Mocheresis, Mucheirisis, Mechlessus, Mochora? Toponym identification challenges

Review: <i>The Rise of Coptic: Egyptian versus Greek in Late Antiquity</i>, by Jean-Luc Fournet

Review: <i>Religious Violence in the Ancient World: From Classical Athens to Late Antiquity</i>, edited by Jitse H. F. Dijkstra and Christian R. Raschle

Reviewed by: Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity by Jason Moralee Raymond Van Dam Jason Moralee. Rome's Holy Mountain: The Capitoline Hill in Late Antiquity. Oxford Studies in Late Antiquity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xxv, 278. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-049227-4. The symbolic high point of ancient Rome was the Capitoline Hill, crowned with the great Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. In Vergil's Aeneid the hero had been granted a glimpse of the glorious future of the site, "once bristling with woodland thickets, but now golden." For centuries the hill and the temple would represent the power and the eternity of the Roman empire. Then, after the collapse of empire, the challenge of Christianity, and the incessant conflicts among medieval states, it became difficult to conjure up that shiny past. In the fifteenth century the antiquarian Poggio Bracciolini mourned the reversal of fortune for the hill and its monuments, "once golden, but now returned to thickets and brambles." In the past the hill had been a caput, the head of the empire; now, Poggio lamented, it had become, literally, the bottom, spattered with poop (12). Jason Moralee's book about the "Temple Mount" of Rome is another sterling contribution to the recent interest in memory studies among classicists and ancient historians. The coverage of his book stretches from the early Roman Republic to the Renaissance, with an emphasis on late antiquity. Part of his narrative is the physical transformation of the Capitoline Hill, with the construction and deconstruction of buildings, monuments, administrative offices, and residential neighborhoods. But his primary concern is the accompanying cognitive transformation. The hill was not simply a place, but also a hermeneutics, "a way of representing and critiquing the exercise of social power, the morality of rulers, the authority of divine forces, and the failures of the state" (121). The discussion of so many topics and themes is often split among various chapters and therefore sometimes a bit jumbled. One important topic is the significance of processions. In the Republic and the early empire, ascending the hill to sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter was the culmination of triumphal parades and [End Page 371] ceremonies of investiture: for a moment the victorious emperors were kings of the mountain. By the early fourth century, however, emperors stopped climbing the hill, and in the culture wars between Christians and pagans Constantine would be denounced for abandoning the Capitol. When Christian emperors visited, the routes of their public processions instead included the Church of St. Peter. Another important topic is the transition from temples to churches. In Moralee's evocative summation, "the old temples of the Roman world were like decommissioned nuclear power reactors: they were systematically closed, cleaned up of contaminants, and eventually demolished" (62). Christian apologists were only too happy to classify the earlier destructions of the Temple of Jupiter as examples of "the Christian God's righteous anger" (183). In late antiquity the agents of that divine wrath were barbarians and Greeks. In the mid-fifth century the king of the Vandals sailed away with half of the gilded roof tiles from the temple; in the later sixth century the first church was established on the hill, whose founder Moralee argues to have been Narses, Justinian's general in Italy. By then the Capitoline Hill was becoming a Christian heritage site (102). It was also incorporated into "a new Christian history of the Roman people" (140). According to this alternative perspective, for centuries the ancient gods had been asleep or ineffective. In 390 b.c. only the honking of a goose had saved the hill from being captured by the Gauls; in 410 a.d. the Goths had sacked the city. These disasters confirmed that the most reliable sanctuaries were now the shrines of the apostles Peter and Paul. In this "triumphalist Christian memory culture" (139) the only triumphs worth celebrating on the hill commemorated the victories of saints and martyrs. Already in antiquity remembering the Capitoline Hill and the Temple of Jupiter was a powerful way of rewriting history, and Moralee's book is itself a splendid evocation of this Capitole imaginaire. Another...

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...

Late Roman Law and the Quranic Punishments for Adultery

The Byzantine-Islamic Transition in Palestine: An Archaeological Approach

Reviewed by: Dialoguing in Late Antiquity by Averil Cameron Maria Doerfler Averil Cameron Dialoguing in Late Antiquity Washington, D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2014 Pp. 98. $19.95. Did the ascendancy of Christianity in the later parts of late antiquity spell the end of dialogue? This is the question Averil Cameron’s most recent monograph, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity, seeks to address.1 The answer, of course, hinges in large part on how “dialogue” ought to be defined: an open-ended intellectual give-and-take, in which both parties are engaged in a shared process of discernment, or a somewhat more expansive understanding that includes exchanges which, while dialogical in form, might reflect a somewhat less “open” spirit. The former definition has shaped accounts of the “end of dialogue” in late antiquity, including those of Richard Lim and Daniel Boyarin. Cameron’s volume, by contrast, relies upon the latter, arguing that to do otherwise gives too much credit to classical dialogues and too little to those of late antiquity. In short, “Contrary to the idea that discussion was ‘shut down’ in the fifth and sixth century, what happened was the very opposite” (9): dialogues proliferated in both number and diversity, ranging from the philosophical, to the self-consciously interreligious, to the highly rhetorically stylized. Rather than focusing upon any one of these categories, the book casts a wide net on the premise that studying the genre’s seemingly disparate representatives in conjunction with one another will yield important insights for any of its subsets. [End Page 141] The resulting study attests to Cameron’s characteristic erudition; its bibliography, weighing in at nearly a quarter of the entire volume, is bound to serve as a starting point for the many future studies whose necessity the book highlights. At the same time, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity aims to introduce audiences of all levels of expertise to intriguing ancient texts. After an opening chapter that surveys the status quaestionis of dialogue in late ancient studies, Cameron accordingly turns first to the historical evidence for debate and dialogue in this era (Chapter Two), and then to three literary exemplars of these practices (Chapter Three). Of these, the dialogues of Methodius, including the well-known Symposium, are likely to be familiar to students of late antiquity. By contrast, Theodoret’s Eranistes, a collection of three dialogues concerning the nature of Christ, and the self-styled pre-Islamic Dialexis between Gregentius of Taphar and Herban, a learned Jew, promise glimpses into more obscure literary territory. The texts are chosen for their diversity rather than their coherence; indeed, aside from their dialogical format, little connects these writings with one another. Yet each of them shows traces of the complex intersection between rhetorical and historical, the production of text and the production of discourse “on the ground” that characterize late ancient dialogue. The lines evidently blur, yet Cameron’s analysis demonstrates once again that orthodoxy remained a moving target and that late ancient, even Byzantine, dialogues were not mere literary shell-games. Amidst all its diversity, “Christian dialogue had a purpose; it was not dialogue for dialogue’s sake” (55). Beyond its substantive importance for historians of late antiquity, however, Cameron’s contribution offers valuable challenges on two additional fronts. First, while the book works out its central argument at least initially as a critique of its predecessors, Dialoguing in Late Antiquity strives to re-open conversation rather than providing a definitive answer to the role of dialogue in late antiquity. As such, the book can be read as an invitation to the study of a fabulously diverse and still insufficiently well-considered range of sources. By the same token, Cameron’s determination to cast a wide net, considering sources from classical antiquity through the Byzantine era and from a range of Eastern languages, calls attention to one of the central methodological challenges facing late ancient historians. In recent decades, students of late antiquity have begun to forge connections with a number of disciplines previously considered discrete including, inter alia, Syriac and Byzantine studies. The ever-greater integration of the fields is surely salutary, even as it raises questions about...

:<i>La villa dopo la villa 2: Trasformazione di un sistema insediativo ed economico nell’Italia centrale tra tarda Antichità e Medioevo</i>

Reviewed by: The Mirage of the Saracen. Christians and Nomads in the Sinai Peninsula in Late Antiquity by Walter D. Ward Jitse H. F. Dijkstra Walter D. Ward The Mirage of the Saracen. Christians and Nomads in the Sinai Peninsula in Late Antiquity Transformation of the Classical Heritage 54 Oakland: University of California Press, 2015 Pp. xxvii + 193. $65.00. Following in the footsteps of Daniel F. Caner's disclosure (History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai, 2010) of some of the most important sources for our understanding of the history of the late antique Sinai, Walter Ward has now written a synthesis on the topic. The book, which is a revised version of a 2008 thesis, focuses on the interactions between nomads and Christians in the area, in particular how the negative portrayal of these nomads in some of the sources contributed to Christian identity formation. As such it belongs to a growing number of studies on the Arabs before the rise of Islam (see e.g., J. H. F. Dijkstra, G. Fisher, eds., Inside and Out. Interactions between Rome and the Peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian Frontiers in Late Antiquity, 2014; G. Fisher, ed., Arabs and Empires before the Rise of Islam, 2015). In the Introduction, Ward situates his investigation within postcolonial theory. Chapter One discusses the terminology used for nomads in the Near East, especially "Saracen," and the way in which the literary sources often characterize them as uncivilized, "pagan," even violent, despite the fact that the situation must have been more complex. Chapter Two charts the rise of Christianity in the Sinai. The first monks arrived in the course of the fourth century, soon followed by pilgrims (most famously Egeria) in search of biblical places. In the fifth and sixth centuries, Christianity expanded on the peninsula, culminating in the fortified monastery that Justinian built around the Burning Bush, known today as St Catherine's. Chapter Three demonstrates how Christians appropriated the landscape of the Sinai by associating sites with biblical events and locations. There was not always agreement, however, on the exact location of sites, as is evinced by Egeria and the Piacenza pilgrim, who situate Elim between Clysma and Mount Sinai, whereas Ammonius and Cosmas locate it on the coast at Rhaithou. In Chapter Four Ward turns to the martyrdom accounts, mainly Pseudo-Nilus's Narrations and Ammonius's Report, which describe nomadic attacks on monks, sometimes in graphic detail. Chapter Five argues that these accounts, even if highly rhetorical, had the effect that the "Saracens" were seen as a threat to security and caused a direct response from the imperial authorities. This is witnessed, according to Ward, in a growing number of military installations, especially in the sixth century, and the construction of Justinian's monastery itself. Taking a wider perspective, Chapter Six shows how the image of the "Saracen" was transferred to Muslims after the Islamic conquest and thus how pre-Islamic conceptions shaped later Christian views of the Muslim "other." This is a clear and pleasantly written book that is full of interesting and original ideas. It should be noted, however, that there is not a whole lot that is new in the interpretation of the texts compared with Caner's book. For instance, for an in-depth discussion of the Sinai martyr inscription found at St Catherine's [End Page 492] (100–102), one should rather turn to Caner (51–52, 60–63). Strikingly absent is any mention of the Syriac History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Qenṭos and Priest John of Edessa, which describes the holy men's capture by Arabs on their way to Mount Sinai (ed. and trans. by H. Arneson, E. Fiano, C. Luckritz Marquis, K. Smith, 2010). Caner (48n207) mentions this text but could not yet make use of the edition. Introductions of general topics, such as that of monasticism (45), are not always fully satisfactory. Most importantly, even though Ward in other cases makes some illuminating comparisons across space and time, the comparison between the situation in the Sinai and that after 9/11 is off the mark, as too many different factors are at stake in each case...

A fifth season of excavation at the late Roman rural estate of Gerace (Enna province, Sicily) took place in 2018. A rectangular kiln of the fifth century ad, partially excavated in 2017, was confirmed as having internal walls of mud brick, hardened by successive firings. It was reduced in size in a secondary period. Investigation was conducted on another of the vertical shafts, extraordinarily hacked through the thickness of parts of the mud-brick walls of this kiln in the sixth century, in order to create rudimentary furnaces, but their function remains unknown. In the bath-house of ca. 380 ad, the rest of the frigidarium, partly investigated in 2017, was uncovered. The geometric mosaic floor has an inscription on all four sides, uniquely so in the Roman Empire; it names the estate as the praedia Philippianorum. Roundels on the mosaic include monograms of ‘Asclepiades’ and ‘Capitolini’, both also named in the inscription. The text of the inscription is discussed, and possible interpretations of what it might mean are offered. Excavation found that the walls of the cold room were never finished and a horseshoe-shaped cold pool on its north side was never installed, suggesting that the baths were left incomplete, although they were used. Further evidence was found of serious earthquake damage that occurred in the second half of the fifth century. It may have happened at night if burn marks on one part of the mosaic come from dislodged torches; they and a glass lamp suggest that night bathing was practised, in line with its increasing popularity elsewhere in late antiquity. An attempt was made to repair the baths after the earthquake, but this was aborted while still in full swing, and the baths were abandoned. A small part of the early Byzantine settlement which replaced the elite buildings on the estate soon afterwards, was excavated nearby; three phases were identified, belonging to the sixth and seventh centuries. Five appendices present evidence of kiln temperature, animal bones, carbonized seeds, and wood charcoal, as revealed during the 2018 season, as well as a selection of pottery from key deposits which aids the dating of individual phases.

<i>The Material Fall of Roman Britain, 300–525 CE</i> By Robin Fleming. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2021. Pp. 303. $45. ISBN 978-0-8122-5244-6 (cloth).

When Christians in Gaul became ill, a variety of options were available to them in the sixth and seventh centuries. Some families, mainly those residing in cities south of the Loire or those presumably of means in more isolated locations, sought the assistance of physicians.1 Severe maladies required visits by doctors who diagnosed diseases by means of patients’ urine and pulse, and then chose the appropriate course of action from among a variety of techniques, including bleeding, cauterization, pharmaceutical remedies, dietetic regimens, the application of prosthetic devices, and surgery. While there is plentiful evidence of practicing physicians throughout late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the number of theoreticians in western Europe with extensive knowledge of classical medicine had declined dramatically.2 The last major compilation written in Gaul based on the work of ancient and contemporary Greek authors before the high Middle Ages was the Gallo-Roman Marcellus of Bordeaux’s De medicamentis, written for the sons of the Emperor Theodosius II circa 408.3 This treatise gave extensive attention to the role of herbs in healing as had been done most famously in the first century by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History and Dioscorides in his De materia medica. The latter was a Greek pharmaceutical text translated to Latin some time before the sixth century.4

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Interpreting Magic and Divination in the Ancient Near East and Magic and Divination in Ancient Israel

This volume is focused on a critical period in European history, the fifth and sixth centuries, when social and religious disturbances were rife. The focus of the research is episcopal crisis management in Late Antiquity, based principally on bishops' letters in Greek and Latin from the fifth and sixth centuries. Population displacement in this period was usually the result of religious dissent and/or barbarian invasion. Catastrophic natural events included drought, famine, earthquakes, epidemic disease, and climate change. The major new religious controversies of our period were the Nestorian controversy, the Euty-chian heresy and so-called monophysitism, the Acacian schism, the Ori-genist controversy and the Three Chapters dispute. Secular defensores were appointed to protect the poor from tax extortion, but these were often guilty of abuse against those they were supposed to protect. The various crises reviewed led to the eventual breakdown of classical structures of social and financial dependence. Keywords: episcopal crisis; Late Antiquity; natural disasters; population displacement; religious disputes; social abuses

BOOK REVIEWS 503 Byzantium and theArabs in the Sixth Century. Volume I, Part !.Political and Military History, and Volume I, Part 2: Ecclesiastical History. By Man Shahîd. (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection . 1995. Pp. xxx, 688; x, 689- 1034 plus indexes. $75.00.) The epic undertaking continues. After volumes (progressively growing in size proportionally to the increasing amount of source material) on Rome and the Arabs and on Byzantium and the Arabs in the fourth and fifth centuries,Professor Shahîd has arrived at the sixth century and indeed carried on down through the first third of the seventh. The massive, physically two-volumed work here considered isVolume One of what is given the acronym BASIC: Part 1 , following Shahîd's usual bipartite pattern of treatment, covers political and military history, while the separately bound Part 2 covers ecclesiastical history. This physical disjunction enables the reader to juxtapose the volumes while studying any particular reign (as in previous periods, Shahîd divides his history up by the reigns of the Byzantine emperors). Volume Two of BASIC will cover the archaeological remains of Arab-Byzantine history from this period, largely reviewed on the ground by the author, and more of the Arabic-language sources, especially poetry. The culmination will come in the in-progress Byzantium and Islam in the Seventh Century. (Note the careful changes: in the fourth through sixth centuries, the Arabs, an ethnic group; in the seventh, Islam, a religious polity.) As in the earlier volumes, we are taught two lessons. The first is in how much history can be squeezed out of a comparatively small amount of evidence: an inscription , a mention in a narrative historian (more here), a subscription to an ecclesiastical letter. The second is that many Arabs were Christians in late antiquity (and the subtext is that many remain so today). From the period being treated here there is a third lesson, this time explicit (see especially 1, 605-610): that the alienating of Byzantium's Christian Arab "federate shield" by the shortsighted policies of the emperor Maurice contributed disastrously to the later conquest of much of the Middle East by the Muslim Arabs. In one form or another this thesis—that Byzantium needed the Arabs—underlies the whole. The century-and-a-half-long story of Byzantium and the Arabs surveyed here is one of a back-and-forth, love-hate relationship of repeated alienation and reconciliation between the two, largely owing to the confessional disalignment of our period's principal federate group, the Monophysite Ghassanids, with the prevalent Byzantine state ideology of Chalcedonianism. Their leaders are alternately accused of treachery and then endowed with honors in the capital, only to withdraw or again be dismissed. In view of the leading part played by Arab armed forces in the intermittent two-superpower struggle between Byzantium and Sasanian Persia that occupied nearly the entire period, the overall story is, from hindsight, a crescendo of warnings about the need for unity in the multicultural Christian Roman Empire. For the Arabs during the reigns ofAnastasius,Justin I, and Justinian and how they are represented for us by narrative historiography, we are brought back to 504 BOOK REVIEWS a subject Shahîd has been writing about for nearly thirty years: the negative attitude of Procopius. The position taken by this all-too-accessible Byzantine writer has colored nearly all subsequent views of the matter, and Shahîd does well to incorporate recent Procopian scholarship and correlate it with other needed parallels such as inscriptions and Syriac-language material. (We should note that IGLSyrY 2553B [BASIC, I, 259], an inscription of Arethas, is not explicitly Monophysite but simply incorporates a forgetful stonecutter's mistake in the invocation formula; and that the epigraphic Fl. Arethas thepaneuphemos dux discussed byJ. Gascou in TM, 12 [1994], 339-341, may be the otherArethas ofÄ4S/C,I,664no.6.) Other Byzantine historians (Malalas,Agathias [silent on the Arabs] , Menander, Theophylact) receive updated analyses through Shahîd's specialized lens, showing the one-sidedness of a picture derived only from Western sources. The reader looks forward even more to BASICVolume Two, which will make more widely accessible such...