it truly Christian, Rome remains diffuse and multi-textured, a truly intertextual city that sometimes answers to the name of Troy, Babylon or Jerusalem, but can never be pinned down successfully.

Rome has a special claim to be considered as a symbolic city in that she always claimed to be more than just a city. Where ‘Roma’ is involved there is always a certain ambivalence: Rome is not just an urbs, even the urbs (as she was for so many of her inhabitants): there is always slippage between the city and the idea, urbs and imperium, urbs and orbis. The city of Rome was both symbol and society, material and immaterial, its topography both symbolically redolent and endlessly polyvalent. The polyvalency of Rome is such that any analysis of (late antique) descriptions of the city needs to focus not on trying to iron out the inconsistencies in its representations, but rather in accepting the discontinuities of city life.Footnote ⁹ Different city-dwellers inhabit different cities, a point for instance made by Boswell in his Life of Johnson (1791):

Boswell's claim for the ‘intellectual man’ — that he alone can comprehend the entire city — seems rather overoptimistic, however: such people can be especially susceptible to tunnel vision, especially intellectuals as single-minded as Saint Jerome. Jonathan Raban suggested that in writing about cities we are inevitably drawn to use simplifying strategies and to take short-cuts: resorting to the use of caricature, to the use of metonymy and synecdoche, and, ultimately, to metaphor.Footnote ¹¹ The ‘short-cuts’, these methods of interpretation and description, as used in the construction of a description of the city that is essentially ideological, will form much of the focus of the following discussion.

Jerome's account of the city of Rome is not least important in biographical terms, constituting as it does the locus for key formative experiences and crucial social and intellectual connections.Footnote ¹² Jerome's experience of and relationship with Rome are clearly crucial also in terms of understanding his complex relationship to Roman classical culture. Born in 347, Jerome first came to Rome as a schoolboy from the obscure city of Stridon in Dalmatia, and stayed there for his secondary and higher education, studying first with the renowned grammarian Aelius Donatus, and then at a school of rhetoric, in the late 350s and early 360s.Footnote ¹³ He was baptized in Rome, a fact of which he was very proud.Footnote ¹⁴ He left the city as a young adult, equipped for a career in the imperial service, which took him first to a very different sort of imperial capital: Trier. Jerome's life then took on a new turn, due to his ‘conversion’ to the ascetic life.Footnote ¹⁵ The chronology of the next few years is far from clear, but it is certain that Jerome's experimentation with the ascetic life took him, together with some friends, first to northern Italy, in or near Aquileia, before heading East in the early 370s. Although Jerusalem was the longed for destination, Jerome in fact stopped in Antioch, where he had the support of his rich friend and patron Evagrius. From Antioch, Jerome headed to the desert area of Chalcis, to study, write and practice ‘desert asceticism’.Footnote ¹⁶ His interest in ecclesiastical politics and debate took him to Constantinople, around 380; he stayed there until the summer of 382,Footnote ¹⁷ when he returned to Rome, after an interval of maybe nearly twenty years.

The intervening years had obviously brought about great changes in and for the provincial novus homo, Jerome. He had worked hard to establish himself as an ascetic authority, biblical scholar and ecclesiastical adviser. He came to the city this time on ecclesiastical business from the East (to attend a synod, aimed at ending the Schism of Antioch), as part of the retinue of Paulinus of Antioch and Epiphanius of Salamis, probably serving as their adviser and interpreter. The intervening years had also brought change to the city of Rome. It is inarguable that the position of Christianity in aristocratic society was considerably more entrenched than it had been in the 350s/360s, though the extent of the ‘Christianization’ of the city still remained at issue.Footnote ¹⁸

Beginning his second sojourn in Rome, Jerome had certain credentials and cachet, but had to work hard to cement his reputation in the urbs: he was, of course, far from being the only would-be biblical expert (and spiritual adviser) in the city.Footnote ¹⁹ Of course he had a good deal of success at this point: as is well known, he swiftly made himself indispensable to the bishop of Rome, Damasus, who commissioned him to make a new translation of the Bible. Jerome would later claim that ‘Damasi os meus sermo est’ (Epistulae 45.3), which generally has been interpreted to mean that the pope made Jerome his spokesperson.Footnote ²⁰ It was during this period that Jerome became the friend and cliens of a coterie of aristocratic women with shared ascetic and scholarly tendencies, led by the redoubtable matrona, Paula.Footnote ²¹ None the less, his success at making friends in Rome was surpassed only by his talent for making enemies. His outspoken promotion of strict asceticism, especially when laid out in controversial writings (such as his infamous Epistula 22 on virginity to the young noble heiress Eustochium) caused scandal throughout the city and beyond.Footnote ²² The death of the young widow Blesilla (Paula's daughter), widely believed to be due to excessive ascetic practices counselled by Jerome, in the autumn of 384 caused even more disquiet and disapprobation.Footnote ²³ When Damasus died in December of that year Jerome lost his most important protector. In the summer of 385 matters came to a head. Charges were brought against him, seemingly relating to his friendship with his female patronesses (especially Paula), charges that he vociferously denied.Footnote ²⁴ Jerome was brought before an episcopal court, and found guilty (though he remains as circumspect regarding the sentence, which presumably required him to leave the city, as about the charges).Footnote ²⁵ At the end of that summer Jerome set sail from Ostia, never to return.

Rome, for Jerome, was the site of success, failure and, ultimately, humiliation. In his writings on the city, whether extended or fleeting, it is as if we find him in the throes of a love affair gone wrong (a love affair not with any one person, but with a city, an idea, a dream); the atmosphere is thick with mutual recriminations and bitter asides.Footnote ²⁶ Jerome spent the rest of his life in the Holy Land, until his death in 419/20, but kept in contact with his friends in Rome, as both his correspondence and the dedications of his other writings attest. The reading public in Rome continued to constitute the most significant audience for his writings.Footnote ²⁷ The city itself, its society and its symbolism, as we shall see, seem never to have been far from his mind. Rome was not a place about which Jerome could be neutral. It is clear that throughout his life Jerome felt something of a bond to Rome and, moreover, that he was proud of having spent time at Rome, and, especially, of his Roman connections.Footnote ²⁸ He referred to himself as a homo Romanus,Footnote ²⁹ and liked to recall ‘when I was at Rome’.Footnote ³⁰ As befitted a proper homo Romanus of his day, he was scornful of the upstart Constantinople, a city in which he had known seemingly untroubled success, and had even acted as a bridge between East and West.Footnote ³¹

Jerome reacted like a true Roman patriot to the news of the sacking of Rome in 410;Footnote ³² his response, expressed across a number of texts from around that time, is full of emotion and vivid, violent imagery.Footnote ³³ He described the sack as nothing less than a global decapitation: ‘Romani imperii truncatum caput: et, ut verius dicam, in una urbe totus orbis interiit’ (‘when the head of the Roman empire was severed, or, to speak more truly, the entire world perished in a single city’) (Commentarii in Ezechielem pr.). His language plays on the metonymic relationship between city and empire, and the verbal similarity between urbs and orbs:Footnote ³⁴ ‘capitur urbs quae totum cepit orbem’ (‘the city that had captured the whole world was itself taken captive’) (Epistulae 127.12). The shocking reversal of this pivotal relationship dominates his descriptions of the sack, and he wonders: ‘quis crederet ut totius orbis exstructa victoriis Roma corrueret, ut ipsa suis populis et mater fieret et sepulcrum’ (‘who would believe how Rome, built up by the conquest of the entire world, fell, that the mother of nations also became their tomb?’) (Commentarii in Ecclesiasten III pr.).Footnote ³⁵ Jerome's reflections on the sack of Rome are spread across several letters, written at various points of remove from 410.Footnote ³⁶

Despite the visceral nature of his response to the sack, generally Jerome's Rome remains a strikingly immaterial city. This is not to say that there is no material for the urban historian: Jerome's writings contain a number of snippets relating to the history and topography of late antique Rome, although they are not all of equal validity. His references to Roman churches are sparing: he refers to the basilica of San Clemente in his brief biography of Pope Clement.Footnote ³⁷ He shows a perhaps surprising antiquarian interest in the origins of the Lateran church, commenting that the basilica was built on the site of the house of Plautius Lateranus, executed for treason under Nero.Footnote ³⁸ He mentions that San Paolo fuori le mura served as both a place of sanctuary and a hospital during the sack of Rome.Footnote ³⁹ Saint Peter's serves as the location for one of his most famous satirical vignettes: the story of ‘the noblest woman in Rome’ who practises ostentatious, but ultimately fake, charity in the basilica of Saint Peter's, distributing coins to a line of paupers but punching in the face an old woman who had the audacity to attempt a second go! Interestingly, this account can be contextualized with other evidence for aristocratic charitable activity located at Saint Peter's, albeit less violent.Footnote ⁴⁰

This episode comes from the infamous Epistula 22, written in 384. As noted above, this letter would be crucial in sowing the seeds of the destruction of his position in the city. The letter extolled the virtues of the ascetic way of life and excoriated the lifestyle of the city's ‘sham Christians’.Footnote ⁴¹ The picture given of the fashionable pseudo-Christian lifestyle is peppered with lively, indeed masterly, vignettes. Jerome famously defends himself, somewhat knowingly, against the charge of satire: ‘ne saturam putes’ (‘lest you think this a satire’) (Epistulae 22.32), but we always must be aware of the distorting contours of the satirical genre when reading Jerome, and remain alert to the presence of satirical tropes and themes.Footnote ⁴² None the less, Cameron argues persuasively that Jerome's exaggerated and hypocritical attacks on ‘sham’ Christians are still, in fact, evidence for the progress of Christianization of the élite at Rome. He rightly suggests that ‘Jerome's vivid sketches are (of course) exaggerations, not to say caricatures, inspired as much by literature as real life. But they clearly imply an established, surely second-generation Christian elite, not a few recent converts’.Footnote ⁴³

Jerome's account of the Christianization of Rome generally does not take account of current events, let alone milestones considered significant by modern historians. He gives a spiteful account of the funeral of the eminent senator Praetextatus (Epistulae 23.3), but does not (at least in an extant text) even mention the ‘debate’ over the Altar of Victory in 384, something that generations of historians have seen as a watershed in the history of the Christianization of the Roman world. Generally Jerome's Rome is an image refracted through a number of prisms, textual (both biblical and classical) and temporal. Even his own experiences of Rome are constructed, or rather refracted, through such prisms. Two examples, relating, obliquely or not, to Jerome's first stay in Rome (that is, to his experiences of Rome as a youth), clearly demonstrate this process of refraction.

The first instance comes from the important Epistula 22, which includes certain biographical aspects, though these are problematic, as ever. In laying out his advice regarding the attainment of the true ascetic lifestyle, Jerome also looks back, as he was wont to do, on his heroic ascetic privations in the desert at Chalcis.Footnote ⁴⁴ At this point, an interestingly split time-frame appears. While evoking the desert period of his life, Jerome at the same time conjures up an image of Rome, as it seemed to him then (and when? the time frame is perhaps deliberately obscure), as the supreme locus of pleasure and sin. While suffering in the vasta solitudo Jerome claims to have imagined himself surrounded by the allurements of Rome: ‘O quotiens in heremo constitutus et in illa vasta solitudine, quae exusta solis ardoribus horridum monachis praestat habitaculum, putavi me Romanis interesse deliciis’ (‘Oh how often when I was living in the desert, and in that vast solitude, scorched by the burning sun, which provides monks with a savage dwelling-place, did I imagine myself surrounded by the pleasures of Rome’) (Epistulae 22.7). And further, while recalling his endurance of all these manner of privations, weeping and groaning, he tells Eustochium that he often still imagines himself surrounded by ‘troupes of dancing girls’ (choris … puellarum), which, in context, seems clearly to link back directly to the ‘Roman pleasures’ evoked almost immediately beforehand. The image of Rome evoked here is that of a pleasure dome, a veritable pornutopia, juxtaposed for dramatic effect against the harsh backdrop of the desert. It is a complex series of memories we are dealing with here: the middle-aged Jerome, writing in Rome in the 380s, is recalling his earlier life in the desert (in the 370s), in which he represents himself as looking back on his earlier residence in Rome (in the 350s/360s).

This memory is to be related only implicitly to Jerome's youth in Rome; explicit recollections of this period are rare. A striking, and famous, exception comes from his Commentary on Ezekiel, a text very obviously written in the aftermath of the sack of 410. Here Jerome recollects visiting the Roman catacombs on Sundays. Though this passage has been repeatedly cited, the significance of its profound intertextuality generally has been ignored.

So we see that, after quoting a passage from the Psalms, Jerome turns to Vergil, connecting the act of wandering through the catacombs with the image of Aeneas searching for his wife amidst the ruins of Troy.

This is a well-trodden passage, most frequently cited as ‘evidence’ for devotional visits to the catacombs in the mid-fourth century, and of course it does give a striking and vivid picture of that experience. The text has been noted also by scholars interested in tracing classical references in the works of the Church Fathers.Footnote ⁴⁵ Jerome, despite his claim never to have picked up a classical author after his dramatic courtroom dream,Footnote ⁴⁶ provides a particularly rich quarry for such a project: he continues throughout his life to quote and to paraphrase classical authors, especially Cicero, Horace and, of course, Vergil.Footnote ⁴⁷

Jerome's use of quotations (and even extended quotations) of Vergil in fact stepped up considerably in his later years. The connection between the sack of Rome and Vergil's account of the sack of Troy was first made in Epistula 127 (written in 412), where Jerome first paired Old Testament (in this case Isaiah) and Vergilian quotations in order to describe the sack.Footnote ⁴⁸ The Vergilian passage is quoted by Jerome at some length, but slightly doctored, not least to avoid some unfortunate ‘pagan’ connotations:

The image of the sacked Troy, it need scarcely be said, is one of the most potent images in the whole of classical literature. Book 2 was clearly one of the most read and most cited books of the Aeneid in late antiquity, as today. Jerome's choice of this specific literary image in connection with the catacombs is clearly to be read in the light of his reaction to the sack of Rome, and its use in this context, therefore, is not surprising at all. None the less, it is obvious that we are again dealing with a multi-temporal frame through which Roman ‘experiences’ are recounted. Whatever the case in 412, the image of the sack of Troy would not be the most obvious association for a teenage visit down the catacombs in the 360s.Footnote ⁵²

It is as if, once Jerome had seen Rome falling in Vergilian colours, the image was indelible. (The same of course could be said to apply to Jerome's readers, both ancient and modern.) The textual Rome of Jerome's later years was a strikingly (however incongruously) Vergilian city. His Rome was a palimpsest, made up of literary, as well as experiential, reminiscences. Moreover, despite his allegedly hard-line stance on ‘pagan’ symbols and ‘profane’ literature, Jerome's city of Rome owed much to both: given his literary practice (both reading and writing) how, we might ask, could it have been otherwise?

So far, it has been argued that Jerome's city of Rome was largely a literary palimpsest, a construction that was deeply intertextual. As should be clear, this palimpsest owed far more to the symbolic and the literary than to the ‘real’ or the ‘material’. This is especially clear when it comes to one notable case-study: Jerome's use of the striking symbol of the Capitolium as a metonym for various aspects of ‘Rome’, Rome here clearly standing for far more than the city of bricks, stone and marble. We shall see that although Jerome's view of the caput mundi was in many respects conflicted, his concern for the Christian conquest of the city remained uppermost in his mind.

In around 401 Jerome wrote, from Bethlehem, a letter to Rome, to his friend Laeta. Epistula 107 is, as so often, a letter of advice, in this case advice on bringing up a baby girl. Laeta, the daughter of a well-known ‘pagan’ as well as the daughter-in-law of a famously pious Christian (the redoubtable Paula), sought advice on the Christian education of her daughter, the younger Paula. The first part of Jerome's letter takes the conversion of Laeta's extended family (both actual and wished for) as emblematic of a broader development that Jerome claims is both inevitable and already well under way: the conversion of the city of Rome itself. Becoming Christian is a process, says Jerome, and one that the city of Rome is itself undergoing. He then adduces the case of the Capitolium to clinch his point: ‘Auratum squalet Capitolium, fuligine et aranearum telis omnia Romae templa cooperta sunt, movetur urbs sedibus suis et inundans populus ante delubra semiruta currit ad martyrum tumulos’ (‘The golden Capitol is dingy; all the temples in Rome are covered with soot and spiders’ webs. The city has shifted its foundations and a flood of people races past the half-ruined shrines on their way to the tombs of the martyrs') (Epistulae 107.1).

When it comes to specifics, Jerome has little to go on. He refers to the earlier destruction of a mithraeum by Furius Maecius Gracchus, a relative of Laeta's, when Urban Prefect, and newly baptized, in 376.Footnote ⁵³ This need not have been a spectacular anti-pagan coup: in fact it most likely provided an easy means by which Gracchus could demonstrate his new fervour.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Roman examples certainly pale by comparison with Jerome's trump example of the triumph of Christianity: the destruction of the Serapeum at Alexandria (according to Ammianus, ‘after the Capitol … the most magnificent building in the world’),Footnote ⁵⁵ which had taken place, accompanied by extreme violence, in 391.Footnote ⁵⁶ He pairs this with the impending destruction of the Marneion at Gaza.Footnote ⁵⁷ He goes on to comfort Laeta with examples of recent conversions in order to show that hopes for her own father should not be forlorn. These build up a triumphant description of worldwide conversion to the true faith: Jerome pushes the notion of Christianity as a world religion, his examples are deliberately exotic and colourful: crowds of monks in Ethiopia; Huns learning their psalms! The place of the conversion of the city of Rome in this discussion is instructive. It is Rome that is central, that is all-important, not least as the site of the aristocratic Laeta's family history, but above all as a paradigm for the rest of the world. The slippage between Rome as city, Rome as idea and Rome as empire is all too clear in Jerome's succinct expression of the decline of paganism in Rome.

It is no coincidence (and nor is it the first time, as we shall see) that Jerome focuses on the Capitolium as his key symbol for the transformation of the city of Rome.Footnote ⁵⁸ Throughout Latin literature the Capitolium served as the paradigmatic Roman toponym, metonymically functioning as Rome, standing, again, for both city and empire, and their continued well-being.Footnote ⁵⁹ The shining gilded roof, the aurum of the Capitolium, evoked a golden age for Rome, most famously in Augustan poetry.Footnote ⁶⁰ In Book 8 of the Aeneid Evander takes Aeneas on a tour of the site of Rome, including an overgrown site that Vergil's reader knew (or knows) as the mighty Capitolium:

It is the temporal slide, forwards and back, from the pre-Roman rustic Rome to the golden Rome of the Augustan age (and beyond!) that makes this visit so redolent.

Jerome is all too aware of the power of this symbolism, and its temporal dimension, as evidenced by the passage in which he first made his metaphorically resonant claim regarding the ‘dingy’ Capitolium, writing Against Jovinian in 393: ‘Cave Ioviniani nomen, quod de idolo derivatum est. Squalet Capitolium, templa Iovis et caeremoniae conciderunt. Cur vocabulum eius et vitia apud te vigeant? Adhuc sub regibus et sub Numa Pompilio facilius maiores tui Pythagorae continentiam quam sub consulibus Epicuri luxuriam susceperunt’ (‘Beware the name of Jovinian, which is derived from that of an idol. The Capitolium is dingy, the temples of Jupiter and their ceremonies have been overthrown. Why should his name and vices flourish now with you? Even in the time of Numa Pompilius, even under the kings, your ancestors embraced the self-restraint of Pythagoras more willingly than they did under the consuls the excesses of Epicurus’) (Adversus Jovinianum 2.38). Jerome's claims that the contemporary Capitolium squalet hence points not only to Augustan poetry but also hints at a theme favoured by early Imperial moralists (as claimed by both Seneca and Silius Italicus):Footnote ⁶¹ that Rome was purer before the Capitol was gilded. The image of golden Rome in late antiquity was still potent,Footnote ⁶² but even more pointedly double-edged.

The point is further highlighted when we compare a closely contemporary polemical claim about the Capitoline, this time made by the poet Prudentius (writing 402/3):

As with Jerome, here is a claim for the inversion of the city's traditional religious topography. Prudentius's reference is to the Tarpeian rock, a site that, by process of synecdoche, can of course also signify the Capitoline Hill as a whole. The Senate House is evoked for obvious reasons (Prudentius's claim is of course made as part of his (belated) poetic riposte to Symmachus's eloquent defence of the Altar of Victory in the Curia), but the link with Evander is also important. The mention of Evander is used to evoke the archaic, pre-Roman purity of Rome, which, none the less, is now surpassed in a topographical inversion, which works in the same way as Jerome's in his letter to Laeta.

What we can see in the writings of Jerome, Prudentius and others is a textual battle over the sacred topography of Rome. This battle was due in part to the threat to the status of the city as caput mundi at this time. The notion that Rome easily could assert her supremacy over the upstart Constantinople, through her superior cult status and her unique religious topography, was maintained by traditionalist Roman patriots. For Ammianus, for instance (citing Constantine), Rome was the templum totius mundi (temple of the whole world) (Ammianus Marcellinus 17.4.12–13): Nova Roma simply could not compete.Footnote ⁶³ Devotees of traditional religion in late antiquity promoted a reading of Rome that involved an antiquarian (but far from irrelevant) interest in the most ancient cult sites and artefacts of the ‘pagan’ city. This is attested, not least, by the frequency and intensity of attacks on the Palladium, the Lares of Priam and the cult of Vesta and the Vestal Virgins in anti-pagan polemic.Footnote ⁶⁴

The dialectic between Christianity and ‘paganism’ was still very much a live issue at this time and the Capitolium was a key symbol in the debate.Footnote ⁶⁵ Jerome's view of the Capitolium was a highly partial one; his claim that the Capitolium squalet is not to be taken literally. While the temple's most famous role, as location of the climactic sacrifice of the triumphal procession, lay in abeyance and its position was undoubtedly anomalous, its continuing centrality in the civic life of the city seems likely.Footnote ⁶⁶ The power of the Capitolium as both site and symbol, moreover, assured its mention in a number of late antique texts: from Ammianus through Ausonius to Cassiodorus.Footnote ⁶⁷ The temple itself was not destroyed for many centuries to come — even its famous gilding lived to see off a few barbarians.Footnote ⁶⁸

The Capitolium was a highly potent metaphor, and its value as symbol far outweighed its materiality. In writing the city, as noted above, writers are bound to resort to metaphor or metonymy: Jerome's use of the Capitolium is emblematic of that trend. It is highly tempting as a symbol, but is ultimately perhaps self-defeating: its very multivalency resists closure, resists any insistence on one ideological meaning alone. The meaning of Rome's traditional symbolic topography was, in fact, up for grabs.

If the fate of the Capitolium was unclear, the spiritual barometer of the city as a whole was equally unsettled. The historian seeking evidence for the state of the Christianization of Rome in the early fifth century finds a conflicted picture in the literary sources of the period.Footnote ⁶⁹ As we saw, on several occasions Jerome (and other Christian writers) argue that present-day Rome had undergone nothing less than a moral and religious renewal through the power of the Christian faith. But how far did Jerome actually think that such a renewal had taken place already? How ‘Christian’ was Jerome's city of Rome? Unsurprisingly, his account is somewhat contradictory. For one thing Jerome's picture of Rome varied from text to text, dependent upon his purpose, and indeed his addressee. When writing in flattery-mode to the eminent Christian aristocrat, Pammachius, presented by Jerome as leader of the lay ascetic community at Rome, the city is praised for having been transformed by the example and teaching of this community: ‘Nostris temporibus Roma possidet, quod mundus ante nescivit. Tunc rari sapientes, potentes, nobiles Christiani, nunc multi monachi sapientes, potentes, nobiles’ (‘In our time Rome possesses what the world in days gone by knew nothing about. Then few of the wise or mighty or noble were Christians; now many wise, powerful and noble men are monks’) (Epistulae 66.4).Footnote ⁷⁰ But the picture remains complex, not least, as previous scholarship has shown, because Jerome's fluctuating picture of the city is fundamentally indebted to classical literary models as well as to biblical comparanda.

The influence of classical satire is particularly important here: the city is the quintessential setting for satire, and the bigger the city, the richer the pickings.Footnote ⁷¹ Just as hackneyed as complaining about life in the city, was the age-old debate about whether it was better to live in the country, or a city, a basic topic for students of declamation, and a favoured old chestnut of letter writers.Footnote ⁷² When he wrote (not long before his forced departure) complaining of Rome as a noisy place, consumed by triviality and a love of the spectacles, Jerome was of course following in a long and familiar tradition:Footnote ⁷³ ‘Habeat sibi Roma suos tumultos, harena saeviat, circus insaniat, theatria luxuriant, et quia de nostris dicendum est, matronarum cotidie vistetur senatus’ (‘Let Rome keep for herself her hustle and bustle, the raging of the arena, the madness of the circus, the luxury of the theatre and — for I must not say something of our Christian friends — the daily meetings of the matrons’ senate') (Epistulae 43.3). In complete accordance with convention, Jerome compares the hubbub of the city with the more wholesome pleasures offered by the countryside.Footnote ⁷⁴ However, ultimately it is a different, and more complex, dichotomy offered by Jerome: while once he had sought (and failed) to replace the city with the desert, after 385 he both opposed and identified the earthly Rome with a shifting ordo of biblical cities.

Biblical texts provided various alternative identities for Rome. The city is referred to as biblical Babylon on several occasions, an epithet with dual associations, as Sugano noted.Footnote ⁷⁵ At times Babylon-Rome is the city from which Jerome wished to escape to the biblical Jerusalem,Footnote ⁷⁶ that is, the Old Testament, exilic-era Babylon, while at other times Babylon-Rome is clearly to be associated with the city of the Apocalypse.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even whorish Babylon-Rome had a dual face, as we can see in Jerome's Epistula 46 (of 386), written again to Marcella. Here Jerome, not long arrived in Bethlehem, writes in the names of Paula and Eustochium, urging Marcella to leave Rome and come to the Holy Land to join them. The letter praises the holiness of Bethlehem,Footnote ⁷⁸ a sacred site, before turning to Rome, first compared with the Babylon of the ApocalypseFootnote ⁷⁹ and then with Babylon as decried by Jeremiah.Footnote ⁸⁰ And yet, some hope for Babylon-Rome is allowed for immediately afterwards: ‘Est quidem ibi sancta ecclesia, sunt tropea apostolorum et martyrum, est Christi vera confessio et ab apostolis praedicata fides et gentilitate calcata in sublime se cotidie erigens vocabulum Christianum’ (‘It is true that [Rome] has a holy church, there are the shrines of the apostles and the martyrs, there is a true confession of Christ. The faith has been preached there by an apostle, paganism has been trodden down while the name of ‘Christian’ is daily raised higher and higher') (Epistulae 46.12). Straight away, however, this positive description of a Christian city is undercut by what follows (sed …), in a passage that sees Jerome firmly back in satirical form and that is, moreover, absolutely conventional in its attack on the daily routine of the city, though the alternative proposed is monastic quies rather than traditional villa-based otium: ‘Sed ipsa ambitio, potentia, magnitudo urbis, videri et videre, salutari et salutare, laudare et detrahere, audire vel proloqui et tantam frequentiam hominum saltim invitum pati a proposito monachorum et quiete aliena sunt’ (‘But the pomp, power, and size of the city, the seeing and the being seen, the paying and the receiving of visits, the complimenting and disparaging, listening or speaking, as well as the need to put up with so very many people, even when one is least in the mood to do so: all these things are foreign to the principles and to the peace of the monastic life’) (Epistulae 46.12). Jerome's elogium to Paula, his Epistula 108 to her daughter Eustochium, plays throughout on the antithesis between Rome and Bethlehem, playing on the contrast between the glories and history of the former and the apparent lowliness and obscurity of the latter. Jerome marvels first that a descendant of the Gracchi and the Scipiones would pick Bethlehem over Rome.Footnote ⁸¹ He enjoys the paradox that Paula found world renown not at Rome, but at Bethlehem, again playing on the urbs/orbis pun.Footnote ⁸² Finally, Jerome plays again on the paradox in each of the two metrical epitaphs that he wrote for Paula's tomb, and that are appended to the letter.Footnote ⁸³

Even more than Bethlehem or even Babylon, the ultimate biblical twin city for Rome is, of course, Jerusalem, but again this comparison bears different meanings according to context. In Jerome's elogium for Marcella (Epistulae 127), a letter that also expresses Jerome's grief at the sack of Rome, as we have already seen, the comparison is used in two ways. Firstly, as in the letter to Pammachius, the comparison is used as flattery. It was thanks to Marcella's holy ways, and the foundation of her monastery in particular, Jerome writes, that he had the joy of seeing ‘Romam factam Hierosolymam’ (‘Rome become Jerusalem’) (Epistulae 127.8).Footnote ⁸⁴ However, for Jerome, Rome truly becomes a second Jerusalem only through a truly tragic event: its sack (Epistulae 127.12). This connection is made with the direct quotation of Psalm 79.1–3, a lament for the destruction of Jerusalem by the gentes.

This parallel, however, is not left to stand alone. The sack, as we saw, brought a whole host of comparanda to mind. As in the passage from the Commentary on Ezekiel, a quote from the Psalms is followed directly by a quotation from the Aeneid, comparing the fall of Rome with that of Troy. However, here the Psalms passage is directly preceded by another biblical quotation, but one that ascribes quite the opposite interpretation of the fall of Rome from that which is suggested by the allusion to Jerusalem: Isaiah 15.1. In this quotation Jerome evokes Isaiah's prophecy about the fall of Moab, an ‘ungodly’ nation, which even the moderately alert reader would then associate with the adjacent prophecies in Isaiah regarding the fall of Babylon (Isaiah 13) and other Gentile nations (Isaiah 17ff). Parallels and allusions seem to tumble, at this point, leading the reader to a very unclear picture of how we should read the fall of Rome.

Jerome's parallel use of biblical and classical literary allusions means that fallen Rome is both a biblical and a mythical city. Rome is the satirists' urbs, Vergil's Troy, not one but two biblical Babylons, and even Jerusalem. No wonder the picture is conflicted! The city of Rome then, in Jerome's writings, is a deeply unstable city: it is intertextually rich and multivalent, while its moral and religious temperature fluctuates wildly. From text to text, year to year, even within the same text, Jerome's Rome oscillates wildly.

Jerome is thus not much use as a practical guide to the late antique city of Rome. He tells the historian surprisingly little. His account of the physical status of the traditional religious sites of Rome is scarcely to be trusted. He is no chronicler of current events. Jerome's Rome, as this article has shown, is far more a city of books, a city of images, a city of symbols, than a material city, made of bricks and stones, and inhabited by historical humans. It remains something of an invisible city, to use the title of Italo Calvino's enigmatic novel:Footnote ⁸⁵ a many-layered and richly intertextual literary artefact, inextricably steeped in classical as well as biblical literature. Jerome the hard-liner, the seemingly stable literary author and persona, turns out to be rather softer than we may have thought. Jerome's Rome, meanwhile, to return finally to Raban's words, is a soft city: ‘the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare’, which, if we agree with Raban, ‘is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps, in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture’.Footnote ⁸⁶