GRBS ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 2013 Tatyana I. Afanas’eva and Sergey A. Ivanov Unexpected Evidence concerning Gold Mining in Early Byzantium Tatyana I. Afanas’eva and Sergey A. Ivanov NE OF THE CONSEQUENCES of the decline of Roman imperial might was the shortage of slaves at state-run mines. Consequently, criminals were often sentenced to damnatio ad metallum. The need for gold especially soared when the gold solidus was introduced at the beginning of the fourth century.1 Side by side with common criminals, political prisoners, including Christians, worked in the mines. In the third century, Cyprian of Carthage addressed convicted Nu- midian bishops: “No wonder that you, being pure gold and silver yourselves, are sent to gold and silver mines! Yet their nature has changed: whereas before they sent gold and silver uphill, now they get it from outside. (The persecutors) put you in fetters, as if gold could be sullied from its contact with iron!”2 It was probably at this time that the first prayers for Christians suffering from such persecution appeared. The earliest attestation is in the fourth-century Apostolic Consti- tutions: “We pray for those in the mines and in exile and in prison and in fetters for the sake of the Lord,” τῶν ἐν µετάλ- λοις καὶ ἐξορίαις καὶ φυλακαῖς καὶ δεσµοῖς ὄντων διὰ τὸ 1 F. Millar, “Condemnation to Hard Labour in the Roman Empire,” BSR 52 (1984) 141. 2 Cyprian Ep. 76.2; cf. Eus. HE 4.23.10, 9.1.7, Mart.Pal.prolix. 5.2, 7.2, 11.6. See J. G. Davies, “Condemnation to the Mines. A Neglected Chapter in the History of the Persecutions,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal 6.2 (1958) 99–102; M. Gustafson, “Condemnation to the Mines in the Later Roman Empire,” HThR 87 (1994) 421–433. O TATYANA I. AFANAS’EVA AND SERGEY A. IVANOV 139 ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 ὄνοµα τοῦ Κυρίου δεηθῶµεν.3 In the Vita of Pope Silvester the same set phrase is used in the address to the newly baptized Emperor Constantine: the pope begs him to liberate “those who are suffering in exile and in the mines for their piety,” τοὺς διὰ τὴν εὐσέβειαν ἐξορίαις καὶ µετάλλοις κακουµένους ἀνα- καλέσασθαι.4 Later this formula became part of the Anaphora within the Liturgy of Basil the Great: it was integrated into the intercessio— a series of invocations on behalf of different groups of people, beginning with emperors and bishops and all the way down to orphans and widows. Basil’s Liturgy was practiced by the Eastern Patriarchates and in different languages, the oldest being the Egyptian; later it was included in the Armenian, Syrian, and Greek traditions. The most flexible part of the Liturgy was the intercessions: different groups of manuscripts contain different pleas subdivided into different thematic groups and arranged in different sequences. The Byzantine version likewise had innovations.5 First and foremost, it intro- duced the block, labeled θʹ by Fenwick (211), which contained adjurations for convicts and the exiled. Here we also have a plea, already familiar to us, for those in the mines, but without mention of the offense for which they were sent there: God is simply implored on behalf of those “under tribunal and in the mines and in exile and in hard labor,” τῶν ἐν βήµασι καὶ µετάλλοις καὶ ἐξορίαις καὶ πικραῖς δουλείαις.6 A comparable group of pleas is found in the second Armenian version of the 3 F. X. Funk, Didascalia et constitutiones Apostolorum I (Paderborn 1905) 236– 237, 490–491. 4 Vita sancti Silvestri papae Romae (BHGn1632e): F. Halkin, Le ménologe im- périal de Baltimore (Brussels 1985) 26. Cf. Eus. Vit.Const. 2.32.1. 5 J. Fenwick, The Anaphoras of St. Basil and St. James: An Investigation into their Common Origin (Orient.Christ.Anal. 240 [Rome 1992]) 290, 308. 6 H. Engberding, “Das anaphorische Fürbittgebet der Basiliusliturgie,” Oriens Christianus 47 (1963) 16–52, at 46. 140 GOLD MINING IN EARLY BYZANTIUM ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 Liturgy, translated from the Byzantine version.7 Yet the trans- lator omitted the reference to “those in the mines”—probably because it was by now irrelevant. The triumph of Christianity could not improve the situation of labor in the mines, which, on the contrary, continued to de- teriorate throughout the fourth century. The state responded with increased levels of control. This can be illustrated by im- perial decrees: an edict of Valentinian and Valens in 369 regulated forced labor in gold mining (Cod.Theod. 10.19.5); in 370–373 gold mines were put under the control of special officials, procuratores metallorum, who were subordinate to the comes metallorum per Illyricum (10.19.7, cf. 10.19.12);8 a law of 373 forbade harboring fugitive gold miners, aurileguli (10.19.7); in 378 all governors of maritime provinces were forbidden to transfer gold miners anywhere, under threat of severe punish- ment (10.19.9); in 424 gold mining was declared a hereditary occupation (10.19.15).9 Amid and in spite of these harsh measures, gold miners were taking refuge anywhere they could, even among the barbarians (Amm. Marc. 31.6.6). In all likelihood, Christian emperors picked up from their pagan predecessors the custom of sending to the gold mines not just captives and criminals but political opponents as well. The Armenian historian Moses of Khorene tells us something that is not found in the Byzantine sources: that Constantine the Great condemned Arian bishops to the mines, and that later another emperor, Valens, who had pro-Arian sympathies, did the same 7 G. Winkler, Die Basilius-Anaphora (Rome 2005) 13, 263. 8 On the offices see A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire II (Norman 1964) 838. 9 For more details see O. Yu. Belous, “Ob upravlenii gornymi predpiia- tiiami v pozdnej Rimskoj i rannej Vizantiiskoi imperiiakh (IV–VI vv.),” An- tichnaia drevnost’ I srednie veka 24 (1988) 143–151; J. C. Edmondson, “Mining in the Later Roman Empire,” JRS 79 (1989) 84–103. TATYANA I. AFANAS’EVA AND SERGEY A. IVANOV 141 ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 to Chalcedonian bishops.10 On this matter we have discovered a piece of evidence in a quite unexpected source. Two Old Russian manuscripts of St. Basil’s Liturgy, copied in the fourteenth century, in the Russian National Library, St. Petersburg, Solovki Collection N 1016/1125, f. 41r–v, and Novgorod Sofia Collection N 521, f. 26v, contain, like all other Slavic manuscripts of the Liturgy, the intercession with the plea for “those in the mines and in prison and in hard labor” (i v rudakh i v potochenii i v liutakh rabotakh), which accurately cor- responds to the Greek τῶν καὶ ἐν µετάλλοις καὶ ἐξορίαις καὶ πικραῖς δουλείαις. But these two manuscripts also contain an interpolation: “those who move the gold ore because of Caesar’s wrath” (izhe zlatuiu rudu kopaiut po gnevu tsesarevu). Two other manuscripts, one in Moscow (Russian State Library, Rogozhskoe Cemetery Collection, N 566, f. 14r) and one in St. Petersburg (Russian National Library, Solovki Collection N 1017/1126, f.14r) have the same interpolation in a truncated form: “those who move the gold ore” without the words “be- cause of Caesar’s wrath.” This interpolation is lacking in all the existing versions of St. Basil’s Liturgy, whether Armenian or Egyptian.11 Nevertheless, it could not be a mere invention of a Slavic scribe or a trans- lator: the Slavs themselves did not mine gold. This means that the interpolation was translated from a Greek version that has not survived. The fact is that liturgical texts were copied in the so-called ‘controlled tradition’,12 in which a scribe had several 10 This information is reported only in Moses Khorenatsi, History of the Ar- menians, transl. R. W. Thomson (Cambridge [Mass.] 1978) 246, 290. Hence it should be treated with discretion, cf. R. W. Thomson, “Armenian Liter- ary Culture through the Eleventh Century,” in Richard Hovannisian (ed.), The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times I (New York 1997) 199–239, esp. 215. 11 Winkler, Die Basilius-Anaphora 263; A. Budde, Die Ägyptische Basilios- Anaphora (Münster 2004) 470. 12 A. A. Alekseev, Tekstologiia slavianskoj Biblii (St. Petersburg 1999) 48–51. 142 GOLD MINING IN EARLY BYZANTIUM ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 manuscripts before him and very often conflated readings that he found in different copies. This is what has happened in our case: the four manuscripts in question combine the traditional formula “those in mines” with a rare reading, “those who move the gold ore (because of Caesar’s wrath),” connecting the two with the conjunction “and,” although in the Greek tradition these phrases must have belonged to different manuscript fam- ilies, one of which has become extinct. St. Basil’s Liturgy was translated into Slavic in the ninth century, probably more than once. But in the tenth century in Preslav, the capital of the First Bulgarian Kingdom, the church service was unified and adjusted to match the contemporary Constantinopolitan models.13 If the plea in question had sur- vived in any of the Constantinopolitan Euchologia of the tenth century, it would have been preserved in the Greek up to the present. In all probability, the prayer for those in gold mines because of Caesar’s wrath dates back to some of the peripheral Greek manuscripts of the pre-Iconoclastic period, from which many Slavonic translations were made in Macedonia in the ninth century.14 Manuscripts going back to the Preslav tra- dition prevailed in Rus’, but manuscripts of the Macedonian tradition also circulated, though rarely, and the ‘controlled tradition’ was conducive to the survival of their readings. The oldest Greek text of St. Basil’s Liturgy was composed in 375–379,15 i.e. exactly coinciding with the period of the harsh- 13 M. Jovcheva, “Problemy tekstologicheskogo izuchenija drevnejshikh pamiatnikov original’noj slavianskoj gimnografii,” Drevneslavianskaia litur- gicheskaia poeziia. XIII Mezhdunarodnyj s’ezd slavistov. Tematicheskij blok n14. Doklady (Rome/Sofia 2003) 64; A. A. Turilov, “K utochneniju ob’ema I sostava drevnejshego slavianskogo original’nogo gimnograficheskogo kor- pusa v drevnerusskoj traditsii (na materialakh minejnykh sluzhb),” in Slavia Cyrillomethodiana: Istochnikovedenie istorii I kul’tury juzhnykh slavian I Rusi. Mezh- slavianskie kul’turnye sviazi epokhi srednevekov’ia (Moscow 2010) 68. 14 T. I. Afanas’eva, Drevneslavianskii perevod liturgii v rukopisnoj traditsii XI–XVI vv. (diss. St. Petersburg 2012) 5, 44–45. 15 Fenwick, The Anaphoras of St. Basil and St. James 301. TATYANA I. AFANAS’EVA AND SERGEY A. IVANOV 143 ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 est imperial decrees concerning gold mining. It is noteworthy that “moving the gold ore because of Caesar’s wrath” is the only type of hard labor specified in the liturgy. One can sur- mise that using forced labor in gold mining began to cause dis- content of sorts. Such feelings can be discerned in a metaphor of John Chrysostom: “This gold is produced not from the ore mined by prisoners’ hands, but from virtue,” ὁ χρυσὸς οὐκ ἀπὸ µετάλλων ἐστίν, ἃ καταδίκων χεῖρες ὤρυξαν, ἀλλ’ ἀπὸ ἀρετῆς τίκτεται.16 It may be that the same latent displeasure is re- flected in the liturgical formula discussed in this article. The author of the plea hints, as it were, that hard labor in gold mines was too cruel a consequence of the imperial wrath, especially since it had been used in persecutions by pagan tormentors. However, this cruel practice was terminated not as a result of moral reprobation but because of its economic ineffectiveness: already by the middle of the fifth century it had become clear that an enterprising free prospector could pan more gold than a convict in fetters, surrounded by guards and working in a large mine.17 When the use of prisoners in gold mining became outdated, references to this practice would begin to disappear from fresh copies of St. Basil’s liturgy. This gives us a terminus ante quem for the creation of the Greek manuscript that served as ultimate source for the four Slavic ones that have preserved centuries-old realia for us. From the point of view of the genesis of Slavonic translation, this conclusion is quite unexpected: a Macedonian bookman came across an extremely old and rare Greek manuscript of the liturgy. Viewed from a Byzantine perspective, the same hypo- thetical manuscript would have seemed unbelievably late, since up to now it has been assumed that “imprisonment and the mines … though perhaps a fading memory as the fourth cen- 16 In epist. i ad Timotheum, PG 62.513. 17 Edmondson, JRS 79 (1989) 93–95. 144 GOLD MINING IN EARLY BYZANTIUM ————— Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 53 (2013) 138–144 tury progressed, suggests a pre-Constantinian”18 time for this intercession. This pious dating should now be revised, since we have learned that when prisoners “for the sake of piety” were set free, almost immediately another group of convicts in chains took over their spades—to “move the gold ore because of Caesar’s wrath.” November, 2012 Department of Letters St.Petersburg State University 160-27, Naberezhnaia Kanala Grobiedova St. Petersburg, 190121 Russia atha@mail.ru National Research University Higher School of Economics 2/8, korp.5, Khitrovkii per. Moscow, 109028, Russia s.ark.ivanov@gmail.com 18 Fenwick, The Anaphoras of St. Basil and St. James 281.