Processions, power, and community identity: East and West

This comparative chapter looks at the different ways in which processions (whether liturgical, triumphal, or otherwise) strengthen the social cohesion among participants and onlookers alike. As such processions are unfolding, they become flashpoints for imperial or religious authority, highly public events that serve to remind everybody involved of the social and hierarchical makeup of society. At the same time, their prescriptions and descriptions—everything from panegyrics exalting the organization to the routes to be followed within and around a city—latch on to long traditions and emphasize that any given procession is, in fact, part of a much longer process. In the right hands, processions may anchor a community to an even larger social whole by means of the persons, institutions, and buildings involved. Conversely, their highly public nature also makes them exponents for social change, whether at the hands of the authorities themselves or of those who find themselves on the outside looking in. Comparing the uses and development of this phenomenon in both the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, this chapter sheds new light on the many practices of community in the (post-)Roman world—at times uniform but also highly diversified by necessity.