In his monograph on the Roman Near East, Millar set out his hope that this would be the start of a wider study that would stretch from Alexander to Muhammad. In this book, a collection of essays rather than a monograph, he pursues many of the same interests as his earlier work, especially the spread of the Greek city and the Greek language, and their relationship to non-Greek institutions and languages. Like A. H. M. Jones, Millar also incorporates studies of the Christian Church as part of his interest in the polis. But he also shows a keen interest in the non-Greek cultures of the region in this period, Jews, ‘Syrians’ and Arabs, and their development in the shadow of Greek cultural dominance.
The method that unites these essays is the accumulation of evidence as a basis for ‘a moderate positivism’. In some cases this constitutes the thorough evaluation of individual works (for example, essays xi, xii). In others, it involves the accumulation of evidence of different kinds (documents, inscriptions, mosaics, manuscripts), together with an assessment of their dates and locations. A particularly impressive example of this approach is his collection of the evidence of inscriptions and manuscript production to trace the emergence of Syriac scribal culture in the fifth and sixth centuries. Here he observes the slow appearance of Syriac as a language of prestige first in the city of Edessa before its steady progression south and west of the Euphrates (essay xxii).
Millar's technique is to accumulate dateable and locatable evidence from as many sources as possible. He uses this to assess more ambiguous evidence or to test wider generalisations about the culture and politics of the region. Occasionally this approach means that individual chapters can lose some of their focus in the effort to set out as much data as possible, but this is a small price to pay for a work that is so panoramic.
There is a sense throughout the work of Millar's own journey as a classicist discovering a new world in late antiquity. Unlike some specialists who have remained in one subfield for an entire career, locked in conversations with other specialists, Millar lets his readers know the reference works that allow a traveller from an earlier period to take stock of the late antique Near East. Thus he flags up the usefulness of Fedalto's Hierarchia ecclesiastica or Destephen's Prosopographie chrétienne. And he identifies a number of projects that are needed in order to make full use of the evidence available: a facing-page edition and translation of the Acts of Chalcedon; a study of Theodoret of Cyrrhus; maps of settlement in Roman Arabia or religious demography in Palestine; the publication of Syriac manuscripts of key significance). To a graduate student or young academic this laying out of the land is invaluable.
The first group of essays (parts i–iii) in this collection deal with the Roman state and Greek culture. Important themes of Millar's argument are the enduring importance of Greek as a language of public communication, whether in secular administration or the proceedings of the Church, and the importance of the Church in stimulating and facilitating communication between centres and peripheries (essays i, viii). He stresses that the evidence for the spread of bishoprics can also be read as the spread of the Greek polis within Roman frontiers (essay v). And he uses the evidence of mosaics (essay vii) and onomastics (essay ii) to argue for the wide reception of Greco-Roman culture, even in a places like Edessa that would be the well-spring of Syriac scribal tradition. His article on Justinian (essay i) will be a useful introduction to the sixth century for undergraduates and should appear on reading lists.
The second group of essays (parts iv–v) deals with the Jews, both in Palestine and in diasporas in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Arabian peninsula. Here he takes Jewish studies to task for ignoring the wider context of the Roman world. In part, this myopia is the result of a concentration on the Mishnah and Talmud. Millar comments that we may study these texts as imagined worlds, on the model of Moses Finley's famous study of the Iliad and Odyssey, while suspending judgement on whether or not these worlds actually existed. But the study of the world of the rabbinic imagination must be linked to the use of dateable evidence that describes the lived realities of the rabbis, and of other Jews, in a Roman context (essays xiii, xx). His survey of Jewish-Christian relations in the fifth century suggests a biblical Judaism that might still attract ‘god-fearers’ and that might reply to Christian threats of violence with its own, even in an era of Christian political dominance (essay xix). And he maintains a case for the widespread existence of a rabbinate, often with a role in the life of the synagogues (essays xiv, xvi). Millar's thoughts here might be usefully read alongside Hayim Lapin's work, Rabbis as Romans.
Millar's third selection of essays (part vi) deals with the Syriac-speaking world. Four of these (essays xxiii–xxvi) can be read as a connected history of the emergence of Syriac as a language of prestige, which functions as a preparatory step in broader enquiries into the emergence of a Syriac ‘ethnic identity’ or of a ‘Syrian Orthodox Church’. At the core of this account is the use of dated documents (including the manuscripts catalogued by Wright and Sachau) and inscriptions to understand the spread of a Syriac scribal tradition. This is a major contribution and will provide a useful skeleton for the analysis of works of literature, or for historical sociolinguistics.
Millar argues that Syriac was always in a complex relationship of coexistence with Greek in this period. Beginning in the third century, he observes that Edessene Aramaic (Syriac) escaped the fate of other forms of Aramaic such as Nabatean or Palmyrene, which mostly lost their status at the Roman conquest. He notes that the third-century Dura documents written in Syriac clearly refer to an archive in Edessa, though he doubts that any public archive in the city would have included records in languages other than Greek after the Roman conquest. He argues that encounters between Roman officials and the populace were conducted in Greek, but this coexisted with a tradition of Syriac hymnography and an educational system that included knowledge of the Bible (essay xxiii).
These traditions were developed by Ephrem and his successors such as Cyrillonas in the fifth century and Jacob of Serug and Narsai in the sixth. Millar points to the significance of the Doctrina Addai and the codex of 411 to argue that local histories and scribal practice must have been nurtured well before they appear in the extant evidence. Even if elites conducted their affairs with the outside world in Greek, the early to mid-fifth century sees the appearance of ‘a confident new literary culture’ in Syriac, with an appetite for translated works as well as local production. But Millar is rightly wary of claiming the existence of theological schools qua institutions in Edessa too early, and he sees them as developments of the middle of the fifth century (essay xxiv). In these descriptions of third- to fifth-century Edessa, Millar emphasises that linguistic differences do not correspond to distinctions of class, religion or ethnicity. Nevertheless, there are moments when linguistic differences do seem to be the basis for both solidarity and boundary-building, such as the fifth-century (?) Life of Euphemia and the Goth, edited and translated by F. C. Burkitt.
Next Millar devotes an important chapter on the evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church (essay xxvi). Here he stresses the importance of the manuscript evidence in tracking the translation of Severus into Syriac, and the dissemination of the works of Philoxenus and Jacob of Serug in the mid-sixth century. It is this process, as well as the ordination of an independent episcopate and clergy by John of Tella and Jacob Baradeus, that allowed for a ‘Syrian Orthodox’ Church to claim its position as one of the major Christian confessions of the Islamic world. This is an important supplement to the efforts of Bas Ter Haar Romeny and colleagues in tracing the emergence of different forms of identity in the Syriac-speaking world.
Millar also devotes an important discussion to the terminology that scholars should employ for non-Chalcedonian confessions in this period: ‘What terms were used by contemporaries? … Should we restrict our terminology to that derived from the usage of contemporaries? … Is it legitimate to retroject terms … which were not used by contemporaries?’ (p. 637). The difficulty here is acute because contemporary terms are frequently polemical (for example, Marcionites, Arians, Manichees). Most groups would have referred to themselves simply as the orthodox. As Millar points out, there will be advantages and disadvantages to any term. For instance, if we label the group ‘Syrian Orthodox’, we imagine an affiliation between ethnicity, language and religion that did not exist in this period.
The fourth section of Millar's collection (part vii) deals with the ‘Saracens’. Here Millar stresses the contemporary use of this term in preference for ‘Arab’, and notes how the use of the term ‘Arab’ by the seventh-century conquerors of the Near East would not have been anticipated by Muhammad's contemporaries. In essay xxviii, Millar analyses the exposure of the Saracens to Jewish and Christian influences (both in terms of practice and their self-imagination as children of Abraham). He goes on to set out the full range of evidence for the Jafnid phylarchs who helped to defend Rome's southern and eastern frontier, combining the evidence of written histories with inscriptions and the documents (essay xxix). Both of these papers are epitomes of clear reasoning, and a good antidote to the over-reliance on later Muslim Arabic sources. And both set out key features of the environment in which Muhammad grew up and against which both Islam and an Arab identity would spread. The twin issues of the development of the phylarchate, and of Christianity and Judaism in the Arabian peninsula are now discussed in an important sourcebook edited by Greg Fisher.
It may be that later sources can be deployed to understand these sixth-century developments. But, as Millar argues, we must give priority to the contemporary evidence before we start trying to fill in the blanks. In a stimulating conclusion, Millar reminds us how little contemporary evidence we really have for either Sasanian Iran or the early caliphate, by comparison to the sixth-century Roman East.
In a deep and wide-ranging collection such as this, it is obvious that there will be something of interest to anyone with interests in the region. But, more importantly, immersion in Millar's work will also challenge different kinds of historians to place their ‘own’ sources into a richer context, where they may take on a different significance and meaning.
