This book is a pleasure to read because each contribution has a high scientific standing, with an explicit methodological concern (for the majority). Yet, the global unity of the volume is not immediately clear because of its rather loose organisation. However, the book draws its coherence from the work of B.D. Shaw, Professor at Princeton University (his bibliography closes the volume, along with a general index), since it originates in a conference, organised in Princeton in May 2017 by the editor and A.M. Luijendijk, in his honour on his retirement. For readers less familiar with the wide range of Shaw's scholarship, the editor, Flower, provides a reminder in the introduction: ‘Patterns and Paradigms in the Ancient Mediterranean’. She highlights three ‘principal themes’ (boundaries and networks, religious change and competition, violence), which could have formed the structure of the book (yet no paper deals with violence). She is echoed in the concluding laudatio by P. Brown, Shaw's colleague (‘Brent Shaw: an Intellectual Profile’), though Brown mainly stresses topics matching his own interests (the socio-cultural history of late antiquity, anthropology of power, [African] Christianity). Both Flower and Brown emphasise Shaw's methodology: his ‘engagement across fields and disciplines’ (p. 5) in order to ‘De-periodize!’ (p. 247).
The title of the conference that nurtured the book, Subjects of Empire: Political and Cultural Exchange in Imperial Rome, had a more problematised flavour than the (too?) general title of the book – for which there is a recent homonymous volume from Brill (ed. E. Muñiz Grijalvo et al. [2017], cleverly identified by the subtitle Religious Change in Greek Cities under Roman Rule). The eleven contributions (each with its own bibliography) are organised into two parts: ‘Empire’ and ‘Religion’. This structure fades the dynamics that Shaw has underlined and reserves most of the second part to Christianity more than to ‘religion’. In fact, Part 2 covers late antiquity, hence M. Vessey's paper, ‘Ausonius at the Edge of the Empire: Consular Poetics as Cognitive Improvisation’, which does not deal with religion, but with Empire in line with its argument on the Mosella ‘that skirts the imperial capital while hymning its region’ (p. 198). The chronological span and territories of the various studies are as large as Shaw's interests – from the first century (E.S. Gruen, ‘Contingency and Context: the Origins of the Jewish War against Rome’) to Western (M. Vessey in Gaul) and Eastern late antiquity (G.W. Bowersock, ‘Muhammad's Rivals: Prophets in Late Antique Arabia’). The book thus covers the major cultural traditions of the Roman Empire (Graeco-Roman, Jewish and Christian), although its organisation and the absence of dialogue between papers when they overlap do not make their interactions visible.
For this reason, I shall not follow the order of the contributions and instead arrange them into two coherent groups. Five papers bring new documents or new questions on known evidence, while inviting an East–West journey within the Roman Empire. K. Harper, in ‘Germs and Empire: the Agency of the Microscopic’, opens the volume in addressing (with contemporary echoes) one of Shaw's thematic interests: connectivity and pandemic events. Rightly, he proposes a new reconstruction of the Antonine Plague (the first ‘pandemic disease’, p. 22), taking advantage of the research of the Arabianist C. Robin. After an exposé on mortality and diseases, either endemic or epidemic, he re-establishes the origin of the plague from the Red Sea axis (and not from Mesopotamia as the consensus says), its chronology (already by 165 ce) and its medical nature (a variola). Driving readers to Egypt, S.R. Huebner, in ‘The first Christian family of Egypt’, stops on a fascinating papyrus she has republished as P.Bas. 2.43 (with colleagues, in the Papyri of the University Library of Basel [2020]). This letter is an invaluable testimony in so far as we are lacking documentary evidence on the spread of Christianity before the second half of the third century. It is dated to ‘the early or mid-230s or an even earlier date’ (p. 126) and the nomen sacrum ἐν κ(υρί)ῳ identifies it as Christian. Moreover, members of this family were city councillors, gymnasiarchs and even a civic high priest (archiereus) of the imperial cult. This document is thus a major piece of evidence in the debated question of the integration of Christians within ‘pagan’ cities and societies (see N. Belayche and A.-V. Pont [edd.], Participations civiques des juifs et des chrétiens dans l'Orient romain (ier–ive siècles) [2022]). Moving to Western Africa, C. Conybeare, in ‘Peregrinationes in Psalmos’, analyses a well-known text, Augustine's Enarrationes in Psalmos. Yet she questions it on the metaphor of peregrinatio, which has been asked rather with regard to the City of God up to now. Following the Derridean concept of metaphor, which is per se a ‘movement of the meaning’ (p. 215), she envisions the Augustinian peregrinatio as ‘a literal enactment of the sense of metaphor’ (p. 216). She borrows his final translation of peregrinatio from the French philosopher as well: a ‘destinerrancy of desire’ (‘destinerrance du désir’ in French). Considering the blossoming of what one could call ‘metaphor studies’, one could have expected a larger theoretical basis, with a call for historical anthropology (e.g. W.M. Short, ‘Metaphora’, in: M. Bettini and W.D. Short, Con I Romani. Un'antropologia della cultura antica [2014], pp. 329–53). However, Conybeare's argument of the ‘wandering semantics’ of peregrinatio (p. 218) is convincing, and she enlightens the dynamics of the concept: for Augustine, the Christian is a peregrinus in both his affective, lived religion and his spiritual path, just as Christ was (En. in Ps. 145). Ausonius was Augustine's elder contemporary. His poem, the Mosella, is studied by Vessey in an innovative way: ‘the “cognitive ecology” of the later Roman Empire’ (p. 190). Interestingly, Vessey combines the date of the work (between 379 and 383), the status of the ‘poet who rather surprisingly became consul’ (p. 195) and who was a ‘technician of empire’ (p. 206), and the poetic form, in order to understand this Belgian heartland's illustratio as a ‘vision of Roman social, political, and economic culture in continuous internal expansion’ (p. 203). The analysis is rich; and, in my opinion, the use of anachronisms (such as ‘a boom time of Roman high-tech start-ups’, p. 206) is more fashionable than bringing supplementary support to the argument. C. Noreña, in ‘Imperial Integration on Rome's Atlantic Rim’, drives us to the long Atlantic coast. He tackles (with maps) how a ‘frontier zone [was] integrated into a Roman imperial system centered on the Mediterranean basin’ (p. 37) – understanding integration as ‘imperial control’ (p. 48). He argues that ‘Roman imperial integration transformed the northeastern Atlantic from a “corridor” into a “rim”’ (p. 35). He scrutinises specifically the connections of four regions (Mauretania, Galicia, the Gironde estuary and southern Ireland outside of the Empire) and combines arguments – physical environment, resources, agencies (local elites and state commands), chronology (a shift from the ‘Celtic’ corridor to a continental tropism), consequences (reorganisation of micro-regions) – in order to demonstrate, convincingly, that the integration of this ‘macro-region’ ‘could bring real benefits to peripheral populations, but always, ultimately, in the service of empire’ (p. 48).
A second group of papers offers new appraisals of debated dossiers. C. Ando, in ‘The Ambitions of Government: Sovereignty and Control in the Ancient Countryside’, pursues ‘the last great frontier of ancient history’, that is a reflection on ‘the extension of state power to the ancient countryside’ (p. 72), which accounted for 85% of the population. The subject is large for a short essay pointing to the overall system of provincialisation, but Ando also relies on his previous works (see footnotes), which enlighten the system of the Roman state and power and the juridical, political and social dynamics of its functioning. Ando bypasses the traditional image of cities acting as instruments of imperial power (thus their competitions) because of the infrastructural weakness of the ‘center’. He builds on the importance of ‘a patchwork of territories’ besides the cities (pp. 78ff.), equal agents of ‘local instantiation of processes and institutions that conduced a peculiarly Roman social order’ (p. 81). Arguing for plurality and ‘networks of city-states’ (p. 85), he points to political economy and the diversity of laws in the relationship between cities and their territories, before the situation changed in 212. After this conceptual reflection, Gruen offers a comparative case study. He methodologically examines the major propositions (political, economical, ethnical, religious etc.) for explaining the origin of the ‘First revolt’ (Bellum Iudaicum). He notes their weaknesses and particularly their common assumption of a long-term development of a ‘Jewish defiance of the ruling power’ (p. 105), falsely inspired by Josephus. Without discarding this wider context, he proposes to focus on ‘elements of contingency’ (p. 106), namely the government of Florus (‘the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time’, p. 107). His paper is a model of historical method, like that of É. Rebillard in ‘Missionaries, Pious Merchants, Freelance Religious Experts, and the Spread of Christianity’. Rebillard methodologically examines the various agents that were proposed for explaining the spread of Christianity from Harnack's ‘professional missionaries’ model onwards – like trading communities or religious experts. Warning about the use of literary evidence and its eventual biases (in terms of dates, ideology and patterns of discourses), he discards the assumption of ‘mission commitment of ordinary Christians’ (pp. 143–4), when they were pious merchants. He calls efficiently for network and diffusion theories to assert that ‘the Jewish diaspora communities constituted a primary network for the spread of Christianity’ (p. 152) – a point already set for Paul by P. Fredriksen. His conclusion matches recent advances on Judaeo-Christianity. C. Rapp, in ‘Christian Piety in Late Antiquity: Contexts and Contestations’, also builds on a shift of paradigms in a social study of the Christian, lived piety in late antiquity. Combining ‘three clusters of evidence’ (p. 161), corresponding to documents of different natures and usually isolated (the dogmatic vision of monasticism by the Church Fathers, hagiographic literature and documentary papyri of laypeople), Rapp succeeds in unveiling what were the best forms of Christian life and their best achieved social organisation. She puts into perspective the well-known binary image of eremitism (in the desert) vs cenobitism (more connected to cities) and explores a middle ground, a ‘third kind’ of pious people, ‘worldlings’, individuals or organised groups (philoponoi or spoudaioi), practising Christian virtues (hymnic liturgy, charity, hospitality, services for monks) in towns and cities, some sort of ‘hidden sanctity’ (pp. 173ff.). Lastly, Bowersock crosses the territorial and chronological borders of the Roman empire. His brilliant fresco (though short) of the known rivals of Muhammad illustrates the religious diversity of late antique Arabia. Following the figures of prophets (in the Biblical sense) and his recent book, The Crucible of Islam (2017), he portrays four rivals (including a woman) of the Prophet, comparing their social and geographical contexts (tribal attachments and regions). It is a welcome occasion for stating some features of Muhammad's specific characteristics.
