Syrian Identity in the Greco-Roman World (Greek Culture in the Roman World)
Cambridge University Press, 7/25/2013
EAN 9781107012059, ISBN10: 1107012058
Hardcover, 441 pages, 23 x 15.8 x 3.4 cm
Language: English
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.