| Abstract | Paper -a:
In May of 363, a flurry of climatic and seismic events befell Jerusalem. The resulting architectural destruction, however, has been much debated. This is because the events coincided with an attempt to rebuild the Jewish Temple. In this paper, I examine how natural disaster took on ideological significance in the physical and conceptual development of Jerusalem following the events of 363. I examine the responses of the Temple rebuilding episode, which primarily come (disproportionately so) from Christian perspective. The incorporation of miracle, polemic, and eschatology into the retelling of the incident provided momentum for further Christianisation of the urban scene.
Paper -b:
Floods have been one of the perennial problems in Mecca. This paper explores how the religious elite coped with the floods to recover from damage and avoid a future disaster. Through analysis of records of the floods in chronicles, this paper reveals that the religious elite played an important role in evacuating people, continuing religious rituals, supervising workers in cleaning up the mess, and digging up roads trying to keep water out of the Sacred Mosque, although they never succeeded in preventing a similar disaster. This paper sheds light on how people struggled with recurring natural disasters.
Paper -c:
Rutilius Namatianus' poem De reditu suo was written a few years after the devastation of Rome in 410. It has been read as a nostalgic song about the past greatness of Rome in a climate of senatorial escapism. This thesis will be revisioned by analysing the song as the literary impression of a collective resilience strategy of the traditional Western aristocracies. Conservative Western Roman èlite opted for facing the crisis by rebuilding the 'beatitudo temporum' of urban structures and consolidating the ideology of the 'Urbs aeterna' whereas increased ascetic movements can be seen as a theological strategy to overcome 410 individually.
Paper -d:
When Salvian of Marseille writes his De Gubernatione Dei, the (Western) Roman empire is on the brink of military collapse. The present paper will build on the thesis that this treatise, while seeing the cause of this catastrophe in the moral decadence of his time and reading the course of events as a sign of God's providence, can be read as an attempt of contrasting with each other two different resilience strategies adopted by Roman Gaul. And so, while cities like Treves petitioned the emperor to re-establish circus-games, Salvianus opts for the persuasive power of his call to repentance.
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