Bodies on Stage. The Saint, the Empire, and the Crowds between θέαμα and θαῦμα. The Life of Daniel the Stylite as a Case Study

Abstract: The Vita antiquior, the main biography on Daniel the Stylite (409– 493), stages a world that does not appear as the background on which mankind operates, but is the result of a constant interaction between human and nonhuman personae, divine, demonic, or animal. The strangeness and extraneousness of the saint’s theama is enacted, collectively, in the context of the thaumatic atmospheres, in which both the ascetic and his interlocutors, seekers of healing and solace, participate: sensory deflagrations woven into the threads of a collective memory that was certainly Christian, but not only Christian. The stylite, cast on the stage of spaces characterised by a high thaumatic content, can never be conceived as an isolated monad, but rather as a subject who contributes to defining the oikoumene through a dense network of relationships with ‘power’, ecclesiastical, aristocratic and imperial but also with the crowds. The world thus appears as the political result of a constant interaction and negotiation in which the liminal zones appear sometimes impassable and sometimes extremely porous and traversable by the saint or by the crowds. The emperor himself becomes the guarantor of the incredible number of healings, which, in a kind of permanent trialectic, are directed to pantes— everyone— , the sovereign, the saint, the masses. What we see is a “diffuse political body” in motion, where the saint’s action triggers the actions of others, even unforeseen ones: the multitudes respond to Daniel’s invitations, but also take independent and uncontrollable initiatives and seem at times to constitute themselves as an autonomous political subject, in a constant and dialectical back- and- forth dynamic.