in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1999).
53 Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of S. Sabas, 60, 61,71–4; while in Constantinople Sabas allegedly
predicted the recovery of Rome and Africa by Justinian.
54 Life of Euthymius, 30, 20.
55 Ibid., 27; Euthymius memorably admitted that he had ‘not read in detail everything that this
council has examined and enacted’, but that he regarded it as orthodox.
56 See on all of this Volker-Lorenz Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), and for a survey of the events leading up the sepa-
ration between Chalcedonians and anti-Chalcedonians in the sixth century L. Van Rompay,
‘Society and community in the Christian East’, in Michael Maas, ed., The Cambridge Compan-
ion to the Age of Justinian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 239–66. See also
Philip Wood, ‘We have no King but Christ.’ Christian Political Thought in Greater Syria on the Eve of
the Arab Conquest (c. 400–585) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
57 Van Rompay, 248–52.
58 Ibid., 253.
59 Ibid., 255–7; see Volker L. Menze and Kutlu Akalin, John of Tella’s Profession of Faith. The
Legacy of a Sixth-Century Syrian Orthodox Bishop (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009).
60 School of Nisibis: Adam Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom. The School of Nisibis
and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia, Pa: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2006); id., Sources for the History of the School of Nisibis, trans. with introduc-
tion and notes, Translated Texts for Historians 50 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2008).
61 In general, see S.P. Brock, ‘Christians in the Sasanian empire: a case of divided loyalties’, in
id., Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (London: Variorum, 1984), VI; further, Chapter 9.
62 See also Michael Morony, Iraq after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1984), 372–6. In his Lives of the Eastern Saints, John of Ephesus, himself a Miaphysite,
‘portrays [the Persian empire] as a land teeming with well-trained, argumentative heretics’,
i.e., Nestorians and Manichaeans: see Joel Thomas Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh. Nar-
rative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2006), 176.
63 See Walker, op.cit., chapter 3. Aristotelian logic was also taught at the School of Nisibis:
Walker, 175.
64 See Fergus Millar, ‘Repentant heretics in fi fth-century Lydia: identity and literacy’, Scripta
Classica Israelica 23 (2004), 111–30; ‘The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus
(449)’, in Richard Price and Mary Whitby, eds., Chalcedon in Context, Church Councils 400–700
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 45–69; id., ‘Christian monasticism in Roman
Arabia’; id., ‘Linguistic co-existence in Constantinople’.
65 See S.P. Brock, ‘The conversations with the Syrian Orthodox under Justinian (532)’, in Brock,
Studies in Syriac Christianity: History, Literature and Theology (London: Variorum, 1992), XIII.
66 Averil Cameron, ‘Texts as weapons: polemic in the Byzantine dark ages’, in Alan Bowman
and Greg Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World, (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1994), 198–215.
67 Key works include Benjamin Isaac, The Limits of Empire. The Roman Army in the East, rev. ed.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Philip Freeman and David Kennedy, eds,, The Defence of
the Roman and Byzantine East I–II (Oxford: BAR, 1986); S. Thomas Parker, Romans and Sara-
cens. A History of the Arabian Frontier (Winona Lake: American Schools of Oriental Research,
1986), and see Jodi Magness, ‘Redating the forts at Ein Boqeq, Upper Zohar and other sites
in SE Judaea, and the implications for the nature of the Limes Palaestinae’, in Humphrey, ed.,
The Roman and Byzantine Near East 2, 189–206. Useful historical survey, maps and splendid
pictures in David Kennedy and Derrick Riley, Rome’s Desert Frontier from the Air (Sheffi eld:
Dept of Archaeology and Prehistory, Sheffi eld University, 1989).
68 See Greg Fisher, ‘A new perspective on Rome’s desert frontier’, Bulletin of the American
Schools of Oriental Research 336 (2004), 49–60; for the wider eastern context see Geoffrey
NOTES TO CHAPTER 8