From the Editor

Abstract

From the Editor Andy Cain This robust issue, which features twelve pioneering studies by fourteen different authors, typifies JLA's mission to showcase cutting-edge scholarship on all aspects of the late antique world. Collectively spanning the third through eighth centuries, these articles whisk us off to numerous locales, such as Egypt, the Middle East, Gaul, Italy, and the Balkans. They take deep dives into a broad swath of the material culture of the period, and they interface with written sources in an array of languages (Greek, Coptic, Latin, Syriac, and Arabic). Their disciplinary coverage, moreover, is comprehensive, as they make noteworthy advances in everything from papyrology, epigraphy, textual criticism, numismatics, and archaeology, to the history of late antique society, politics, economics, literature, law, religion, medicine and art. Anna Dolganov and Éric Rebillard provide a critical edition, translation, commentary, and interpretive essay on the well-known papyrus P.Mil.Vogl. VI 287. After arguing against a recent identification of it as the transcript of a trial of Christians, they propose that it records not a trial at all but instead a preliminary hearing for an official accused of maladministration, and they also suggest that this fragmentary papyrus belongs to the archive of a prominent office-holding family from the Arsinoite nome. Robert Chenault establishes 369 as the date of Symmachus's embassy to the imperial court at Trier, where he addressed panegyrics to Valentinian I and Gratian, and he gives us a nuanced analysis of this embassy which yields valuable new insights into not only Symmachus's career but also relations between the senate and imperial court at the time. Duncan MacRae examines the anonymous fourth-century De excidio Hierosolymitano, which often is misunderstood as a mere translation of Josephus's historiography. Focusing on an episode within this work (the sexual assault of the Roman aristocrat Paulina in the temple of Isis), MacRae compellingly demonstrates that its author subtly reworks Josephan material to engage with polemic against paganism and with issues surrounding aristocratic marriage and asceticism in contemporary Rome. In an addendum to his substantial 2017 JLA article, Michael Kulikowski sheds further light on the corpus of bronze tesserae of urban and praetorian prefects from late and post-imperial Italy by adducing four previously unknown tesserae (and noting the re-appearance of two more thought to be lost) which introduce one new prefect to the fifth-century fasti. Matthew Cobb considers why the major Egyptian port city of Berenike, after a period of decline, witnessed a sharp upsurge in trade activity during Late Antiquity. [End Page 175] Taking into account recently discovered epigraphic and archaeological evidence, he argues that this revival was tied closely to the Blemmyes's local influence and control of Berenike. Andrei Gandila challenges the prevailing method of studying coin finds in the Balkans, with its heavy reliance on written sources, and proposes a stronger focus on material culture. As he cogently shows, the archaeological and numismatic evidence exposes the local economy as an artificial construct driven by the region's heavy militarization as well as by the state-controlled annona dispatched to the garrisons defending the Danube frontier during the long sixth century. Karen Britt and Ra'anan Boustan forge a new approach to the famous Elephant Mosaic from the fifth-century synagogue at Huqoq in Galilee. Establishing that it evokes a historical episode from the Hellenistic period and is not based on a biblical story (as usually is thought), they make the case that Jewish communities in Galilee had interests in the non-biblical past and actively engaged with broader cultural and artistic trends than scholars hitherto have assumed to be the case. Jordan Pickett challenges current scholarly orthodoxy about why Roman thermae were abandoned or repurposed by the sixth or early seventh century, and he insightfully argues that the Roman state phased them out in part to curtail social unrest and violence for which these grand public baths increasingly had become a breeding ground. Janet Wade explores another source of popular unrest, the circus factions and their partisans. Whereas most scholars have focused on their land-based activities, she adduces fourth- to seventh-century sources documenting their maritime violence (piracy, etc.) and affirms just...