THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYJulian, and ceded to Persia the important border city of Nisibis.^70 However,
recent scholars have pointed out that for most of the period neither of the
two empires seriously thought of trying to defeat the other or occupy territory
on a large scale, and have argued that the Roman defence system was in fact
much concerned with prestige, internal security and the policing of the border
areas. Benjamin Isaac is not the only scholar to have argued that the military
roads which are so conspicuous in this area, especially the strata Diocletiana,
a road from north-east Arabia and Damascus to Palmyra and the Euphrates,
and the earlier via nova Traiana, from Bostra to the Red Sea, were meant not
as lines of defence, but rather as lines of communication. However, the need
for an intensifi cation of defences became acute when in the early sixth cen-
tury the Persian shah Cavadh launched a major attack, with a damaging siege
and capture of Amida in Mesopotamia in 502, vividly described in the Syriac
chronicle attributed to a certain Joshua the Stylite.^71 People in the area who
had managed to escape the Persian assault were tempted to fl ee, but the Syriac
author Jacob of Serug wrote to all the cities nearby urging them to stay.^72 The
same chronicle gives a striking picture, corroborated by Procopius’ accounts
of the Persian wars under Justinian, of the leadership bishops in eastern cities
now provided in matters of defence, building fortifi cations, pleading the cause
of their city with the emperor and negotiating with the Persians. They were
not always successful: Megas, bishop of Beroea (Aleppo), had the unenviable
task of trying to negotiate with Chosroes I when the latter was threatening
Antioch in 540 and the Byzantine troops were wholly insuffi cient to defend it.
Chosroes took 2,000 lbs of silver from Hierapolis and demanded ten centenaria
to call off an attack on Antioch, but attacked Beroea (Aleppo) and sacked it in
any case, and went on to sack Antioch. Orders had come from Constantinople
not to hand over any money, and the city’s patriarch, Ephraem, was thought
to have favoured surrender.^73 Defence needs also went hand in hand with
pleas for reduction of taxation. In 505–6 the generals Areobindus and Celer
reported to the Emperor Anastasius that the border near Amida and Tella was
in need of strengthening in order to fend off Persian attacks; as a result, orders
were given to fortify the frontier site of Dara, a project in which the bishop
of Amida was much involved, as is known from the anonymous continuation
of the Syriac ecclesiastical history by bishop Zachariah of Mytilene; Proco-
pius later contrived to give the credit for the massive fortifi cations of Dara
to Justinian.^74 After the Persian assault on Amida the remaining population
suffered badly from shortage of food, and the bishop went to Constantinople
to plead with Anastasius for remission of taxes.^75 During the Persian wars of
Justinian, and especially in the diffi cult years in the early 540s when Belisarius
clearly did not have enough troops, bishops were even more active in their
attempts to buy off the danger of a Persian siege, usually with large payments
of silver (Chapter 5).
In the Sasanians, the Byzantines faced a rival power which was their equal
in military capacity and at times capable of ruthless and aggressive campaigns
against Roman territory. We have seen already the helplessness of the eastern