»The battalions of impiety«. Victor of Vita’s rhetorical strategies and perspective on the Vandal migration as a religious event
JbAC 63 (2020) Seiten: 161-177
The present article analyzes Victor of Vita’s depiction of the Vandal migration into North Africa, focusing on its intertextual elements and rhetorical strategies. It argues that Victor particularly emphasized the religious aspects of what was essentially a military event, the overtaking of Roman North Africa by the Vandals. The context in which he wrote, the immediate aftermath of the council of Carthage of 484, which led to the coercion of Nicene Christians by the Vandal authorities, largely explains his view of the Vandal period as a time of continuous persecution of his Christian faction. Victor retroactively applied this view of the Vandals – »the battalions of impiety« – to the migration period, the article argues, and used literary means to implement such a view. In the end, Victor’s text is evidence of the Nicene reaction to the Vandal migration, rather than of the migration itself, because he exaggerated the religious elements associated with the newcomers (heretics who he saw as a threat to his own community of believers) and this aspect which he estimated the most important dominated his depiction of events.
Éric Fournier