ABSTRACT
In recent years, the phrase “Invention of Christian Rome” has been used to characterize the Christianization of Rome during the fourth and fifth centuries. The invention of Christian Rome appears to have consisted in the production of a Roman Christian culture modeled after, or rather cobbled together out of, classical Roman culture. For example, Trout argues that Pope Damasus’ inscriptions honoring Rome’s martyrs reimagined them in classical terms in order to invent a new vision of Rome’s glorious past.1 Similarly, Elsner maintains that the material evocations of the saints, who were to become the foci of cultic activity, created an alternative sacred topography by borrowing heavily from late classical visual and architectural traditions.2 To this one may add the construction of monumental Christian basilicas, the forms of which were clearly classical.3 Likewise, the development of a Christian institutional history in the Codex-Calendar of 354 was modeled after traditional Roman conventions of chronology and institutional memory.4 In all cases-the Damasian elogia, late antique Christian art and architecture, the Calendar of 354-Christianity imagined its place in Rome, thereby re-imagining Rome by following a classical pattern.
