From Late Antiquity until now, eastern Roman Syria has conjured up exotic, ‘‘oriental’’ images for western writers. For those, then and now, accustomed to the known classics of the Greek east and the Latin west, the predominantly Greek-speaking Syrian city of Antioch has been a familiar landmark of ecclesiastical and political power, while the predominantly Syriac-speaking Syrian city of Edessa shimmers uncertainly on the edge of the unknown. Although they were both Syrians, the Greek-writing John Chrysostom (c. ad 347-407) stands solidly in conversation with his Greek and Latin contemporaries, while the Syriac-writing Ephrem (c. AD 306-73) has remained an obscure figure in western scholarship, shrouded behind the impenetrable veil of a language that never became a sine qua non of western erudition. Syria in Late Antiquity thus stands firmly planted between western distinctions of east from west - part of the Mediterranean world, but on its eastern periphery; partially Hellenized, but still adamantly Syrian. Syrian cities that produced predominantly Greek-speaking authors have for the most part remained influential to scholarship and, for that very reason, this chapter focuses primarily on Syriac-speaking Syria. The goal, however, will be to begin to bring these two overlapping Syrias back into conversation not only with each other, but with the larger Roman-Byzantine context to which they contributed. While the boundaries of ‘‘Late Antiquity’’ are notoriously flexible, I shall examine here the period from the end of Edessa’s independent kingship and the growing political control of Rome in the third century AD to the region’s conquest by Muslim armies from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh. Both series of events mark significant political changes in Syria and had long-lasting effects on its culture.
From an overemphasis on the significance of Syriac’s linguistic relation to Jesus’ Aramaic to Peter Brown’s flamboyant description of Syria as ‘‘notoriously the Wild and Woolly West of ascetic heresy’’ (Brown 1971a: 84), eastern Syria has played a colorful but caricatured role in western scholarship. It has traditionally emerged as alternately too ‘‘Jewish,’’ too ‘‘pagan,’’ or too ‘‘heretical’’ to be Christian by western
A Companion to Late Antiquity. Edited by Philip Rousseau © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-11980-1
Standards of orthodoxy, while Syrians themselves were commonly described as too inferior, effeminately eastern, hedonistic, and morally suspect to be properly ‘‘Roman’’ (Juv. 3. 62-6; SHA, M. Ant., Verus; Lucian, Bis Accusatus 27, 34; Liv. Ab urbe condita 38. 17; see Isaac 1998b, 2004). Contrary to that historical emphasis on difference, however, late antique Syria was integrally connected with its western neighbors - more so, in fact, than in the previous or following centuries. We must acknowledge Syria’s relationship with the Roman and Byzantine Empires, neither denying its individuality nor making it so foreign that it does not have a place within the empire that was its home. Such an acknowledgment not only proves us more faithful to the primary sources, but also enriches our understanding of the period and of the broader empire. The example of Syria reminds us that places once dismissed as being so marginal that they were insignificant are in fact fundamental to a full understanding of the rhetoric and politics of Late Antiquity. At the same time, it demonstrates that even those individual places and people understood to be normative were also local and unique, tied to particular contexts. I attempt in this chapter to provide, therefore, an introduction to eastern Syria in Late Antiquity, while also demonstrating the advantages of restoring it to conversations about the empire as a whole. I shall not only begin to scrape away for westerners late antique Syria’s sometimes misleadingly mysterious facade, but also provide the framework for a richer and more subtle reconstruction of the culture, theology, and politics of the Roman and early Byzantine Empires.
World History
