T
he Roman Empire was home to an extraordinarily diverse population. In Rome alone on any given
day, someone walking through the city’s various quarters would have encountered people of an
astonishing range of social, ethnic, racial, linguistic, and religious backgrounds. The multicultural char-
acter of Roman society became even more pronounced as the Romans expanded their territories
throughout Europe, Africa, and the Near East (MAP10-1). The previous chapter focused on the public
and private art and architecture of the pagan Roman world. During the third and fourth centuries, a
rapidly growing number of Romans rejected polytheism(belief in multiple gods) in favor ofmonotheism
(the worship of a single all-powerful god)—but they did not stop commissioning works of art. Jewish
and Christian art of the Late Antique period is no less Roman than are sarcophagi with mythological
scenes. Indeed, the artists may in some cases have been the same. The Jewish and Christian sculptures,
paintings, and buildings of Late Antiquity are Roman in style and technique, but they differ in subject
and function from contemporaneous Roman secular and religious art and architecture. For that reason,
and because these Late Antique artworks and sacred buildings formed the foundation of the art and
architecture of the Middle Ages, they are examined separately in this chapter.
Dura-Europos
The powerful religious crosscurrents of Late Antiquity may be seen in microcosm in a distant outpost of the
Roman Empire on a promontory overlooking the Euphrates River in Syria (MAP11-1). Called Europos by
the Greeks and Dura by the Romans, the town probably was founded shortly after the death of Alexander the
Great by one of his successors. By the end of the second century BCE, Dura-Europos was in the hands of the
Parthians. Trajan captured the city in 115,* but Dura reverted to Parthian control shortly thereafter. In 165,
under Marcus Aurelius, the Romans retook the city and placed a permanent garrison there. Dura-Europos
fell in 256 to Rome’s new enemy in the East, the Sasanians, heirs to the Parthian Empire (see Chapter 2). The
Sasanian siege of Dura is an important fixed point in the chronology of Late Antiquity because the inhabi-
tants evacuated the town, leaving its buildings largely intact. This “Pompeii of the desert” has revealed the
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LATE ANTIQUITY
*In this chapter, all dates are CEunless otherwise indicated.