Sacra: Letter omicron, concerning conceit and appearance, and that being is better than seeming; for this is a hindrance to virtue2

To understand the integration of Palmyra in the wider system of the Roman Empire and Mediterranean societies, this study will follow the paths of individuals between their place of origin and different Mediterranean locations. Palmyrenes in the Mediterranean were traders, soldiers or craftsmen, and their itineraries have to be integrated in a more complex picture. The personal names and the use of Palmyrene Aramaic generally testify to individuals of Palmyrene origin. If the routes are beyond our evidence, it is often possible to understand the relationships of those individuals with the populations around them and their local integration.

The concept of leadership has not received much attention in Assyriology as it was overshadowed by the concept of kingship and its omnipresence in ancient Mesopotamia. As the available sources mostly are written from the perspective of the leader – in the case of ancient Mesopotamia this is the king or the city ruler – also Assyriologists mostly took this standpoint and wrote ‘history from above’. Much scholarly effort was invested in the study of various aspects of kingship. Because of the scarceness of sources discussing the experience of the ruler’s leadership and the abundance of royal inscriptions, we usually do not take the perspective – to use a widespread political metaphor – of the sheep, but only that of the shepherd. Nevertheless, there are some texts that critic the leadership of kings. These texts are mostly of literary nature but they allow us at least a partial ‘view from below’, as they describe the problems of people living under a powerful king.

There has never been a time when the life of Jesus has not presented some occasion for scandal. Although the primordial scandal of the Christian Gospel unfolded around the figure of a crucified Messiah, this book takes as its principal subject a derivative scandal: the scandal of the Christian Gospels; namely, the impediments – even offenses – to literary, historical, and logical sense that only seem to multiply in proportion to one’s intimacy with the narratives of the four Evangelists. The suggestion of such things will itself be scandalous to some.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

Cyril of Alexandria was a central figure in many of the theological developments and religious conflicts that challenged the stability of the fifth-century eastern Roman Empire. Crucial moments during his episcopacy (412–44) marking wider and more complex developments may be seen with sharp clarity in the outbreaks of overt violence between Christians and Jews and between Christians and “pagans” in the metropolis of Alexandria during the first years of his episcopal career. Moreover, roughly halfway through his tenure as bishop, he would involve himself in a doctrinal dispute underway in the eastern capital of Constantinople, opposing its bishop Nestorius because he believed the truth of the gospel was dangerously undermined by what he took to be Nestorius’ errant Christology. Through the savvy manipulation of ecclesiastical and imperial politics, Cyril succeeded in having Nestorius deposed by the Council of Ephesus in 431, though it took eighteenth months of negotiations to restore communion between the warring factions.

Origen’s examination of Jesus’s baptism in Against Celsus offers readers a particularly secure first footing for apprehending his sense of the Gospel narratives’ “mixed” character. That Jesus was baptized by John is hardly problematic, historically speaking. But the events narrated to have taken place directly after the baptism presented no less difficulty for readers in antiquity than they do for readers today. Origen preserves Celsus’s dismissal of the descent of the dove and voice from heaven as an obvious fiction. Origen, however, resists the judgment. Why? His reply to Celsus puts the whole complex of first principles detailed in Part I to work. According to Origen’s view, one can receive the narrative to be “true” inasmuch as it depicts, in figurative language drawn from prophetic literary tropes, Jesus’s own interior inspiration at the commencement of his public ministry. In short, the story narrates something real, something “historical” even, precisely insofar as it is entirely spiritual. The Evangelists then came to share in the same kind of vision Jesus is said to have had at his baptism and narrated “in figures” what they, too, had “perceived in their own understanding.”

The chapter is focused on the Palmyrene Tariff (CIS II.3913), a lengthy bilingual text in Aramaic and Greek promulgated in the city in AD 137 to regularize local taxation, i.e. taxes on goods entering and leaving the city which originate within its immediate vicinity, and on trades being plied within the city, not taxes on long-distance trade. Attention is given to the book on the Tariff by Ilia Sholeimovich Shifman, published in Russian in 1980 and republished in English in 2014, and to the publications of Michał Gawlikowski (2012, 2014) on the original location of the Tariff stone opposite a shrine devoted to Rab-Asīrē and close to the Agora. The respective roles of Greek and Aramaic are explored, including the question of which had priority in the drawing up of the Tariff. The sources and composition of the text are analysed with reference to the role played by earlier Roman authorities. A final section considers the position of tax collectors in Palmyrene society and the light which the Tariff can throw on life in Roman Syria.

Palmyra is usually studied for one of three reasons, either its role in the long-distance trade between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, its distinctive cultural identity as visible in the epigraphic and material record from the city or its rise as an independent regional power in the Near East in the third quarter of the third century AD. While Palmyra was indeed a special place, with a private sorte, or destiny of its own, as Pliny famously expressed it (HN 5.88), the city’s ability to maintain its distinctiveness arguably rested on deep entanglements with her local and regional surroundings. This chapter addresses how the city engaged with its neighbours and its Roman imperial overlords. Actions, events and policies attested in the epigraphic record from the city and from the Palmyrene diaspora in the Roman Empire are discussed in light of theoretical insights from archaeology, sociology and economics. It is argued that Palmyra’s remarkable success built on the city’s ability to connect with the range of social networks that constituted the Roman Empire.

A prevalent idea in scholarship on Athenian politics of the classical period is the assumption, based on figures like Pericles and Demosthenes, that political leadership depended on the ability to give good advice and communicate well with fellow citizens in the Council and Assembly. Without necessarily challenging this assumption, the present chapter focuses on a mechanism for attaining political leadership that has received less attention: gift-giving to both individual citizens and the entire community. Athenians with political ambitions built networks of followers (clients) through private gifts, but the phenomenon has not been fully appreciated because of the supposition that nothing comparable to the Roman patron/client relationship existed in the Greek polis. This chapter focuses on the case of Demosthenes.

10.1 [675] We have, I believe, given an account of the shadow in the law that is precise, since the enemy of the truth attempted – I do not know how – to persecute us and bizarrely brings the indictment of lawlessness against people who, more than anyone else, have made a firm determination to fulfill those divine laws in a more rational and precise manner than those who are conversant with the bare types alone. But since he takes us to task for absolutely everything we say and do, observe how he plunges us, so to speak, into yet more accusations, and says we stand in opposition even to the holy mystagogues themselves and have given no regard to the apostolic tradition, but instead have turned wherever our whim might carry us – and what’s more, without being taken to task for it! For he again writes as follows:1 [676]

This chapter focuses on the way the Livian conception of political leadership reflects the corresponding Ciceronian theory. Although Livy does not seem to use any specific term for ‘leadership’, the latter is given a prominent role in his theory regarding the progress and the decline of the res publica: in his much-commented-on passage of his preface (praef. 9), both the relaxation of disciplina and the role of the leaders (uiri) are elucidated by reference to Cicero’s theory and terminology of leadership. Disciplina should then be defined as a way of moral and political life transmitted from one generation to the other, which is essentially based on the principle of obedience to an ‘enlightened’ political leadership. The characteristics of efficient leadership are expressed by Livy in various comments or speeches throughout the work. The role attributed to the people and the leaders in Livy’s scheme also reveals a close affinity with Cicero’s theory of the ideal leader as a moderator rei publicae, especially in the De re publica. Livy also promotes some leaders of the Roman past as exempla which have incarnated the Ciceronian ideal of leader.

The author provides an account of the cultural evolution of a new concept of leadership for both emperors and the church in the Christianising society based in the eastern Roman capital of Constantinople. The focus is the pivotal period from the establishment of Constantine the Great’s one-man rule through Byzantine rule over the eastern and western empires in the sixth and seventh centuries, ending with the rule of Irene as sole empress (797–802) and Charlemagne’s coronation in 800. Letters exemplify the late Roman transformation from a model of one-man (or one-family) rule to a more complex system of power sharing between religious authorities, which was under constant renegotiation, from the highest levels of governance under emperors and bishops to the lowest level of the parish led by local clergy. Increasing opportunities for women to exercise power, hand in hand with the episcopal leaders of the new church, also shaped imperial leadership ideals in new ways.