A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

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Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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isbn: 9781119037422
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the lands of the Near East came to form one of 12 new dioceses under the name “Oriens” (which also included Egypt and Libya), the region had undeniably grown into an integral part also of the Greco-Roman world. With the main enemy on its eastern frontier (see the collections of sources in Dodgeon and Lieu 1994; Dignas and Winter 2007), Rome concentrated many of its forces in the region and the percentage of legions stationed in the Near East grew substantially over the course of the principate (Isaac 1992; Kennedy 1996a; Gebhardt 2002; Mitford 2018). The army played a major role in processes of state formation and both legionaries and soldiers from the auxiliary cohorts often found themselves deeply engrained in the local societies in the vicinity of their camps (Pollard 2000; Stoll 2001; see Haynes 2013 on the auxilia; James 2019 for a case study of the best-known base of any garrison in the Near East). Emperors, and with them the imperial court, spent more and more time in the Levantine provinces, also when not campaigning against the Parthians or later the neo-Persians. And perhaps most significantly in the long run, the Near East is the region that formed the cradle of the three great monotheistic world religions of today.

      Indigenous vs Classical Culture

      The most important debate about the nature of Near Eastern civilization in the classical period hinges on the question of whether, and to what degree, there was a continuation with the preceding centuries. Millar famously discussed this in terms of an “amnesia” (forgetfulness) of the region: with the exception of the Jews (see also the discussion by Rajak 2000) and to a lesser degree the inhabitants of the Phoenician coast, there was said to have been no “sense of a common past uniting the contemporary populations of the region and identifying them with the life of the cities of the ancient Orient” (Millar 1993: 6). Others have preferred to make more of the undeniable glimpses of continuation – such as the enduring popularity of the sanctuary of the old Phoenician healing god Eshmun, situated to the north of Sidon, which Strabo (16.2.22) referred to as the “grove of Asklēpios.” Similarly, discussion has focused on how the two halves of the period covered in this volume contrast with each other: whereas Millar famously argued that, in contrast to the Near East under the principate, “the preceding Hellenistic period has left us almost nothing which can count as the expression of a regional or a local pagan culture” (Millar 1993: 22 – the so-called “problem of Hellenistic Syria”; see id. 1987), Sartre (2001) insisted on studying the Roman evidence explicitly in the context of what there was in the Hellenistic period.

      Variety

      What the source material does reveal, however, is the sheer variety of ways in which the various places and sub-regions expressed their own specific local identities. This is reflected most vividly in the rich archaeological remains of monumental buildings and sculptures, juxtaposing finds from the various archaeological sites in the southwestern Arabian and Nabataean worlds (most notably Petra with its rock-cut façades), the Phoenician coastal cities (including Tyre, Byblos, and the first Near Eastern colonia Berytus) with the monumental remains of the temple complex at Baalbek-Heliopolis inland (Figure 21.1), the coastal strip further to the south with the harbor at Caesarea Maritima constructed under Herod the Great, Gerasa and the Decapolis cities in Transjordan, the “desert cities” of Palmyra in Syria and Hatra in northern Mesopotamia, and the Euphrates small town of Dura-Europos (see, above all, the discussion of the various regions in Millar 1993: 223–488; for a classic study of the different local cultures of three of the key sites, see Drijvers 1977; cf. the contributions in Kaizer 2008 on religious variety). This undeniable variety is now perhaps best visible, or at least most easily accessible, in the magnificent catalog of the recent exhibition on “The World between Empires” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fowlkes-Childs and Seymour 2019). If the selection of documentation and imagery will give the impression of merely being snapshots from the available evidence, this is quite fitting, since the evidence represents six centuries of snapshots from antiquity.