The Syriac tradition presents an exceptional opportunity to investigate how the people of a late Roman frontier articulated local community affiliation against the backdrop of the larger Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. Over the last decade, Syrian/Syriac identity and Roman identity in late antique Syria-Mesopotamia have emerged as topics of increasing interest. In concentrating on ethnicity, however, studies of specifically local affiliations have generally left unexamined the other modes of group identification which may have been equally or more salient. This essay fills that gap by excavating non-ethnic means of constructing local and regional identity in three Syriac texts written in and about Edessa in the pivotal century around 500 CE: the Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite , the Chronicle of Edessa (540) , and Euphemia and the Goth . Across their differences in date and genre, these three texts demonstrate a convergent set of strategies for reconciling Edessa and its neighbors to the Roman Empire at large. Crucially, all three project notions of local belonging which focus not on ethnic markers but on particular places: in the first instance, on the city. Drawing from cultural geography’s interdependent concept of “place,” the essay shows how in these texts local identity emerges from the interaction of city, church, and empire; Edessa’s connections to the wider Roman world serve not to negate but to articulate its specificity as a community. Moreover, such place-based means of identification could be extended to frame larger regional communities too, as Ps.-Joshua does in its most distinctive moments.

Late Antiquity witnessed a revolution in textuality. Numerous new technologies transformed the practices through which readers accessed written knowledge. Editors reconfigured existing works in order to facilitate new modes of access and new possibilities of knowledge. Despite recent investigations of late ancient knowing, tables of contents have been neglected. Addressing this lacuna, I analyze two examples from the early fourth century: Porphyry of Tyre’s outline of the Enneads in his Life of Plotinus and Eusebius of Caesarea’s Gospel canons. Using tables of contents, Porphyry and Eusebius reconfigured inherited corpora; their creative interventions generate and constrain possibilities of reading—sometimes in ways which run against the grain of the assembled material. I thus argue that Porphyry and Eusebius employed tables of contents to structure textual knowledge—and readers’ access to it—by embracing the dual possibilities of order and creativity in order to offer new texts to their readers. This dual function—of affording structure and inviting creative use—was significant in the construction of composite works which characterized much late ancient intellectual production. The examples of Porphyry and Eusebius illuminate broader late ancient practices of collecting and cataloguing textual knowledge.

This article identifies a military prison ( carcer castrensis ) in the Roman legionary fortress at Lambaesis (Tazoult, Algeria) and contextualizes the space among North African carceral practices evidenced in epigraphic, papyrological, and literary sources of the first through fourth centuries CE. The identification is made on the basis of architectural comparanda and previously unnoticed inscriptional evidence which demonstrate that the space under the Sanctuary of the Standards in the principia was both built as a prison and used that way in antiquity. The broader discussion highlights the ubiquity of carceral spaces and practices in the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean, and elucidates some of the underlying practices and ideologies of ancient incarceration.