Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World

This book proposes a new means of identifying how Greek and Syrian identities were expressed in the Hellenistic and Roman Near East.

Nathanael J. Andrade (Author)

9781108456531, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 April 2018

442 pages, 22 b/w illus. 7 maps
23 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.68 kg

'… [this] book is of great importance in both its method and its content for the study of Roman Syria and the surrounding region from the Seleucid period through the early Roman Empire. Scholars will benefit a great deal from Andrade's impressive contribution to, and reshaping of, these ongoing discussions.' Christine Shepardson, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

By engaging with recent developments in the study of empires, this book examines how inhabitants of Roman imperial Syria reinvented expressions and experiences of Greek, Roman and Syrian identification. It demonstrates how the organization of Greek communities and a peer polity network extending citizenship to ethnic Syrians generated new semiotic frameworks for the performance of Greekness and Syrianness. Within these, Syria's inhabitants reoriented and interwove idioms of diverse cultural origins, including those from the Near East, to express Greek, Roman and Syrian identifications in innovative and complex ways. While exploring a vast array of written and material sources, the book thus posits that Greekness and Syrianness were constantly shifting and transforming categories, and it critiques many assumptions that govern how scholars of antiquity often conceive of Roman imperial Greek identity, ethnicity and culture in the Roman Near East, and processes of 'hybridity' or similar concepts.

Introduction: signification and cultural performance in Roman imperial Syria
Part I. Greek Poleis and the Syrian Ethnos (2nd century BCE–1st century CE): 1. Antiochus IV and the limits of Greekness under the Seleucids (175–63 BCE)
2. The theater of the frontier: local performance, Roman rulers (63–31 BCE)
3. Converging paths: Syrian Greeks of the Roman Near East (31 BCE–CE 73)
Part II. Greek Collectives in Syria (1st–3rd centuries CE): 4. The Syrian Ethnos' Greek cities: dispositions and hegemonies (1st–3rd centuries CE)
5. Cities of imperial frontiers (1st–3rd centuries CE)
6. Hadrian and Palmyra: contrasting visions of Greekness (1st–3rd centuries CE)
7. Dura-Europos: changing paradigms for civic Greekness
Part III. Imitation Greeks: Being Greek and Being Other (2nd and 3rd centuries CE): 8. Greeks write Syria: performance and the signification of Greekness
9. The theater of empire: Lucian, cultural performance, and Roman rule
10. Syria writes back: Lucian and On the Syrian Goddess
11. The ascendency of Syrian Greekness and Romanness
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Judaism [HRJ], Biblical studies & exegesis [HRCG], New Testaments [HRCF2], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA], Middle Eastern history [HBJF1]