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.