The city of Ephesus experienced a marked civic transformation in Late Antiquity. After having centered its settlements and economic fortunes on its proximity to a deep-water harbor for over a millenium, late antique Ephesus gradually shifted to an inland, fortified settlement on Ayasoluk Hill. While several factors undoubtedly informed this civic reorientation, the most commonly cited impetus for Ephesus’s late antique reorientation was the infilling of its deep-water harbor. This article argues that, in addition to this environmental cause, an important cultural shift correspondingly informed Ephesus’s late antique reconfigurations. Namely, the emergence and development of the tomb of John on Ayasoluk Hill, informed by an array of literary legends associating the apostle with the city, increasingly positioned this site as a cultic and economic focal point in Late Antiquity. This article argues that an important early strand in this cultural fabric was the Acts of John , a collection of apocryphal tales that narrate John’s exploits in Ephesus. Significantly, the Acts of John articulates a “counter-cartography” that disassociates Christian identity from prominent Ephesian cultic sites and accentuates the importance of spaces “outside the city” of Ephesus, including and especially the tomb of John. Through its own circulation as well as its influence on later Johannine narratives, the early Acts of John helped inform a shift in the cultural cartographies of Ephesus, where Greco-Roman polytheistic spaces were gradually devalued in favor of Christian sites, the tomb of John on Ayasoluk chief among them.

Natural disasters feature prominently among the topics that preoccupied late ancient homilists. Earthquakes, droughts, pandemics, and other catastrophes both inflicted untold suffering on their communities and raised pressing questions of interpretation: to whom ought Christians ascribe the origin of these scourges? what message or lessons did they convey? and how could their impact be reconciled with the existence of a loving and powerful deity, intimately invested in the well-being of Christian communities? To address these questions, homilists across the Greek- and Syriac-speaking world turned to a wide range of textual and cultural resources. Many of the resulting works nevertheless coalesce around one central theme: that of children and the child/parent dyad. Authors turned to the familiar tropes of parents protecting, punishing, or educating their offspring—and the latter’s ambivalent characterization as both vulnerable and intractable in ancient discourse—to craft “disaster mythologies,” narratives designed to make sense of disaster and thus effect desirable responses on the part of the speakers’ audiences. This article explores this topos in the writings of three late ancient orators: the fourth-century Syriac homilist Cyrillona; his Greek contemporary Gregory of Nyssa; and the sixth-century bishop of Antioch, Severus.

In 636 CE, Roman and Arab contingents met at the river Yarmouk. After days of fighting, the Roman army suffered a disastrous defeat. The provinces of Palestine and Syria, which had been reconquered from Persian occupation only a few years prior, were again lost to enemy forces. The emperor Heraclius (610–641), who had coordinated the defense in person, left Syria in haste. A passage in Nicephorus’ Breviarium covers what happened in Constantinople in the aftermath of the battle: It tells a seemingly strange tale of Heraclius being so afraid of water that he would not enter the capital until a bridge of boats was built over the Bosporus. In scholarship this tale is often reproduced uncritically. Deconstructing the passage, I argue that the image of a mentally frail Heraclius is an instance of political satire that exposed the emperor’s weak position and ridiculed his attempts to cope with the destabilizing consequences of Roman defeat. When seen from a structural perspective, it becomes clear that Heraclius was not afraid of water but intended the bridge of boats to serve as a triumphalist statement at a moment when the situation in Constantinople threatened to slip out of his control.

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.