A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East. Группа авторов

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СКАЧАТЬ (Chapter 2), there are three parts, subdivided into thirty-six chapters: part I treats the main textual and a variety of non-textual sources; part II deals with selected regions, places, and peoples; part III is thematically subdivided. Some overlap has, quite naturally, been unavoidable, but rather than being mere repetitiveness this takes the form of variegated approaches to the relevant sources, places, and themes. Some chapters focus more on the earlier period, others more on the later centuries. Some places (e.g. Hierapolis) or regions (e.g. the Hauran) will be touched upon in chapters in parts I or III rather than having a chapter devoted to them in part II.

      The Hellenistic and Roman Near East

      Geographically defined, the Near East comprised of the lands situated between the Mediterranean in the west (bordered by the Phoenician and Palestinian coastal strips), the Taurus mountains in the north (with the hill countries of Commagene and Osrhoene opening up into the northern sections of Syria and Mesopotamia), the “land between the rivers” Euphrates and Tigris in the east, and the more sparsely populated steppe zone stretching into the Arabian peninsula in the south. Intersected by the great rivers and their tributaries, the various sub-regions were very different from each other as far as topography and geology are concerned.

      Taken as a whole, these lands had always been – as already emphasized by the great Russian scholar Mikhaïl Rostovtzeff in a classic paper (1935a; see id. 1941b) – a transit region, a meeting-place for the three great civilizations of the ancient world: the Mesopotamian, the Egyptian, and the Aegean. At the same time, the enormous zone beyond Anatolia and the Mediterranean Sea was a region of great geographical and cultural diversity (see now Cameron 2019 on the relevant writings by the ancient geographers). Even if the geographical (and environmental) divisions cannot explain all the cultural variety, the fact that all sub-regions had their own, quite specific geological characteristics will have had some bearing on the cultural developments within them (for helpful overviews see the relevant chapters in different volumes of the Cambridge Ancient History , by Musti 1984; Kennedy 1996b; Sartre 2000, 2005b; and also the overview article by Rey-Coquais 1978).

      The continuously shifting borders of the subsequent and overlapping imperial powers notwithstanding, the Near Eastern lands (at least in part) formed the heartland of the realms of the Seleucids and the Arsacids, and the latter’s successors the Sasanians. As for the Romans, in the centuries forming the prelude to the rearrangements under the tetrarchy, when 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.

It is, in any case, only in the early Roman period that the density in the spread of the available evidence truly became a factor, and that the impact of what we call “classical culture” on the local and indigenous cultures of the region came to the fore and gained in visibility. The multifaceted processes of interaction between the cultures of Greece and Rome and those of the non-classical world have been vigorously debated over the years. Making the case against the old, oversimplified paradigm of a linear process by which Greek features gradually replaced non-Greek ones, Glen Bowersock proposed to drop “Hellenization” from our investigations and to focus instead on “Hellenism,” as a concept known already in antiquity itself (Hellēnismos, meaning “Greek culture”). He argued that the classical culture in the Near East in the late Hellenistic and Roman period functioned as a channel through which local indigenous cultures could be manifested: “In language, myth, and image it provided the means for a more articulate and a more universally comprehensible expression of local traditions” (Bowersock 1990: 9). As such, Bowersock emphasized “the remarkable role of Hellenism in strengthening and even transforming local worship without eradicating its local character” (ibid.: 21). In a later study, Bowersock argued that “Hellenism in the Roman Near East was … by no means what it was to become later in the Byzantine Near East” and that the “dominance of Greek form and design in a unified world of Aramaic culture seems … a quite different kind of Hellenism from what comes later” (Bowersock 2008: 22). Or rather: “When Greek became the unifying culture of the region, it was no longer the Roman Near East” (ibid.: 23). In his own study of “the nature of Syrian Hellenism,” Maurice Sartre made the astute observation that “there are extremely varied modes of appropriation of Hellenism, according to the individual and the region” (Sartre 2008: 37). He further stated that “Syrian Hellenism carried with it, via the multicultural, multireligious, and polyethnic framework in which it developed, an obligation of openness” which, however, “does not authorize us to imagine a society of universal tolerance and harmony” (ibid.: 48), concluding that Greek culture throughout the Roman Near East “remains a criterion of social differentiation whose prestige seems virtually untarnished” (ibid.: 49). Nathanael Andrade, in what is now widely acknowledged as the single most important contribution to the scholarly debate on how to analyse the multifarious expressions of what he called “Greekness” in the Near East, warned how this concept “cannot be attached to a stable, unchanging set of materials, idioms, and practices … cannot be framed by universally applicable definitions [and] cannot be reckoned as simply a manifestation of culture, for what constituted Greek or Syrian culture was shaped and reshaped by civic affiliations and networks” (Andrade 2013: 343). Our subject therefore seems to change as quickly and easily as a kaleidoscope: cultural elements that entered a local society at the beginning of the Hellenistic or Roman period may not necessarily have been considered similarly “new” hundreds of years later. Over time, manifestations of “Hellenism,” or reflections of different degrees of “Greekness,” underwent continuous renegotiation and could themselves come to be considered part of the package of local traditions. Admittedly, this is not easily caught in the often conservative source material (Kaizer 2000a).

      Variety

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