THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYand Seleucia-Ctesiphon and, later, Gundeshapur. In the late fourth century
the Syriac Christian religious poet Ephraem moved from Nisibis to Edessa
when the former was ceded to the Persians in 363. His highly metaphorical
and imaginative poetry may strike a classical reader as very unfamiliar, and he
expressed a lively contempt for everything Greek, i.e., pagan; but his work
was quickly translated into Greek, and a large body of other material also
exists in Greek under his name, which was later much cited in the Greek
monastic literature. On the other hand, the culture of an important bishop
such as Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in northern Syria in the fi fth century,
was Greek; he wrote in Greek and owed his culture to the traditions of Greek
rhetorical education, writing letters to offi cials and churchmen in rhetorical
Greek and many other Greek works, including a refutation of heresies, even
though many of his fl ock knew only Syriac; how much Syriac Theodoret knew
himself is less certain, but his Life of Symeon the Elder was one of three such
works: two in Greek and one in Syriac (Chapter 3). The culture of the Syrian
city of Antioch, the second city in the eastern empire, was also essentially
Greek; it was the earliest home of Christianity outside Judaea and the centre
of one of the two major Greek schools of theology and biblical interpretation.
At Jerusalem the bishop always preached in Greek, but an oral translation into
Aramaic was provided during the liturgy when the pilgrim Egeria went there
in 384. Even at Edessa, the very home of the great Syriac literary tradition in
late antiquity, Greek was in use till late in the Islamic period.
To say that Greek was the dominant language, necessary for offi cial transac-
tions, is true, but can be misleading in that it may obscure the very widespread
use of Greek even in non-offi cial contexts. It is even more misleading to use
acquaintance with Greek as a badge of identity.^33 The language of Jews in Pal-
estine, for example, was Greek, and funerary inscriptions from the Golan and
from modern Jordan, for example, indicate that Greek was still in widespread
use by individuals up to the seventh century. Many churches, including the
fi ne churches at Jerash (Gerasa) in the Decapolis, whose other cities included
Philadelphia (modern Amman), were decorated with fi ne mosaic inscrip-
tions in Greek verse as late as the middle of the eighth century and after. The
administration and institutions of the empire placed an overlay of Greek on
local conditions, but this had already been the case for centuries, since the
foundations of Alexander the Great and the Seleucid empire that succeeded
him. It is true that the literature in Syriac originated in a region considerably
removed, and in certain ways very different, from the Hellenized coastal cities
such as Caesarea, or indeed from much of Palestine, but distinctions between
Greek and Semitic, whether applied to language or iconography, along ethnic
or class lines can be very deceptive. An Arab dynasty ruled Edessa itself, and
its affi liations can be clearly seen in the city’s reliefs and mosaics. Yet the same
city produced a third-century mosaic of Orpheus as well as a Syriac inscrip-
tion. At Palmyra, with a bilingual culture in Greek and Palmyrene, the temple
of Bel proclaims its Semitic roots, though like the cella of the temple of Ba’al
Shamin, it was converted into a church.