Milson, Art and Architecture of the Synagogue in Late Antique Palestine: In the Shadow of the Church
(Leiden: Brill, 2007); Fergus Millar, ‘Narrative and identity in mosaics from the late Roman
Near East: pagan, Jewish and Christian’, in Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise A. Friedland and Sharon
Herbert, eds., The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East. Refl ections on Culture, Ideology
and Power (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), 225–56.
47 Whittow, ‘Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city’, 17 (part of a general argument
from the silver treasures of Syrian churches, for which see also Chapter 3).
48 See T.J.W. Wilkinson, Town and Country in S. E. Anatolia. I. Settlement and Land Use at
Kurban Höyük (Chicago, Ill.: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 1990) 117f.,
131–2, arguing for ‘precipitous decline’ in settlement resulting from the Persian and Islamic
invasions.
49 See D. Krueger, Symeon the Holy Fool. Leontius’s Life and the Late Antique City (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1996); Miracles of St Demetrius: see R. Cormack, Writing in Gold
(London: George Philip, 1985), chap. 2; text, ed. P. Lemerle, Les plus anciens recueils des mira-
cles de Saint Démétrius, 2 vols, (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1979–81); Theodore of Sykeon: S.
Mitchell, Anatolia; Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995), II, 122–50.
50 Mango, Byzantium. The Empire of New Rome, 68–9, lays great emphasis on the presumed
demographic effects; contra, Whittow, ‘Ruling the late Roman and early Byzantine city’, 13,
and for a reasoned argument against over-reliance on the literary evidence see J. Durliat, ‘La
peste du VIe siècle’, in Hommes et richesses dans l’empire byzantine I (Paris: Lethielleux, 1989),
107–19. Cemeteries in the west do, however, seem to show such traces.
51 Y. Hirschfeld, The Judaean Desert Monasteries in the Byzantine Period (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1992), 228, drawing on the Life of the saint by Cyril of Scythopolis.
52 For south-east Palestine and Arabia see S. Thomas Parker, Romans and Saracens. A
History of the Arabian Frontier (Winona Lake: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1986),
and above, Chapter 2; however, the identifi cation of some of the frontier installations is
disputed: for discussion see Greg Fisher, ‘A new perspective on Rome’s desert frontier’,
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 336 (2004), 49–60.
53 Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, 274 f.; Michael Whitby, ‘Factions, bishops,
violence and urban decline’ in Jens-Uwe Krause and Christian Witschel, eds., Die Stadt in
der Spatantikie – Niedergang oder Wandel?, Historia Einzelschrift 190 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner
Verlag, 2006), 441–61, at 456.
54 See Béatrice Caseau, ‘The fate of rural temples in late antiquity and the Christianisation of the
countryside’, in Bowen, Lavan and Machado, eds., Recent Research on the Late Antique Country-
side, 105–44, an excellent discussion of evidence that often needs to be carefully interpreted,
with Chapter 3 above; the faltering and uncertain, though ultimately successful narrative of
the Christianization of pagan religious buildings is also emphasized in ead., ‘Sacred land-
scapes’, in G.W. Bowersock, Peter Brown and Oleg Grabar, eds., Late Antiquity. A Guide to
the Post-classical World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 21–59.
55 The increased civic role of bishops: Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City, chap. 4,
137–68; see Chapter 3.
56 See I. Ševcˇenko and N.P. Ševcˇenko, The Life of St. Nicholas of Sion (Brookline, Mass.: Hellenic
College Press, 1984), paras 52–5. Slaughtering and offering up oxen, which then provided
feasts, seems to have been one of Nicholas’ specialities – see paras 87–91, and he was also
good at fi nancing church restoration and ensuring good crops (paras 91–5); cf. C. Foss,
‘Cities and villages of Lycia in the life of St Nicholas of Sion’, Greek Orthodox Theological
Review 36 (1991), 303–37.
57 For the manifestation of this change in the evidence from Egypt, see R. Alston, ‘Urban
population in late Roman Egypt and the end of the ancient world’, in W. Scheidel, ed.,
Debating Roman Demography (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 161–204, at 193–5; it included the
increasing amounts of land owned by monasteries. Alston sees a gradual erosion of tradi-
tional urban centres in Egypt from the seventh century onwards in favour of more rural
conditions, without a single dominant cause.
NOTES TO CHAPTER 7