Conclusioni

Abstract

At the end of a colloquium which had gone far beyond the original range of the paradigm, it was useful to recall the ‘Mazzarinian’ way of understanding the ‘democratisation of culture’, even if Mazzarino himself never provided a definition, any more than he applied it to the full. Influenced by Rostovsteff, but also in reaction against him, the concept expressed Mazzarino’s general interest in the problems of interactions between different cultures, which he identified from their linguistic and ethnic characteristics in close connection with the social frame. When Mazzarino proposed the idea of the ‘democratisation of culture’, it was firstly in order to identify its limits, in particular the disjuncture between culture and politics: neither the perspective of Hippolytus nor that of Bardesanes extended to liberty in the political sense. Another limit was the impossibility of dialogue between classical culture, official and dominant, and the local cultures, represented chiefly by the rural populations. By ‘democratisation of culture’ Mazzarino certainly did not mean that in Late Antiquity classical culture became more ‘democratic’. Nor should we lose sight of the fact that Mazzarino applied his concept principally to the third century, a time when the Severans were attempting to integrate the provincial populations into the life of the State; a time, also, of economic and social experiences connected with the ‘creative minority’constituted by the first Christian society, able to promote a vast cultural revolution with no political or social aims, and able, in preaching, to adapt itself to the various languages and cultures of those provincials who had not been ‘romanised’. With the ‘democratic’ aspects of the third century, key to a reconsideration of the ‘crisis’, Mazzarino contrasted what he called the charismatic outlook of the fourth century, following the ‘religious revolution’of Constantine, who had, in fact, imprisoned democratisation within a hierarchical structure. The two periods differ in ‘style’ – a category which betrays Mazzarino’s debt to the art historians. That is why, when he detected democratised culture in the Ambrosian hymns, detached from any ‘national’ cultures, he was already using the term in a different sense, just as the phenomena differ which can be analysed with this term. This colloquium has demonstrated – although still only partially – how widely it can be applied. It is as difficult to evaluate the impact of Mazzarino’s formula in historiography as to ignore its extensive influence, due to its very flexibility. For example, Peter Brown was able to interpret it as a continuity in the peripheral influences working on the mass of the population independently of central authority (while refusing to accept languages and ethnicity as important elements in division). For Mazzarino, the ‘democratizzazione della cultura’ continues to be a concept for analysing the crisis, while the current trends in the cultural history of Late Antiquity tend to place more emphasis on continuity.