How Did All These Barbarians Get Here? The (Im)Permeable Gates of the Caucasus in Late Antiquity in Jerome’s Letter 77 and Claudian’s Against Rufinus

Abstract

The main pass through the central Caucasus Mountains, the present-day Dariali Gorge, had various names in ancient Greco-Latin sources: the Gates of the Caucasus, the Caspian Gates, Gates of Alexander, Sarmatian Gates. These Gates represented the frontier between the known and unknown worlds and were understood as an impermeable barrier to the barbarian groups from the Eurasian Steppe. This paper demonstrates the intersection between rhetoric and historicity and explains how these tropes about the Gates of the Caucasus were recycled in Late Antiquity and given new meaning in the context of the Hunnic invasion of the Near East in A.D. 395-398. This paper argues that Jerome’s Letter 77 and Claudian’s Against Rufinus used the perception of this gate as an impermeable barrier to further their literary agendas. Jerome used this perception to highlight the gravity of the Hunnic incursion to justify why Fabiola, a close friend and a devout Christian, had left Jerome’s side and returned to Rome before completing her pilgrimage. The literary associations of the Gates of the Caucasus also supported Jerome’s interpretation of the Hunnic incursion as divine punishment and an invitation for repentance. Claudian employed this same perception for a very different purpose: to slander a political opponent.