Introduction xvportrayed by Josephus.’’ The preference, which is ‘‘no more than an hypothe-
sis,’’ goes to John’s Gospel.
The next two chapters belong together for two reasons. First, a formal
reason: it was our editorial decision, contrary to our practice throughout,
not to translate the texts written in the ancient languages in these two chap-
ters. These are in essence linguistic papers based on documents, focusing on
borrowings from one language to another. Although integral to the cen-
tral theme of the volume, these two chapters do not, and can not, make
sense unless the relevant material is retained in the original (or in the case of
Semitic languages in upper-case transliteration). To ‘‘transcribe’’ and translate
this material would blur the intellectual point.
Second, both chapters isolate and explore the Roman component in the
mixture of cultures characteristic of the Roman Near East and its impact.
This is seen in the foundation of colonies or the conferral of the titlecolonia
on native cities (chapter : ‘‘The RomanColoniaeof the Near East: A Study
of Cultural Relations,’’ —virtually a monograph), and in the limited use
of the Latin language (chapter : ‘‘Latin in the Epigraphy of the Roman Near
East,’’ ). The bilingual and trilingual documents from Palmyra discussed
in chapter hammer home the point made by Millar already in his cele-
brated article on ‘‘Epigraphy,’’^7 namely that the richness of the epigraphic
tradition comes fully into its own only when epigraphic texts in different
languages, the contemporaneous expressions of different but related cultures,
are studied together.^8
A test case for the survival and potential vitality of local cultures under-
neath the dominant Greek surface is the subject of chapter , ‘‘Paul of Samo-
sata, Zenobia, and Aurelian: The Church, Local Culture, and Political Alle-
giance in Third-Century Syria’’ (), which examines the hypothesis that
in the events of the s and the s in Roman Syria ‘‘either a man from
Samosata or a ruler of Palmyra could have seen themselves as in any sense
representatives of the ‘Orient’ as against the Graeco-Roman world.’’
The next two chapters should also be read together. They explore the true
‘‘Orient,’’ the one beyond the Euphrates and outside the classical world, in
. Originally published in chapter in F. Millar,Rome, the Greek World, and the
EastI:TheRomanRepublicandtheAugustanRevolution(), ; cf. section of the epilogue
to this volume: ‘‘A New Approach to Ancient Languages?’’
. The innovative project now under way to create a comprehensive multilingual cor-
pus of all inscriptions, both published and unpublished, from the territory of present-
day Israel, from the fourth century...to the seventh century..(Corpus Inscriptionum
Iudaeae/PalaestinaeCIIP) owes Millar a great debt; see Cotton et alii, ‘‘Corpus Inscrip-
tionum Iudaeae/Palaestinae,’’ZPE (), –.