All Christian flights were not created equal. With the aid of pro-Nicene authors, Athanasius of Alexandria's multiple flights quickly became the standard for an orthodox exile. The charge of cowardice, or worse, heresy, was not so easily dismissed, however. While the famed Athanasius would explain away such charges in his own writings, as did many of his later defenders, not all fleeing bishops could escape a damning verdict. In this article, I explore how the enemies of Nicaea, re-read as the enemies of Athanasius, also found themselves in exile. Their episcopal flights were no testament to their virtue but within pro-Nicene Christian memory of fifth-century ecclesiastical historians, the exiles of anti-Nicene bishops, such as Eusebius of Nicomedia, were remembered as evidence of guilt. To show how this memory-making exercise took place we will turn to the imperial landscape and assess how the space someone was exiled from greatly shaped how exile was deemed either orthodox or heretical.

Late antique clerical exile is traditionally investigated from the perspective of banished cleric or banishing emperor and council. This article investigates the relationships between banished clerics and imperial women. Drawing on data collected by the Migration of Faith: Clerical Exile in Late Antiquity project, as well as quantitative methods such as social network analysis, I discuss how late antique authors exploited these (at times fabricated) relationships for their narrative agendas. Focussing on the case study of imperial women as patrons of banished clerics, I draw three conclusions: First, there was a constantly negative attitude towards involvement of imperial women in clerical exile throughout Late Antiquity. Second, there was, nonetheless, variation in this attitude across time and genres. Negative portrayal of imperial women engaged in cases of clerical exile peaked in the fifth century and in Nicene and Chalcedonian sources. Third, positive portrayal appears only towards the end of the period, and in sixth-century Miaphysite hagiography. I suggest that the identified differences were due to genre, but also responded to real changes in the institutional roles of imperial women over the course of late antiquity.

During the reign of Constantius II (337–361), a number of Christian bishops were exiled from their sees, reportedly for their opposition to the emperor's “Homoian” theological position. Several of them (Athanasius of Alexandria, Hilary of Poitiers, Lucifer of Cagliari, Eusebius of Vercelli) responded to their institutional insecurity and geographical isolation by writing accounts of their experiences in a range of textual forms: letters to individuals or groups, historical narratives with quoted documents, or formal invectives. This article explores the variety of ways in which these examples of exilic literature construct different forms of communities in order to weave supportive narratives around the authors and their allies: Hilary and Lucifer emphasized their possession of parrhesia both within and through their texts; Athanasius constructed a network of opposition to heresy with himself as its focus; Eusebius presented himself as the lynchpin of a north Italian community which he could still lead from exile in Palestine. Through inscribing particular roles onto both their readers and other figures discussed within the texts, these exiled authors sought to foster their own reputations as leaders of these communities and arbiters of membership, thereby bolstering their positions at a time when their authority was under serious threat.

This contribution examines how models of exile were adopted and adapted in non-Chalcedonian communities following the establishment of a parallel Severan episcopal hierarchy under Archbishop Peter IV of Alexandria (576–577) and the consolidation of the Severan non-Chalcedonian church under his successor Damian (578–c. 607). Peter's predecessor Theodosius spent most of his long episcopacy (536–566) exiled in Constantinople, where he died, and Peter himself contended with three rivals to the patriarchate of Alexandria. Drawing on literary, documentary, and archaeological sources, I explore how the memory of non-Chalcedonian heroes was mobilized partly in order to validate the uncomfortable truth that members of the new network of bishops did not always live in their capitals, but in local monasteries, just as Peter and Damian did not live in Alexandria, but in the Enaton, nine miles to the west. After a brief survey of the role of exile in the Alexandrian Church, I concentrate on the literary representation of the appropriate places for exile in monastic literature, in particular the identification of the “deserts” and “mountains,” “caves” and “holes” of the wandering Hebrews (Heb 11.38) with the monastic landscape of Egypt in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. At this time, monastic habitation of natural caves, gallery quarries, and rock-cut tombs on the desert escarpment above the Nile Valley flood plain flourished. Finally, I survey the archaeological evidence of one region where bishops appointed by Damian settled, and how they put their models of exile into practice.