Topography and history of Transtiberim

From the time of its founding through the regal and republican periods (753–29 BCE), Rome was confined to the east side of the Tiber. The west bank was contested ground for the first few centuries of the city's existence, remaining only partially under Roman control until the conquest of an early rival, the nearby Etruscan city of Veii, in 396 BCE.Footnote ⁷ Transtiberim (across the Tiber) became an increasingly valuable centre of population and industry in the third and second centuries BCE, as Rome consolidated control over Italy and grew into the capital of an expanding empire. Its main residential area lay between the Tiber and the long ridge of the Janiculum Hill (modern Gianicolo), which runs north–south from the Vatican to the slopes of Monteverde. This low-lying area became increasingly crowded in the first century BCE, while Rome's increasingly wealthy aristocracy filled the hillside, which offers sweeping views of the city, with villas and gardens. Transtiberim nevertheless remained outside Rome until the first emperor, Augustus (r. 27 BCE–14 CE), incorporated it into Rome as part of a programme of urban renewal intended to revitalize Rome's infrastructure and administration after decades of civil war. In addition to undertaking several monumental building projects, expanding public facilities such as aqueducts and theatres, repairing 82 temples that had fallen into disarray and founding the city's first firefighting force, Augustus divided Rome into 14 administrative districts called regiones (singular regio).Footnote ⁸ Transtiberim became the fourteenth of these districts, which would remain the units used to govern Rome until the end of antiquity.Footnote ⁹ Though Regio XIV encompassed all parts of Rome on the west bank of the Tiber including the modern Vatican, its residential and industrial heart was in the crowded quarter south of Tiber Island, north of the Porta Portuensis and east of the Janiculum Hill. This is the area upon which I will focus my analysis.

Two main avenues served this part of Transtiberim: the Via Aurelia, which ran roughly east–west, and the Via Portuensis, which followed the riverbank on its way to Rome's port 15 miles to the south-west. These larger thoroughfares branched off into a number of smaller streets, which themselves wound and intersected at dozens of crossroads.Footnote ¹⁰ Most residents lived adjacent to these streets in the multi-storey apartment blocks (insulae) that housed the majority of Rome's population. Fire-prone and thin-walled, with upper floors built of wood and plaster, crowding in these buildings was common.Footnote ¹¹ Most lacked easy access to kitchens or latrines, and individual apartments were sometimes so ill-equipped to meet their inhabitants’ needs that they were less homes in the modern sense of the word than places to sleep and store property.Footnote ¹² Smells, sights and sounds would have been vivid and inescapable, as suggested by the philosopher Seneca's description of an apartment where he once stayed as a place where the walls were ‘rotten, full of cracks, and uneven’ and a person could hear, all at once, ‘laughter and weeping, coaxing and quarrelling, joy and sorrow, the human voice and the roaring and barking of animals’.Footnote ¹³ Especially during the hot Mediterranean summer, residents would have spent much of their free time on the streets in search of entertainment, opportunity or a meal at one of the numerous cook-shops (popinae, thermopoliae) that occupied the ground floors of many apartment blocks.Footnote ¹⁴ Many would also have congregated at Transtiberim's numerous public fountains, as the district was particularly well watered. Seven or eight out of Rome's ten aqueducts served the fourteenth region by the time of the emperor Trajan (r. 98–117 CE), and the district had 180 public fountains by the middle of the fourth century.Footnote ¹⁵ These fountains, like those in many traditional societies, doubled as social centres where people exchanged news, looked for work, gossiped and flirted. Vital pieces of infrastructure that served as gathering places and hubs of social networks, they emphasized the local in the sprawling city.Footnote ¹⁶

Rents in Transtiberim may have been lower than in other parts of Rome because the area between the hill and the river was prone to flooding and was also home to noxious or dangerous industries deliberately kept at a distance from central Rome.Footnote ¹⁷ One of these was tanning, a trade crucial for a city with a never-ending demand for leather but one considered both socially taboo because tanners worked with dead animal flesh and physically repugnant because curing skins required the use of urine and faeces.Footnote ¹⁸ Elite authors such as the satirist Juvenal and the epigramist Martial, both vivid commentators on city life in the first and second centuries CE, turned up their noses at ‘the trade that must be banished to the other side of the Tiber’ because of the stench it generated, portraying the tanning district and its environs as a blighted area.Footnote ¹⁹ Most tanneries were situated along the riverbanks, as the curing process was water intensive and generated waste material best quickly flushed away.Footnote ²⁰ They shared the area with glassmaking workshops, businesses that provided another important commodity but which were similarly relegated to the city's margins because they carried a high risk of fire.Footnote ²¹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, glassmaking was another industry that Roman writers described in a negative light. Martial linked the industry with the residents of the fourteenth region in his description of ‘the vagabond Transtiberim man who trades sulphur matches for pieces of broken glass’.Footnote ²² His dismissive tone is typical of most elite commentaries, reflecting the dim view of commerce and most forms of physical labour held by many Roman aristocrats.Footnote ²³ Exclusive reliance on literary sources can thus lead to the ironic impression that the region that was likely the industrial heart of Rome – Transtiberim was home to potting, milling, brickmaking and shipping facilities in addition to tanneries and glassmaking workshops – was populated exclusively by the destitute.Footnote ²⁴

Elite commentary about the bridges that linked the fourteenth region to the rest of the city reinforces this impression. Juvenal and Martial portrayed bridges as places haunted by panhandlers, prostitutes and desperate people with nowhere else to go.Footnote ²⁵ Seneca expressed a similar view in a passage from his treatise ‘On the Blessed Life’ in which, seeking to demonstrate how Stoic composure can be maintained even in the direst of circumstances, he declared: ‘Take me over to the Sublician Bridge and toss me among the beggars there, but do not despise me because I will be seated among their number, who stretch out their hands for alms.’Footnote ²⁶ Panhandlers could of course be found in many parts of Rome, and would have likely congregated in spots where traffic was forced to slow down or stop since such places were good for business.Footnote ²⁷ Their repeated associations with bridges in literature implies that better-off Romans saw at least some neighbourhoods bordering the river as undesirable places polluted by the dregs of society.Footnote ²⁸ As the only regio located across the river, bridges were of course an inescapable part of Transtiberine life. Such literary descriptions, then, suggest that the spatial boundary of the Tiber could also function as a symbolic line separating different social worlds.

In addition to being, as we might say, ‘on the wrong side of the tracks’, in the eyes of many Roman writers, the fourteenth region was outside the pomerium, the sacred boundary that surrounded Rome in antiquity. An invisible line dividing the orderly civic sphere from the external world of war and the realm of the living from the world of the dead, this religious boundary played an important role in Rome's urban history from the city's founding until its Christianization.Footnote ²⁹ Within it, burials were forbidden, as was the worship of foreign gods not sanctioned by the state's religious authorities. Though extended several times over the centuries as the city grew, the pomerium likely never encompassed the region beyond the Tiber.Footnote ³⁰ Transtiberim therefore remained external in a religious sense even after its incorporation into the city as Regio XIV. The far bank consequently became a place where foreign gods that had found their way to Rome could have a presence in the imperial capital while simultaneously being held at arm's length. This remained the case even after the emperor Aurelian (r. 270–75 CE) included Transtiberim's main residential area within the circuit of walls he built to defend Rome during the troubled third century CE. It should come as no surprise, then, that the area remained attractive to practitioners of foreign religions, chief among them Jewish and Syrian immigrants, from its incorporation under Augustus to the end of the empire itself.

The Jews of Transtiberim

Rome's Jewish community is one of the oldest in the world, likely originating in the second century BCE. We cannot be certain whether the first Jewish migrants to Rome were slaves or free foreigners who came to the city for commercial or political reasons.Footnote ³¹ It is clear, however, that the city's Jewish population grew considerably in the first century BCE. In a speech delivered in 59 BCE, the orator Cicero described a crowd of Jews gathering to protest a measure that would have prevented them from sending their annual half-shekel tax to support the Temple at Jerusalem. Cicero stressed the group's size, cohesion and political clout: ‘You see how great their numbers are, how they stick together, what weight they carry in public meetings.’Footnote ³² He thus depicted the Jews of Rome as an organized constituency engaged in the capital's civic life, while remaining connected to the Jewish community across the Mediterranean.Footnote ³³ Similarly, the biographer Suetonius reported that the Jewish community came out en masse for several nights in a row to pray for Julius Caesar after his assassination in 44 BCE.Footnote ³⁴ Caesar had granted a number of special privileges to Roman Jews during his dictatorship, including freedom of worship, permission to assemble freely and raise money for communal purposes (including the Temple tax), exemption from compulsory military service and permission to try cases involving only Jews in their own tribunals instead of Roman courts.Footnote ³⁵ The emperor Augustus, Caesar's heir and successor, added to these rights by permitting Jewish recipients of the state-sponsored grain dole an extra day to collect their allotments if the distribution happened to fall on the Sabbath.Footnote ³⁶ This again points toward the community's size and cohesion. Although precise numbers are impossible to determine, by the turn of the first millennium there were perhaps 40,000 Jews living in Rome: a mix of slaves, freedmen, freeborn immigrants, and native-born citizens with full political rights.Footnote ³⁷

By this time, the heart of the community was likely located in Transtiberim. Philo, a Jewish philosopher from Alexandria who wrote an account of an embassy of Alexandrian Jews to the emperor Gaius Caligula that he led in 39 or 40 CE, described ‘the great division of Rome on the other side of the Tiber’ as being ‘occupied and inhabited by the Jews’.Footnote ³⁸ There, he wrote, Roman Jews ‘have synagogues and are in the habit of visiting them, most especially on the sacred Sabbath days when they publicly cultivate their national philosophy’.Footnote ³⁹ We may speculate that Philo perhaps visited Transtiberim during his stay in the capital, as he and his delegation were kept waiting before being granted their audience with Caligula; he may have attended one of the synagogues mentioned in his account. If so, the clustering of Jews in Rome's fourteenth region might have felt familiar to him, as the large Jewish community in his hometown of Alexandria was similarly concentrated in the north-eastern Delta quarter near the city wall.Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet regardless of whether Philo personally spent time in Transtiberim during his stay in Rome, his description of a visible community that had its own temples and proselytized among the population at large aligns with contemporaries’ testimonies about the Jewish community of Rome at this time in its history.Footnote ⁴¹

Although neither Roman nor Alexandrian Jews were required to reside in certain neighbourhoods as with medieval or modern ghettoes, there were undoubtedly advantages to living together.Footnote ⁴² Residing in the same apartment buildings or frequenting the same restaurants would have helped observant Jews adhere to Judaism's dietary restrictions.Footnote ⁴³ Living on the same street with co-religionists would make it easier to abstain from work on the Sabbath while limiting exposure to the temples, shrines, processions and public events like weddings or funerals that involved the worship of Greco-Roman gods. In a culture where public bathing was a highly important social ritual, male nudity was common, and most non-Jews viewed circumcision with derision, attending baths frequented or owned by other Jews would offer a degree of acceptance and familiarity not found elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁴ Finally, privileges granted to Roman Jews by Julius Caesar and Augustus such as the right to assemble or adjudicate certain crimes in Jewish tribunals would have functioned best if members of the community lived in relatively close proximity. These facts might help explain the relative traditionalism of Roman Jews in this period when compared with other diaspora communities. Attachment to the Mosaic Law and (until its destruction in 70 CE) the Temple remained strong, and writers like the second-century biographer Suetonius still wrote about the Jews as a foreign people even though the Jewish community of Rome by that time was more than two centuries old.Footnote ⁴⁵

There were disadvantages to clustering as well, as it made the community especially visible and vulnerable in times of crisis.Footnote ⁴⁶ Although some late republican politicians saw Jews as useful allies, evidence of xenophobic anti-Semitism, often entwined with classicism, appears repeatedly in Roman literature. In contrast to some modern stereotypes, negative depictions of Jews in antiquity typically present them as impoverished parasites on Roman society. Juvenal portrayed Jews as poor and synagogues as the haunts of beggars in several satires.Footnote ⁴⁷ Martial described the typical Jew as a vagrant whose mother taught him to panhandle, and included ‘the bad breath of fasting Jews’ on a list of unpleasant smells encountered in Rome.Footnote ⁴⁸ These verses overlap with descriptions of Transtiberim as a physical space in interesting ways. Martial's association of Jews with bad smells, for example, recalls jokes about the stench of Transtiberim's tanneries, while Juvenal's descriptions of Jewish beggars call to mind descriptions of the district's bridges as haunts of the destitute. Here again, we see a kind of neighbourhood definition through negative association. Now, however, negative feelings already associated with a particular segment of urban space are further entangled with ideas about Jewishness, reinforcing impressions of Transtiberim's undesirability. Such negative stereotypes reveal something about the overlap of physical and mental landscapes, but also obscure the fact that many Roman Jews did indeed work for a living. Some may have been skilled artisans in the neighbourhood's glassmaking facilities, as Jews were active in the glassmaking trade elsewhere in the Mediterranean at this time.Footnote ⁴⁹ Others may have laboured as dockworkers on the busy Tiber wharves, a job that would have brought them into frequent contact with non-Jews and increased other Romans’ awareness of the community.Footnote ⁵⁰

Considering this, it may not be coincidental that the first century CE is both the first time we hear of Roman Jews’ association with Transtiberim and the period in which actions against the community became more common. Two decades before Philo's arrival in Rome, in 19 CE, the emperor Tiberius and the Roman Senate ordered the expulsion of Jews and worshippers of the Egyptian goddess Isis from the capital.Footnote ⁵¹ The reasons behind this decree are murky, with some ancient sources maintaining that Roman authorities acted in response to Jewish proselytizing among the senatorial class and others emphasizing a scandal in which a respectable Roman matron interested in Judaism was swindled by four Jewish con artists.Footnote ⁵² Anxiety about Roman elites being seduced by foreign ideas was nothing new; an earlier expulsion of Jews from the city for this reason had already taken place in 139 BCE.Footnote ⁵³ There may also have been a practical concern behind this decree, such as a disruption of Rome's grain supply leading to civil unrest. Faced with such a crisis, Roman authorities might simply have chosen to expel certain easily identifiable groups of foreigners, reducing the number of mouths to feed until the shortage passed.Footnote ⁵⁴ Jews would have been ‘usefully conspicuous’ in such moments, as habits such as Sabbath worship, proselytizing, circumcision, and abstention from pork made them stand out from the population at large.Footnote ⁵⁵ Targeting Jews would also have been especially easy if a large portion of the community was already clustered on the margins of the city, as seems to have been the case in Transtiberim.Footnote ⁵⁶

Practical concerns may also have informed another decree against Roman Jews that occurred not long after, during the reign of Claudius (r. 41–54 CE), in which the emperor again expelled the city's Jewish population ‘because they were constantly causing disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This episode has received much attention, as the phrase ‘instigation of Chrestus’ (a likely alternate spelling for ‘Christus’) has often been interpreted as referring to the arrival of the first Jews who had accepted Jesus of Nazareth as the messiah at Rome.Footnote ⁵⁸ Indeed, it stands to reason that news of events in Palestine might have come first to Transtiberim, the heart of Rome's Jewish community, and that any subsequent infighting among Jews would have been centred there. Faced with such a disruption, Claudius may have chosen to restore order across the river by the easiest means available: throwing the offending parties out of the city.Footnote ⁵⁹ Of course, if Transtiberim was indeed the place where the first proto-Christians arrived in Rome, this episode also highlights the long-standing networks of migration and communication that linked the margins of the imperial capital to the edges of the empire itself.Footnote ⁶⁰

Despite these periodic troubles, the Jewish community of Transtiberim endured and appears to have attained a degree of prosperity. From the second century CE through late antiquity, our best evidence for Roman Jews – and, as we will see below, for the district's other immigrant groups – comes from not from literature but from inscriptions written on stone or other non-perishable materials. These texts offer distinct advantages in trying to reconstruct Roman Jewish life at the time when the community likely reached its height. Most Jewish inscriptions from Rome are funerary in nature, commissioned to honour deceased family members. As such, they reflect the priorities and preferences of Jews themselves, rather than the views of Roman writers. Inscriptions thus illuminate a much wider range of socio-economic experiences, allowing us to glimpse something of what we might call middle-class life.Footnote ⁶¹ Those that record an immigrant's place of birth further hint at migration networks and enduring connections to the eastern Mediterranean.Footnote ⁶² Finally, as physical artifacts that can be associated spatially with certain locations, inscriptions are puzzle pieces that allow us to assemble a picture, albeit fragmentary, of lived experience at the local level.

Nearly 600 Jewish inscriptions have been recovered from Rome, dating from the second to the seventh century CE. Their Jewishness is determined by factors such as find spot (if known), language(s) used, names of dedicators and individuals being commemorated, references to institutions such as the synagogue and the appearance of symbols such as the menorah.Footnote ⁶³ They commemorate men and women of all ages and varying levels of wealth and education, who occupied a variety of positions in the community. Though individually brief, inscriptions collectively form an impressive body of evidence. Some are poignant in their simplicity, such as one plain marble plaque engraved with the words, ‘Here lies Samuel, child’ in Greek.Footnote ⁶⁴ Others read almost like miniature biographies, like the following Latin inscription from the third or fourth century CE: ‘For Aelius Primitivus, an incomparable husband, mellarchon, who lived 38 years, with whom I lived together for 16 years without complaint. For her dearest, well-deserving spouse, Flavia Maria had this made.’Footnote ⁶⁵ One Greek inscription looks back to an immigrant's homeland, commemorating ‘Macedonius the Hebrew from Caesarea in Palestine, the son of Alexander.’Footnote ⁶⁶ Another points to communal ties among Jews at Rome, honouring ‘Julianus, council leader, [who] lies here having lived a good life with everyone.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Most of the Jewish inscriptions from Rome were found in six catacombs on the outskirts of the ancient city. The oldest of these underground cemeteries, probably in use from the late second through the fourth centuries CE, is the Monteverde catacomb of Transtiberim. Located on a southern slope of the Janiculum about 400 metres west of the modern Trastevere railroad station, Monteverde was probably the first place the Jews of Rome began interring their dead.Footnote ⁶⁸ Begun in the first century BCE, it appears to have been designed to meet the basic burial needs of the Jews of Transtiberim.Footnote ⁶⁹ Jewish residents of Transtiberim would have been able to walk there easily, as in antiquity its entrance overlooked the Via Portuensis, one of the main highways that entered the city via the fourteenth region. This is not to say that every person buried in Monteverde lived in Transtiberm. Epitaphs almost never include specific data about the deceased's address, and many inscriptions were not discovered within the catacombs at all.Footnote ⁷⁰ Furthermore, as the Jewish community grew beyond Transtiberim and expanded to other areas of Rome in the first centuries CE, Transtiberine Jews may have buried their dead in other catacombs besides Monteverde. Still, it is reasonable to assume that the site primarily served people who lived in the neighbourhood, at least for the first centuries of the community's existence.Footnote ⁷¹

Montevere has yielded 155 inscriptions in Greek, 39 in Latin, 4 in Hebrew, 2 in Aramaic, 2 in both Latin and Greek and 2 in both Greek and Aramaic.Footnote ⁷² The dominance of Greek is notable, as Latin was the dominant language in Rome and throughout the western half of the empire.Footnote ⁷³ While many Transtiberine Jews no doubt spoke Latin, it appears that Greek was an important marker of identity: a way to express one's Jewishness not just in life but also for posterity.Footnote ⁷⁴ This makes sense when one considers the community's origins. Many Roman Jews came from Hellenized diaspora communities that used Greek for everyday speech and Hebrew as a sacred language. Upon moving to Rome, many likely continued to see Greek as the appropriate language for Jews to use among themselves, whatever level of Latin fluency they may also have possessed. This situation has been compared with the experiences of twentieth-century Jewish immigrants who saw Yiddish, a Germanic dialect, as an inherently Jewish language and Hebrew as the language of the Bible and ritual; to the Jews of Transtiberim, Greek names may have become entangled with ancestral heritage just as some Germanic surnames (Klein, Salzman, Grossman, etc.) became associated with Jewish heritage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Rome, some Semitic names also seem to have been adapted to resemble Greek or Roman types: Aster, Mniaseas, Museus, Annia and Sabbatius are probably ‘translations’ of Esther, Manasseh, Moses, Anna (Hannah) and Shabbeti, respectively.Footnote ⁷⁶ Others retained their original forms, like that of the child Samuel mentioned above.Footnote ⁷⁷ Thus, while Latin, Greek and Semitic names all appear in the inscriptions, Greek and some level of Hebrew continued to be important for the Jews of Transtiberim into late antiquity.Footnote ⁷⁸ This traditionalism suggests a degree of continuity over multiple generations.

The surviving inscriptions record the names of 11 synagogues, though there may have been others whose names have not survived.Footnote ⁷⁹ None have been excavated, but the names of several suggest that they were located in or associated with Transtiberim: the Synagogue of the Augustesians (named in honour of the emperor Augustus, patron of the Jews and first emperor to develop Transtiberim), the Synagogue of the Agrippesians (named after Marcus Agrippa, Augustus’ son-in-law and closest ally), the Synagogue of the Calcaresians (possibly named for its proximity to nearby industrial facilities, as the Latin word calcarenses refers to lime kiln workers) and the Synagogue of the Hebrews (perhaps the first synagogue founded in Rome).Footnote ⁸⁰ Again, we must be cautious; the appearance of a synagogue name in a Monteverde inscription does not prove that the synagogue itself was located nearby or that it directed the place of burial.Footnote ⁸¹ Still, it is almost certain that the synagogues of the Augustinians and Agrippesians were located in the fourteenth region, since at the time of their foundation during the reign of Augustus Transtiberim was the only part of Rome occupied by significant numbers of Jews.Footnote ⁸²

Synagogues – religious and social institutions whose Greek name literally means ‘coming together’ – were likely the centre of Jewish life in Transtiberim. Many inscriptions refer to administrative positions associated with them that deceased individuals held in life, highlighting titles such as archisynagogus (‘head of the synagogue’), gerusiarch (‘council leader’), archon (‘councilman’), phrontistes (‘manager’), grammateus (‘secretary’), prostates (‘patron’) and pater or mater synagogarum (‘father’ or ‘mother of the synagogue’).Footnote ⁸³ These titles typically take the place of other markers of identity, such as a deceased's profession or civil or military office, that are found in contemporary non-Jewish funerary inscriptions from Rome.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this respect, Roman Jews were noticeably different from other residents of the capital, preferring to be remembered for the roles they played in their local synagogues rather than for practising certain trades or holding civic office.Footnote ⁸⁵ For the Jewish community, belonging to a synagogue would have fulfilled some of the same needs that membership in voluntary associations (collegia) did for their non-Jewish neighbours, providing social connections, mutual support, opportunities for patronage or mentorship and a shared sense of purpose and place.Footnote ⁸⁶ Synagogal office-holding also seems to have been used by prosperous members of the community to mark status; this social standing was carried over to family members of office-holders as well, who mention prominent relatives in their own inscriptions.Footnote ⁸⁷

At once a building and a community, the synagogue was a positive expression of the overlap between social and spatial difference that we might see as countering some of the negative stereotypes found in the works of non-Jewish Roman elites. The inscriptions associated with these sites – and the patronage they record – make it clear that, contra Juvenal and Martial, the Jews of Rome were not simply a mass of beggars. For the Jews of Transtiberim, synagogues were places of worship, hubs of social activity and repositories of local history. Their proliferation would have made it clear that, across the Tiber, Jewish community was unusually visible and vibrant. This arrangement, evident as early as Philo's time, persisted through the Christianization of the Roman world in the fourth century CE, and survived the sack of Rome and the collapse of the western Roman government in the fifth. A late fifth-century inscription found on the Via Portuensis near Monteverde even suggests a degree of rapprochement between the Jews of Rome and Rome's conquerors, commemorating a Jewish woman named Sarah and a man with the distinctly Germanic name Sigismund.Footnote ⁸⁸ Transtiberim continued to be the centre of Roman Jewish life throughout the Middle Ages, with a street (the Rua Iudaeorum) and a bridge (the Pons Iudaeorum, now called the Ponte Fabricio) testifying to the district's ancient beginnings as an immigrant enclave.Footnote ⁸⁹

The Syrians of Transtiberim

Jews have sometimes been portrayed as the exception to the rule about the ephemeral ties among foreigners at Rome, and it is true that bonds of religion, history, custom, language and ethnicity made their community particularly distinctive. But Transtiberim was not an exclusively Jewish neighbourhood. Other migrants from roughly the same part of the eastern Mediterranean began arriving in Rome around the same time as Jews. They too were a mix of enslaved prisoners captured during Rome's conflicts with the Syrian-based Seleucid Empire and free immigrants who came to pursue careers in the city. Literary evidence for Syrian immigrants is initially sparser than for Jews, but it is clear that voluntary migration from Syria increased after Rome annexed the region in 64 BCE, peaking in the second or third century CE and continuing into late antiquity.Footnote ⁹⁰ Many of the Syrian immigrants known to us from literary sources were upper-class people with specialized skills, such as the successful poet Lucian of Samosata (c. 125–180 CE). However, inscriptions also indicate that the number of Syrian soldiers and traders at Rome increased significantly during the first centuries CE, with Syrian businessmen becoming common enough for the term Syrus to occasionally be used as a stand-in for ‘merchant’.Footnote ⁹¹ Although people of Syrian descent could be found all over Rome, some seem to have settled in Transtiberim for the same practical advantages that drew Jews to the area, such as lower rents and opportunities for employment.Footnote ⁹² Beginning in the reign of the emperor Septimius Severus (r. 193–211 CE), the imperial government also became increasingly interested in developing the district's infrastructure, working with associations of tanners, millers and wholesalers to ensure abundant water supplies for industrial use and a steady supply of flour for the grain dole.Footnote ⁹³ The tanning district was expanded at this time, with new vats installed near the Tiber banks; this area became known as the Septimianum in honour of Severus, whose wife, the empress Julia Domna, was from the Syrian city of Emesa. The jobs associated with these expanded facilities would have been attractive to skilled and unskilled workers alike.

The label ‘Syrian’ was ambiguous in ancient literature. The term could be used to indicate that an individual was born in the Roman province of Syria, or to refer to the ethnicity of an indigenous Syrian who spoke a Semitic language and practised customs derived from Near Eastern and Semitic culture.Footnote ⁹⁴ Roman writers also sometimes used the word to refer not just to immigrants from the province of Syria but also to people from neighbouring Phoenicia, Palestine, and Arabia, in the more general sense of ‘foreigner from the East’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Some residents of Syria, moreover, were not ethnically Semitic but descended from Greek settlers who spoke Greek and embraced Hellenism as a way of life; mixed marriages were also common, leading to uncertainty about where the boundaries of Syrian identity lay.Footnote ⁹⁶ This blurring of lines is a frequent theme both in works written about Syrians and produced by Syrians themselves.Footnote ⁹⁷ Both in the Hellenized eastern Mediterranean and at Rome, people of Syrian descent expressed their identities by freely drawing upon Semitic, Greek and Roman symbols and idioms. The same person, for example, might have an Aramaic name, speak or write primarily in Greek and call himself a Roman in the civic sense. Syrians living at Rome can thus be identified in texts and inscriptions in a number of different ways, including places of origin, naming conventions, linguistic choices or the worship of deities venerated in eastern cities such as Heliopolis or Palmyra. In the east and at Rome, Syrian identity was often fluid and situational.Footnote ⁹⁸

At first glance, this ambiguity might make Syrians seem quite different from their Jewish neighbours. Indeed, there were important differences. Unlike Jews, Syrians were not linked by a uniquely monotheistic religious tradition that required adherence to a homogenizing set of customs and taboos. They did not bury their dead in catacombs or employ a distinctive set of symbols such as the menorah or shofar on their funerary epitaphs. They likely would have been less distinguishable than their Jewish neighbours from the population at large. Yet despite these differences, Jews and Syrians shared some common ground. Both groups originated in a part of the world with a far older history than Rome itself, shaped by Semitic languages, customs and ideas. Like Syrus, the Latin word Iudaeus had multiple readings, meaning either ‘person from the province of Judaea’ or ‘member of the Jewish nation’ depending on context.Footnote ⁹⁹ Like Syrians, many diaspora Jews spoke Greek as a first language and straddled the line between Hellenism and their ancestral traditions.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ And it is possible that some nuances of homeland and heritage that served as important markers of identity within the Syrian and Jewish communities were opaque or irrelevant to their Roman neighbours, causing both groups to sometimes be lumped together and painted with a broad brush.

Stereotypes in Roman literature seem to bear this out. On the one hand, Roman writers specifically associated certain vices with Syrians, such as effeminacy, luxury and faithlessness.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Particularly in satire, perfumed men with ‘vile Syrian accents’ or ‘effeminate windows’ in their ears were stock characters that functioned as butts of jokes or targets of exaggerated invective.Footnote ¹⁰² At the same time, a number of negative traits associated with Syrians in literature were also applied to Jews. Nationalistic writers such as the historian Livy, for example, specifically linked the two groups as servile easterners fit for conquest.Footnote ¹⁰³ Syrians and Jews were often lumped together as charlatans who tricked respectable Romans out of money by peddling bogus horoscopes or pretending to exorcise spirits for a fee.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Both groups were also vulnerable to charges of sexual perversion. Many Romans viewed with horror the cult of the Syrian goddess Atargatis, whose worship included public processions accompanied by frenzied music and ecstatic rites performed by cross-dressing eunuch priests; the practice of ritualistic castration associated with this and some other Near Eastern cults was disturbing enough to Roman sensibilities for it to be banned on more than one occasion.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Similarly, many Romans saw circumcision as an emasculating and unnerving form of genital mutilation; even those who were attracted to Judaism sometimes balked at full conversion to avoid the procedure.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Particularly in the areas of culture and religion, then, Syrians and Jews sometimes overlapped in Roman eyes. Despite major differences between Judaism and pagan cults such as that of the Syrian Atargatis, it was possible to depict these distinct traditions as similar or inter-related, particularly if one wished to emphasize their foreignness. Thus, the emperor Alexander Severus (r. 222–225 CE), a relative of Julia Domna whose family held the hereditary priesthood of the solar deity Elagabalus in the Syrian city of Emesa, could be mocked as ‘a Syrian synagogue leader (archisynagogus) and high priest (archiereus)’ even though he was not Jewish and it was in fact impossible for the same man simultaneously to lead a synagogue and serve as high priest of a pagan cult!Footnote ¹⁰⁷ What matters, of course, is not the accuracy of this association but its use to portray an emperor of Syrian descent as an ambiguous and partially alien figure. Syrians and Jews could be Romans, but they remained on the margins of Roman society. It should perhaps not surprise us, then, to find Syrian immigrants and their descendants living alongside Jews on the margins of Rome itself.

The fact that Transtiberim was outside the religious boundary of pomerium made it attractive to worshippers of foreign deities such as the Syrian Atargatis, as their cults could flourish there without interference from Roman authorities, and indeed there was a temple to Atargatis located across the river in Transtiberim.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The processions, music and ceremonies associated with this site may have inspired a famous passage in Juvenal's Third Satire, which imagines the Syrian Orontes River ‘pouring out its contents into the Tiber, bringing with it its language and customs, pipes, harp strings, and native timbrels’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Typically read as a poetic metaphor bemoaning the ever-increasing number of easterners in Rome as a whole, Juvenal's specific choice of riverine imagery points, again, to the overlapping of spatial and social boundaries that helped create Transtiberim's distinctive local culture. The physical line of the Tiber can again be seen as marking the edge of a different social world. Juvenal's language also conjures up some of those ephemeral characteristics that act together to create the backdrop of neighbourhood life, such as the sound of music or foreign languages, the sight of strange processions and rituals, or the smell of incense mixing with the pungent odour of tanning vats. Atargatis was, moreover, not the only Syrian deity with a temple in Transtiberim: the district was home to a number of other structures dedicated to the worship of eastern gods. Inscriptions affiliated with these buildings are our best source of evidence for the Syrian community of Transtiberim. While not as numerous as the Jewish inscriptions from Monteverde, they function in a similar way, linking people to places, helping us sketch out the spatial contexts that shaped human relationships and hinting at communal ties among the Syrians of Transtiberim.

A number of inscriptions have been found at a building known today as the Syrian Sanctuary, discovered in 1906 on the eastern slope of the Janiculum Hill not far from the entrance to the Monteverde catacomb. In use from the first through the fourth centuries CE, this unique structure (architectural elements of which resemble the temple at Baalbek in Syria) went through three phases of construction and renovation over its lifetime.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Inscriptions indicate that the Sanctuary housed the cults of numerous eastern deities, many assimilated with Greco-Roman gods. In one Greek inscription from the late second century CE, a woman identifying herself as ‘Sidonia of Cyprus, who is also called Artemis’ paid honour to Zeus Keraunios, an epithet referring to the Greek god Zeus’ association with the Phoenician god Ba'al Karnaim.Footnote ¹¹¹ In another, dated to the third century, a man named Lucius Trebonius Sossianus dedicated a marble pillar decorated with a relief sculpture of Atargatis to Jupiter Heliopolitanus, a solar deity venerated at the Syrian city of Heliopolis.Footnote ¹¹² One unnamed worshipper donated a marble altar to Jupiter Maleciabrudus, a Romanized version of the Syrian deity Ba'al Malek.Footnote ¹¹³ Still another left an offering ‘to Hadad, Lord of the High Places, Lord of Lebanon’.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The Syrian Sanctuary's richest dedications come from a prominent local benefactor named Marcus Antonius Gaionas, who lived in the middle of the second century CE.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Six surviving inscriptions in Latin and Greek bearing this individual's name show him to have been an important patron of the Sanctuary who displayed his ties to Syria through multiple offerings to Jupiter Heliopolitanus and his allegiance to Rome through repeated prayers for the well-being of the emperors Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180 CE) and Commodus (r. 177–192 CE). Gaionas also took pride in holding several titles that allow us to glimpse his social world. He repeatedly refers to himself as cistiber (‘member of the night watch’), Claudialis Augustalis (a priest of the deified emperor Claudius) and deipnokrites (‘judge of banquets’).Footnote ¹¹⁶ The last words of his epitaph, which describe him as ‘judging many things in banquets with cheerfulness’, suggest that he particularly enjoyed this last position, which may have involved serving as an overseer or host of meals associated with the worship of Jupiter Heliopolitanus.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Whether he was born at Rome or immigrated there from the east, Gainoas had enough wealth (possibly through a business in Rome's harbour of Portus, where one of his inscriptions was found) to patronize generously the sanctuary of his ancestral god located in the neighbourhood where he may have lived.Footnote ¹¹⁸ At the same time, dedications on behalf of the emperors in Latin and Greek show that he was integrated into Rome's Latin-speaking society without shedding ties to the Greek east. His inscriptions remind us that activities such as feasting and local office-holding build social ties, encouraging people to identify as members of a community and to feel at home in the place where they live, work and worship.Footnote ¹¹⁹ It is also important to note that Gaionas’ dedications span decades, suggesting both long-term residence in the area and the importance of the Syrian Sanctuary as a site of worship and community for people who lived nearby. The site itself, it must be remembered, was in use for perhaps three centuries. This too speaks to a continuity of patronage and worship over multiple generations.

Inscriptions found in Transtiberim also make it clear that there were other buildings dedicated to the worship of eastern deities in the neighbourhood. Although the Syrian Sanctuary is the only structure that has been excavated, a group of inscriptions in Latin, Greek and Aramaic indicate that sanctuaries dedicated to a group of solar deities worshipped in the Syrian city of Palmyra were located somewhere in southern Transtiberim near the Porta Portuensis.Footnote ¹²⁰ Several of these texts are bilingual, reminding us that immigrants are often skilled code switchers accustomed to moving between the languages and customs of their ‘home’ and ‘host’ communities. As with the Jewish inscriptions from Monteverde, this bilingualism highlights ethnic or cultural difference, telling the reader that a dedicator was perceived or wished to be perceived as belonging to two distinct linguistic and cultural traditions.Footnote ¹²¹ Bilingual inscriptions associated with the Syrian community were meant to ‘speak’ both to people born in Rome who may have only known Latin and to more recent arrivals who may have spoken Greek and Aramaic at home. In addition, inscriptions produced by immigrants from Palmyra display notable traditionalism in their content and iconography, suggesting enduring ties to their city of origin.Footnote ¹²²

Thus, the donors of one inscription could identify themselves as ‘Maqaai son of Lišamš’ and ‘Sodu son of Tiame son of Lišamšai’ and expect these clearly Semitic names to be recognizable and significant to passersby in Rome.Footnote ¹²³ In another dedication, a relief sculpture dated to 236 CE that shows the moon god Aglibol and the sun god Malachbel shaking hands, a donor identified himself first in Greek as ‘Gaius Aurelius Heliodorus, originally from Palmyra’ and again in Aramaic as ‘Iarhai son of Haliphi son of Iarhai son of Lišamš son of Soadu’.Footnote ¹²⁴ This inscription, which records the founding of a temple to the gods of Palmyra at Rome at Heliodorus’ expense, also lists the date using the calendar of the old Seleucid Empire, traditional in the east but never used by native-born Romans. The fact that individuals like these knew the names of multiple Palmyrene ancestors and chose to include them in their dedications suggests that their eastern backgrounds remained an important part of their identities at Rome. Use of the ancient (and by this time defunct) Seleucid calendar indicates a desire to keep alive traditions from home among some Syrian immigrants in Rome. These choices also imply that other members of the community able to understand these languages would appreciate the dedicators’ Palmyrene heritage, presumably because at least some of them shared it. We should thus imagine local social ties that extended both ‘horizontally’ among people living in the neighbourhood at the moment an inscription was made and ‘vertically’ through time as dedicators traced their genealogies back through the generations. Many inscriptions dedicated by Syrian benefactors like Heliodorus/Iarhai were also erected to preserve a record of acts of patronage and public piety, recording good deeds that their dedicators wished future residents of the neighbourhood to remember them for.Footnote ¹²⁵

Perhaps the most tantalizing dedication associated with the Syrian community of Transtiberim comes not from a wealthy individual but from a group of ordinary workers. It is an altar dedicated to the god Sol Sanctissimus (‘the most holy Sun’) with high-quality relief sculptures on each of its four faces showing scenes from the god's lifecycle, set above bilingual inscriptions in Latin and Aramaic. Stylistically dated to the late first or early second century CE, the altar's Aramaic inscription reports that it is an offering to the gods of Palmyra dedicated by Tiberius Claudius Felix and ‘the people of Palmyra’. The Latin inscription differs slightly, stating that Tiberius Claudius Felix, Claudia Helpis and their son Tiberius Claudius Alypius donated the altar in fulfilment of a vow.Footnote ¹²⁶ No mention is made of ‘the Palmyrenes’ in the Latin text, but Felix and his family are instead described as members of ‘the third cohort of the Galbensians’. This phrase identifies them as workers at the Horrea Galbana, the Warehouses of Galba located across the Tiber on the south-western slopes of the Aventine Hill. The altar, in other words, locates its dedicators as members of a family, of an ethnic and linguistic group, of a community of workers, and as ‘belonging’ in a particular place in Rome. The use of Aramaic alongside Latin obviously suggests an appeal to tradition and a connection to Syria, as does the direct reference to ‘the people of Palmyra’ living at Rome.

This inscription also makes an important connection to labour and its relationship to identity and community. Tanning, glassmaking, brickmaking, potting and milling were all important trades in this part of Rome, as already discussed above. But the biggest industry that drove the economy of south-western Rome was shipping. On the docks that lined both sides of the river for more than a mile south of the Tiber Island, slave and free workers laboured side by side to unload barges filled with grain, olive oil, wine, construction materials and other commodities ferried upstream from Rome's port. These goods were placed in warehouses located in Transtiberim and across the river in the adjacent Aventine district, another part of Rome that was long a destination for migrants, before being distributed for sale.Footnote ¹²⁷ The porters (sacarii) and day labourers (mercenarii) who did much of this heavy lifting were indispensable to the shipping and construction industries, two of the biggest employers in south-western Rome.Footnote ¹²⁸ Although elite writers scorned this type of labour, epigraphic evidence outside the literary tradition makes it clear that work was often a source of pride and a prime marker of identity for ordinary Romans.Footnote ¹²⁹ People who identified themselves by profession on their epitaphs, such as the family of Tiberius Claudius Felix and their Palmyrene co-workers, articulated a sense of dignity and worth as well as a sense of place. By naming their Palmyrene homeland as well as their place of employment in Rome, dedicating to Roman and eastern gods in Latin and Aramaic, and identifying themselves as warehouse workers who moved goods upon which the Roman economy depended, these immigrants highlighted how they ‘fit’ into the city geographically, socially and economically. The inscription thus allows us to glimpse the lives of Syrians who identified themselves as members of a community that shared ties of work, ethnicity, language and religion.

We cannot know whether the dedicators of this altar lived in Transtiberim and crossed the bridges to work in the Aventine warehouses, or if they lived in the Aventine and sometimes climbed the Janiculum slopes to worship in the Syrian Sanctuary, or whether they thought of themselves primarily as Syrians living in Rome or as Romans of Syrian heritage. Such questions are beyond the scope of the surviving evidence. What matters more for the question of immigrant community is the relationship, glimpsed in this inscription and in dozens of others from Transtiberim and its environs, between social ties and lived space. It is certain that the streets of Transtiberim were central to the social and economic lives of the district's residents, as were the Tiber bridges that created shared pedestrian ‘paths’ and shaped locals’ perception of their relationship to the greater city.Footnote ¹³⁰ We might imagine an informal system of agents based around public fountains, at busy crossroads or near the bridge crossings that put young locals or new arrivals in touch with potential employers at places like the docks and warehouses.Footnote ¹³¹ Basing themselves near such places would have been an effective way for newcomers to integrate themselves into the city, by tapping into existing networks of kinship and language bolstered by simple proximity.Footnote ¹³² And although Jews, as we have seen, seldom mentioned jobs in their epitaphs, they too would have benefited from the networks of communication and opportunity that spread through and beyond the fourteenth region. On the crowded streets and in the close quarters of Transtiberim's insulae, mingling among Syrians and Jews, newcomers and natives, must have been frequent and unavoidable.Footnote ¹³³ The result was a small world within greater Rome: a neighbourhood with a local culture that was Jewish, Syrian and Roman all at once, neither precisely replicating the traditions of the east, nor assimilating fully into Roman norms.

Conclusion: finding community

In Rome as in many cities, geography, community and difference were inextricably inter-related.Footnote ¹³⁴ While we cannot be certain whether Transtiberim was Rome's one ‘accepted refuge of the unorthodox’ or simply a particularly visible example of processes that played out all over the imperial capital, it is clear that the fourteenth region had a local culture that was in some ways distinctive.Footnote ¹³⁵ Separated from the rest of the city by the physical barrier of the Tiber and the sacred boundary of the pomerium, the margins of Rome were home to communities of immigrants who were themselves marginally situated within Roman society. Ties of ethnicity, language and religion helped the Jews and Syrians of Transtiberim forge social bonds and find a bit of the familiar amid what was, to some of them, the foreign. At the same time, living cheek by jowl, working in the area's various industries and sharing facilities such as bridges, fountains and public baths with others who lived nearby would have required them to look beyond their communities, reinforcing a sense of common experience and perhaps priorities among neighbours.

For these people, and for many who lived in the cosmopolitan capital, the experience of Rome may have been largely focused on the district where they spent much of their time in limited contact with the larger city.Footnote ¹³⁶ Thinking about the social and spatial boundaries they navigated as they went about their lives can bring us down from the level of high abstraction about immigration and assimilation to understand lived experience at the neighbourhood level better. By learning Latin while still expressing themselves in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, worshipping their ancestral gods in conjunction with Roman deities and enthusiastically supporting civic institutions such as the imperial cult and the nightly watch, the immigrants of Transtiberim managed to carve out places for themselves and their children at the heart of the Roman Empire. In doing so, they helped to expand the idea of what it meant to be residents of the imperial city and, more broadly, to be Roman.