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.

As a rule in the historical tradition, over time the larger cast of characters behind a series of events, the king and his court, is distilled down to the person of a single actor, the king, while his ministers and lieutenants are consigned to oblivion. Alexander the Great is by and large an exception to this rule. His Companions play important roles in his reign and campaigns, his character is developed to a great extent in his relations with them, and they rise to prominence in their own right as his successors; they form an indispensable part of the memory of Alexander. This is certainly true of the account of Alexander in the Chronographia of John Malalas, the seminal work of the Byzantine chronicle tradition. The men surrounding Alexander are referred to repeatedly, in marked contrast to the other historical personages who feature in the Chronographia . The terms that Malalas uses of Alexander’s Companions, however, are unusual, and require some interpretation. And the prominence of his Companions in this narrative seems intended to contribute to an essentially, but subtly negative depiction of Alexander by recalling the most disreputable incidents in Alexander’s career, which usually involved his Companions.

This article sheds light on a hitherto unexplored phenomenon that alters our picture of Byzantine monasticism: the monastic culture of the Black Mountain outside Antioch. From 969-1084, the Black Mountain thrived as a destination for a variety of Chalcedonian monks: Greek-speaking Romans, Arabic-speaking Melkites, Georgians, and Armenians. I illustrate the prosperity of monastic life on the Black Mountain, the scholarly activity flourishing in and between languages, and the networks connecting the mountain to monasteries inside and outside of Byzantium. In this paper, I examine three bodies of source material: manuscripts produced at the Black Mountain, texts produced by its scholars, and the letters of Nikon of the Black Mountain. Colophons in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, and Georgian manuscripts display the active scribal culture of these monasteries. Scholars centered at St. Symeon produced scores of translations from Greek into Arabic and Georgian that illustrate the lasting impact of this multilingual intellectual atmosphere. Nikon’s letters provide the basis for a cultural history of Antiochene monasticism. From these and other sources, I show that the Black Mountain was a major hub in middle Byzantine monastic networks. At the same time when Athos was assuming a primary role in the western Orthodox monastic world, the Black Mountain was performing a similar function in the east.

A large dossier of primary sources survives for Symeon the Stylite the Younger from Late Antiquity. These sources include not only hagiographical evidence, but also archaeological remains from his cult site, homilies, and at least one letter. They offer insight into the varied voices which shaped Symeon’s identity, sanctity, and ministry in the sixth and early seventh centuries CE. The state of scholarship on these sources is uneven, however, with the result that scholars have primarily studied the saint and his cult through the lens of the hagiographic material, the Life of Symeon Stylites the Younger in particular. In order to lay the foundation for a full inquiry into the saint and his cult, this article disentangles the dossier of evidence on Symeon in Late Antiquity. It introduces each source in chronological order; provides an overview of authorship, date, and the state of scholarship for each source; and makes preliminary recommendations for paths forward. It is meant to be a guide for art historians and archaeologists unfamiliar with the sizeable literary corpus, textual scholars who do not often work with material sources, and, for both groups, an introduction to problems in the dossier. It encourages scholars to treat each source on its own terms and re-evaluate the rich interconnections between the textual and archaeological evidence.