Urban Crises and the Contours of the Late Antique Empire through the Lens of Antioch

Abstract

This introduction sets the stage for three essays that each address different crises in the late antique history of Antioch. The essay considers some of the difficulties presented by various methodological lenses for “reading” the urban experience of a city such as Antioch and provides a framework for understanding the cultural meaning of the late antique urban landscape and the modern discourse concerning the role of cities in the Roman Empire. The essay also considers the rhetoric of Antioch in late antique sources and the intersection of that rhetoric with the centrality of cities in the maintenance of the Roman Empire. The essay suggests that the complicity of the cityscape in modern narrative frameworks for the fall of the Roman Empire has produced teleologies that inflect the understanding of disaster and crisis at Antioch and elsewhere in the Roman Empire.