ABSTRACT
A flurry of recent scholarship has led to a thorough revision of our traditional interpretation of the Vandal period, increasingly downplaying Victor of Vita’s depiction of doom and gloom, in order to present a more balanced picture of Vandal Africa. Still, this body of work has tended to focus on the Vandals rather than on Victor’s text as its object of analysis and consequently, Victor’s own rhetoric of persecution still awaits analysis on its own terms. Although scholars of earlier generations were aware of Victor’s rhetoric, with the exception of Courtois, they systematically refused to draw methodological conclusions from their observations on Victor’s use of literary strategies and largely continued to use his text at face value. Scholars have been more critical in the last few decades, but mostly in order to study the Vandal period more critically. One aim of the present chapter is to address this void, by analyzing the elements of Victor’s rhetoric, before looking at the evidence he adduced to convey his vision of Vandal Africa as a time of persecution for Nicenes. A second goal, in the context of the present volume, is to study Victor’s text as an example of the discourse of persecution, in order to understand its mechanisms and functions. It will argue that Victor’s polarizing view of the world, as a Nicene cleric convinced of the truth of his faith, which he considered engaged in a struggle with the Homoian faith of the Vandals, considered any measure taken against Nicenes by Vandals constituted persecution. And in turn, because of this view, Victor deployed the discourse of persecution and its rhetoric to attack the legitimacy of Vandal rulers to reign over Nicene Christians.
