The Roman Empire & the Fourth Beast: The Four Kingdoms of Daniel in Late Antiquity and Byzantium

The Old Testament Book of Daniel had a major influence on Byzantine eschatology, though this influence is often poorly understood. This paper seeks to address this problem by shedding light on how subjects of the Byzantine Empire understood their empire within the prophetic framework of Daniel.

The Book of Daniel took its present form (as preserved in the scriptural canon) in the second century BC, during the persecution of the Jews by the Hellenistic king Antiochus IV. Several of the prophecies in the Book of Daniel predicted in coded language the apocalyptic fall of Antiochus’ kingdom. For example, in chapter 7, Daniel sees in a dream four beasts arise from the sea, and later an angel tells him that the four beasts represent the four great earthly kingdoms or empires; the fourth and final beast (a thinly disguised symbol for Antiochus’ empire) is the worst and most evil of the kingdoms: it persecutes the holy and will be justly destroyed by God.

Though the Antiochene persecution of the Jew passed, Jewish, and later Christian, readers of the Book of Daniel considered these prophecies unfulfilled. Many Jews soon came to believe that the Roman Empire was the fourth kingdom of Daniel, especially after the Romans sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, a deed far worse than any committed by Antiochus IV. Christians inherited from the Jews the idea that the Roman Empire was the fourth kingdom from the Book of Daniel, and identified the persecution mention by Daniel as the Roman persecution of Christianity. 

Most secondary scholarship on Christian eschatology holds that all this changed after the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the early fourth century, when Christian apocalyptic expectations about Rome’s fall had to give way in a more optimistic era of church-state relations. According to these scholars, the Christian intellectuals of early Byzantium reinterpreted the fourth kingdom as a force for good, as the empire that anticipates God’s kingdom. 

This paper will argue that traditional interpretation of the fourth kingdom of Daniel was not so quickly forgotten. It will show that the surviving sources from the fourth to the seventh century demonstrate that Byzantine subjects continued to believe that the empire, as the fourth kingdom of Daniel, was fated to one day persecute Christianity once again and then suffer destruction as divine retribution.

Further, this paper will argue that the reinterpretation of the Byzantine Empire as a good version of the fourth kingdom only became widespread in the eighth century. The change in eschatological expectations resulted not because of the needs of Christian triumphalism, but because of the crisis sparked by the near collapse of the empire in the face of the Arab conquests. These conclusions have major consequences for Byzantine imperial ideology, and our understanding of how the Byzantines thought about their empire.

Organizer and Session Presider

Early Byzantine Apocalypticism and the Rise of Islam

For much of the past century, scholarship on Muhammad and the beginnings of Islam has shown some reluctance to acknowledge the importance of urgent eschatology in earliest Islam.  One of the main reasons for this resistance to eschatology would appear to be the undeniable importance of conquest and political expansion in early Islam: if Muhammad and his followers believed that the world would soon come to an end, why then did they seek to conquer and rule over so much of it?  Nevertheless, the apocalyptic literature of Jews and Christians in Byzantium during the sixth and early seventh centuries indicates that these two beliefs went hand in hand, offering important contemporary precedent for the imperial eschatology that seems to have fueled the rise of Islam. 

The tumult of the last Roman-Persian war stoked eschatological hopes across the Near East, and for the Christians, Heraclius’ crushing defeat of the Persians and his restoration of the True Cross to Jerusalem intensified convictions that the end of the world was at hand. The literature of this era, especially in Syriac, speaks with newfound urgency about the eschaton’s near approach. We now know that one of the most significant of these texts, the Syriac Alexander Legend, was the source of the Qurʾān’s traditions about Alexander the Great. From this borrowing we may conclude that Muhammad and his followers had direct contact with the Byzantine tradition of imperial eschatology via Syriac. Islam, so it would seem, emerged into a world that was permeated by eschatological anticipation and furthermore expected the end of the age to arrive through the triumph of a divinely chosen empire. Undoubtedly, then, Muhammad and his followers must have understood the dramatic expansion of their righteous polity as preparing the way for the restoration of divine rule to the world and the Final Judgment.

Preaching the Apocalypse: Homiletic Responses to the Crises of the Seventh Century

The seventh century was a period of crisis for the Byzantine Empire. Although these initial decades saw disastrous losses at the hands of the Persians, the emperor Heraclius was able to secure a costly victory, providing a brief respite. This would be shattered by the rise of Islam, and the progressive encroachment of early Muslim-led forces into Byzantine territory, including Jerusalem which had only recently been recovered from the Persians.

Many Byzantines interpreted these crises through the lens of apocalyptic discourse, considering enemy success to be divine chastisement for sin and seeing themselves as part of a providential narrative laid out in the Old Testament. Homilies were well suited to this discourse. In times of victory, as in the successful defence of Constantinople from the Avar and Persian siege of 626, authors such as Theodore Syncellus preached that the city and the empire had been delivered by the supplications of the Mother of God from the army of Gog mentioned in Ezekiel. For Sophronius of Jerusalem, who witnessed the progressive advance of Arab forces into his ecclesiastical territory, the Muslim Arabs were the “abomination of desolation” predicted by Daniel. 

This paper examines the use of apocalyptic discourse in seventh-century homilies, in particular homilies depicted in saints’ lives, the homily of Theodore Syncellus on the siege of Jerusalem, and the homilies of Sophronius of Jerusalem. Close attention will be paid to the exegesis of Old Testament passages, dehumanisation of adversaries, and the importance of the homiletic genre in understanding the role of homilies in making the crises of the seventh century comprehensible to a popular audience.

The Literary topos of the Last Roman Emperor Revisited

The aim of this paper is to study the backgrounds of the literary topos of the Last Roman Emperor, tracing its background and underlining its place in a specific literary framework that survives the ages and gives the topos its specificity.

*with Diego M. Santos, National Pedagogical University (UNIPE)