xii Introduction
Greco-Roman civilization is the leitmotif running through all of the articles
in this volume. The study of ethnicity and language accounts for an appar-
ently almost obsessive preoccupation with primary evidence, inscriptions
and papyri.
I can offer no better description of the conception behindRNEand there-
fore also behind the articles collected here than that given by Fergus Millar
himself in chapter (‘‘Porphyry: Ethnicity, Language, and Alien Wisdom,’’
) of the present volume, where he debunks the notion of ‘‘something
distinctively ‘oriental’ in his thought,’’ ascribed to the Neoplatonist philoso-
pher solely because he was born in Tyre in s:
The Roman Near East, ..–..()...wasintendedpre-
cisely to draw a ‘‘map’’ of the Roman provinces of Syria, Mesopo-
tamia, Judaea/Syria Palaestina, and Arabia, first in terms of language,
as attested by documentary and literary evidence, and then of ‘‘eth-
nicity,’’ as claimed or imputed by contemporaries. Its approach was thus
severely empirical, and was designed, not—as is in any case impos-
sible—to prove negatives (for instance, that a particular language was
notin use at a particular time or place), but to show the limits of what
we know now: that we have actual evidence for the use of a particular
language only in particular places and at particular times. Suppositions
about wider use are themselves hypotheses, which might of course re-
ceive support at any time from new evidence. But such suppositions,
until supported, must on no account serve as the bases for interpreting
the thought of Porphyry, or of other philosophers.Many of the chapters in the present volume, albeit self-contained, are indeed
preliminary studies forRNE, as their first footnote attests; others, looking
backward to the Hellenistic period, precede the time span set byRNE; some,
written after the completion of that work, look forward to its sequel; finally,
the two last chapters go beyondRNE’s thematic scheme to discuss the Jewish
diaspora in the West as well as in the East.
However, each of the chapters has a focal point, which in one way or an-
other has been integrated into the vast canvas ofRNE, or at least has been
foreshadowed in it. Their innovativeness, originality, and individuality are
thus in danger of being lost to the unwary and inexperienced reader of Fer-
gus Millar’s work—which now spans almost half a century. It is one of the
aims of the present collection, as it was of the previous two, to recapture
the vigor and ground-breaking freshness of the originals for a young and
uninitiated audience and recreate it for others.
The six chapters of the first part, ‘‘The Hellenistic World and Rome,’’ be-