A Restless City: Edessa and Urban Actors in the Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus

ABSTRACT

The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus offer an opportunity to look at the evolution of urban structures in the middle of the fifth century at the edge of the Roman Empire. Observing a city in a state of unrest comes with both advantages and pitfalls. While upheaval creates a chance for otherwise hard to spot structures and classes to be clarified, the record of such an upheaval is never an objective description. Mindful of these caveats, this article puts various actors present in the Acts into conversation in order to reconstruct an image of Edessa as an urban system. Thus an attempt is made to reconstruct the structures of governance and political participation as well as the interface between religious and secular authority at this time of change. Various instruments of such participation, such as acclamations and oaths, are reassessed. Ultimately, new light is cast on the role of various monastics in the practice of governance of a Late Antique metropolis in times of unrest.

KEYWORDS:

• Late Antiquity
• urban history
• ecclesiastical history
• urban unrest

1. Introduction

On 12 April 449, Flavius Chaereas, comes ordini primis et praeses Osrhoene, was having an extremely bad first day on the job. As a new governor he was on the way to Edessa to take up his post, and a large crowd of agitated inhabitants awaited him. After Chaereas entered the martyrium of Saint Zacchaeus, just outside the limits of the city, archimandrites, monks, women and men gathered there started shouting loudly: “One is God! Victory to the Romans! […] Many years for the orthodox! You are the messenger of peace!”¹ The governor might have thought the mood to be joyful but the situation escalated quickly. “Another bishop for the metropolis! No-one accepts Hiba! […] An orthodox bishop for the metropolis!”² This kind of reception, including all the ceremonial bells and whistles, was a traditional part of a new governor’s arrival in the province³ but this occasion differed in many ways from a traditional adventus: Edessa found itself on the brink of exploding, engulfed by a wave of civic unrest directed against its bishop, Hiba. As a man in charge of a province at the very edge of the empire, Chaereas had now to deal with a populace rising against their bishop, a bishop accused not only of unorthodox views but also of abuse of power and misuse of his office. In this article, we shall accompany Chaereas during the first dazs of his tenure but, most importantly, we shall look at a restless Late Antique city: Edessa in the throes of civil strife expressed as text.

First, we shall look at the historical, textual and doctrinal background and at how the city is stirring, and the civil unrest is represented. This will be followed by a short excursus into the role of monasticism in the whole affair. Then we shall examine the representation of the city in the Syriac Acts of the Council of Ephesus and how Edessa functioned as a lived-in textual landscape. Here, we are less interested in the Christological niceties of Hiba’s stance or even the various positions of the Antiochene Church, and more in what these events reveal about the fabric of the Late Antique city. The Syriac Acts of the Council of Ephesus, our chief source, can be read through the analytical toolbox of a “city as text” concept and so give us access to the various readings of Edessa. The phonai, the loud acclamations by the crowd, will play an important role, as will the structure of the text itself.

While in this article we will be mainly concerned with the reconstruction and analysis of urban life and governance in times of unrest, it will, in parallel, strive to make contributions to a range of other, mutually connected, historiographical debates. The Acts offer insight into the position of monks in the urban space and the fate of Late Antique urbanism. Edessa in 449 and the sources connected with the events here described are a textual laboratory that makes possible discussion of Late Antique adaptations of urbanism. At the core of these interventions in the first part of the article lies the unifying question of whether a city in the mid-fifth century was still a politically functioning organism or whether it had devolved into a stage of strife, mainly theologically driven, making it ultimately dysfunctional and paving the way for its eventual demise. The article will offer an alternative interpretation that tries to account for a widened participation in urban politics without denying the changing nature of Late Antique governance. Ultimately, the intervention made here in the field of urban history is this: the entanglement of ecclesiastical and urban politics in the mid-fifth century is undeniable, but the progressive adaptation of urban governance is not necessarily a sign of political dysfunctionality. The second part of the article will focus in detail on the arguments for a different, more textual understanding of the nature of the relationship between the Late Antique city and the imperial bureaucracy, offering a different way of understanding how a city was perceived both within it and outside it. The Acts show how this relationship was dominated by texts in the middle of the fifth century, and so any attempt to understand it today must consider the dynamics of textual production and consumption. In this process, the article engages critically with the way urbanism and cities were seen and perceived from the perspective of Constantinople. As much as the sources allow, and major limitations in this area remain, a similar attempt is then made to think about how the city was perceived by its inhabitants.

2. Edessa and Its Bishops in the Fifth Century

The fifth century was a period of relative stability in the Persian-Roman borderlands. While hostilities did erupt sporadically (as in the two brief wars of 420–421 and 440), the empires were largely busy elsewhere.⁴ At the same time, the relatively late newcomers to the Roman Empire – the provinces of Osrohene (formed in 214) and Mesopotamia (formed in 198) – witnessed a flourishing of what we now call Syriac culture. While lacking official status, Syriac emerged as an important language of both Christian literature and everyday life, providing a framework for a unique development in the Roman Christian world. Here, at the periphery of empires, theological disputes and political hustings were conducted in, or with an important role for, the local language.⁵ This has influenced the dynamic of the region and set it apart from many other provinces of the empire. At the same time, a local and diverse tradition of asceticism emerged. Although this found itself quickly in contact with the Egyptian tradition, it retained many local characteristics. Edessa was, next to Amida, Nisibis and Harran, one of the main cities of this world in cultural, administrative and religious terms.

As we zoom in, we see that, while Edessa found itself at the very periphery of the empire, the city occupied a strategic position between Syria and Mesopotamia and between Rome and Persia.⁶ It also quickly became a major centre of Syriac literature and culture⁷ as well as a centre of learning,⁸ and it remained a focal point of theological controversy and discussion,⁹ although initially the pluralism of Christian thought was characterised by a rather peaceful coexistence and lacked anything more than regional impact.¹⁰

The entry of Edessa onto the major theological stage is closely connected with the figure of Rabbula, elected bishop in 412, who attempted to transform the city of Edessa into a “city of believers”.¹¹ But it would be amiss to see Rabbula as single-handedly responsible for this process. Rather, we should see him as a leader of a broader movement, coalescing around the figure of a bishop, and one that continued after his death. This made it possible for the main vehicle for this transformation to be the Vita of the holy man, written under the episcopate of Hiba, his successor.¹² This textual impact was perhaps longer-lasting and more effective than the actual actions of Rabbula during his lifetime. There is exceedingly little of city life in the Vita and nothing about Hiba.¹³ And yet, even with possible monastic authorship in mind, it is an urban text that refers to Edessa as “our city”, clearly aimed at both monastic and urban audiences.¹⁴ “[A]t all times he was exalted and lifted ever higher in his victory over these powerful passions that strike down the mighty ones”,¹⁵ writes the hagiographer, painting an image of a Brownian athlete of Christ on steroids. The picture that emerges is that of a man who cares for the poor and for the discipline of his community. On the other hand, Rabbula also appears as violent and opportunistic.¹⁶ Rabbula did seem genuinely to care about theological positions and to change sides based on his own assessment. In the Christological debates he was, at least from the evidence at our disposal, firmly on the side of Cyril of Alexandria. Even if being a “Cyrilist” was regionally problematic (not all bishops saw that as a good thing), he bet theologically and politically on the right (ultimately orthodox) horse. Some have seen this as an example of being a loyal conformist to the imperial administration.¹⁷ Similar ambiguity can be observed when it comes to Rabbula’s approach to urbanity: while on the one hand Rabbula gave sermons in Constantinople and had connections in the capital,¹⁸ on the other his power base was ascetic. He promoted monasticism (in various forms) as both a reservoir of clout in ecclesiastical politics and as a genuine theological proposition. His attempts to regulate various forms of monastic and ascetic life found their expression in sets of canons for monks and one for clergy and the “children of the covenant”.¹⁹ These rather eclectic texts reveal a desire to both control and “asceticise” everyday ecclesial life.

Sustaining an ascetic course at odds (or at least not in line) with the local power structure in Edessa, which included local aristocracy, the theological schools and the imperial administration, was a difficult act to balance. Therefore, Rabbula’s vision of Edessa as a “city of believers” was at stake when Hiba was elected, and his legacy was ultimately threatened. In Hiba, Edessa got an extraordinary bishop whose life and career have often been misunderstood.²⁰ Little is known of his early background. He taught in the School of the Persians, where he had shown himself interested in knowledge transfer, perhaps taking part in Syriac translations of Aristotle.²¹ He was also an active priest, attending, according to his own testimony, the synod in Ephesus in 431.²² While teaching, he got into conflict with Rabbula over the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia. In his polemic, Hiba shows himself to be a moderate and considerate thinker.²³ But he also played a dangerous game in a dangerous world. In the letter to Mari (which was to become one of the infamous Three Chapters), he criticised both Nestorius (for his refusal to grant Mary the title “Theotokos”) and Cyril of Alexandria (accusing him of veering just a bit too close to Apollinarism).²⁴ Sources like the Acts flatten chronologically what was a complex matter: the church in the East manoeuvred the perilous theological waters with some political skill until the Formula of Reunion in 433 between John of Antioch and Cyril.²⁵ It is only after the Formula that sides had to be declared. And so Hiba was exiled by Rabbula in 433 only to come back to Edessa and rise to the episcopate in 435.

As a bishop, Hiba executed an important building programme including a whole new major church dedicated to the Apostles.²⁶ His power base was centred on the city’s aristocracy and the scholarly establishment. He showed himself to be an active bishop who attempted to operate inside the traditional power structures. Hiba promoted local family networks (including his own nephew Daniel, whom he made bishop of Harran),²⁷ and attempted to rule with, not against, the local elites. While Rabbula was an outsider in need of monastic leverage,²⁸ Hiba was a local boy who made some high-ranking enemies. Instead of seeing him chiefly through the lens of theological controversy, it is much more productive to see Hiba as first and foremost someone with an authority stake in a major city at a time when questions of urban leadership were in flux. His authority was contested, and he represented views and attitudes that generated backlash and opposition.

Navigating a Late Antique metropolis was a difficult task. Although early in his episcopate Hiba seemed to have a degree of influence over Edessa (after all, he managed to successfully leave his mark on its topography), the situation changed rapidly in the mid-440s. The opposition that formed inside the city had led to a series of hearings that initially remained inconclusive. Hiba was summoned to Antioch by its bishop, Domnus, and then also to Constantinople after some unrest had broken out. In October 447, an imperial rescript to form a commission to question Hiba was issued, which led first to hearings in Beirut in early 448 and then moved to Tyre in the winter of 448/449. Looking closely at the accusations against him, we see that it was mismanagement of administration and finances that constitutes their major part.²⁹ None of this was happening in isolation from a broader context of ecclesiastical politics. The 440s brought increased polarisation and Theodosius II (r. 402–450) in Constantinople hardened his line as well. The hearings failed to remove Hiba or even put his orthodoxy in question, as Domnus stayed on his side. In fact, Hiba publicly condemned Nestorius and agreed to put the finances of his see at least partially under external supervision, but the unrest did not cease and his opponents did not stop agitating. Hiba was unable to return to Edessa, even though he requested a military escort. The civil authorities were against him. He tried to return again in April 449 but he was not able to. The situation was no longer ecclesiastical. Chaereas, as a newly appointed governor, had to deal with the trouble.

Was Chaereas sent to Edessa with a specific brief to handle the situation or did he encounter the unrest on his arrival as governor? The whole ceremony of his arrival points towards a rather run-of-the-mill situation: the urban populace meets him outside of the city as expected, and bombards him with praise and demands.³⁰ But ulterior motives for his arrival in Osrhoene have been assumed.³¹ This is not to be discounted, judging from the relative sympathy of the comes towards the protesters. Whether he was actually “sent” to deal with the problem remains disputable.³² While late Roman governors often acted in a passive way when faced with problems,³³ Chaereas does seem to actively contain the situation, acting with a certain decisiveness. A governor’s mandate could be connected with additional commands, including the expulsion of bishops.³⁴ In other words, there is no way of disproving additional intent but there is also little to confirm it. Chaereas might have been briefed, as the situation was well-known already, but to what extent he acted according to precise commands remains unknown.

In Edessa, Chaereas could not and did not want to abdicate responsibility in light of a conflict to which the Roman authorities actively contributed.³⁵ Chaereas did not seem to fight the discontent too vigorously and some elements of it might seem staged. To what end the staging was necessary remains contested. One possible reason could have been to legitimise the removal of Hiba in the eyes of members of the populace who were still loyal to him. The other was to smooth the way for the ecclesiastical process to take its course. The protocols of Chaereas’s fact-finding mission were, after all, a basis for the deposition of Hiba at the Second Council of Ephesus in 449, but were not necessarily designed for that end. After the deposition, Hiba seems to have been mishandled badly, being moved, according to his own testimony, between over 20 prisons.³⁶ But even though Hiba lost in Ephesus, vindication was close: the Council of Chalcedon in 451 reinstated him and he remained bishop of Edessa until his death in 457.

3. The Acts as a Source

How do we know this? While a good part of the dealings of the Hiba case is preserved in the Acts of Chalcedon,³⁷ what happened in Edessa was never included. Much of our material on this affair exists thanks to an extraordinary source, preserved in a manuscript made in a monastic context in the vicinity of Apamea c. 535, put together by a scribe Iohanan (John).³⁸ The so-called Syriac Acts of the Council of Ephesus (known in the West as “the Robber Synod”) are one of the earliest witnesses to synodal acts that we have.³⁹ The Syriac Acts contain imperial rescripts and the protocols of the deposition of Hiba, Daniel of Harran, Ireneaus of Tyre, Aquilinos of Byblos, Sophronius of Tella, Theoderet of Kyros and Domnus of Antiochia, as well as revocations of some clerical exiles. The part concerning the deposition of Hiba contains three reports of Chaereas’s staff from mid-April 449, destined for his superiors, giving a magnifying glass overview of the events in Edessa between 12 and 18 April.⁴⁰

Being such an early witness, the Acts are a unique source. They represent an example of a “case-file” that was part of documentation gathered for a synodal proceeding.⁴¹ The included protocols of Chaereas were intended primarily for the bureaucracy in Constantinople – a fact clear to the protagonists in Edessa. The text that we have has not been delivered to us “as is” and comes with a series of reservations. John revised and copied it at a time of major disagreements surrounding Justinian’s (r. 527-565) religious policy and in the build-up to the Three-Chapters Controversy (of which Hiba’s letter to Mari was part). The text that we have, as it exists in BM Additional 14530, was also copied with at least one commentary on the Gospel. Moreover, the Syriac text contains numerous calques of Greek terms (that are in turn in some cases translations from Latin). While it is not improbable that the proceedings and negotiations of Chaereas’s staff were conducted in Greek before they were put into a Latin official document, at least some of the cries of the crowd must have been in Syriac.⁴² This creates a linguistically complicated narrative that involves multiple levels of translation, in multiple registers. These are then Greek texts written on the basis of (perhaps) Latin reports from Syriac and Greek conversations and depositions, translated and edited into Syriac in the context of Justinianic religious policy in a monastic milieu. What we read out of them must always be seen in this context and they are also beset with numerous obstacles.

Until now, the Acts have attracted only limited research interest.⁴³ Synodal acts are complicated sources, not created in one go or even in one place.⁴⁴ Even though it recounts a course of events, this text is not a narrative source per se. The semblance of objectivity that we gain from its administrative character should not mislead us – the Acts are a result of multiple redactions, of a series of interventions by various actors and finally a reworking and translation by John. Even though Roman bureaucracy produced an immense amount of documentation, protocols of imperial officials are a rather rare source.⁴⁵ Papyri finds from Egypt show that, at least in some provinces, written documents covered all aspects of the public-private interface.⁴⁶ But a vast majority of this textual production is irrevocably lost to us. The level of loss must have been immense: what we have is a drop in the ocean of bureaucracy. We need to thank John and Chaereas for our luck.⁴⁷ At the same time, the place where the three reports sent by Chaereas before they ended up in Ephesus, and where the petitions mentioned in the text, were archived was probably Constantinople so, as is so often the case, an archivist again saved the day.⁴⁸

4. Civil Unrest and the Politics of Urban Governance

The expressions of discontent in the reports are unique because they are not simply presented through a nameless crowd.⁴⁹ Rather, we are confronted with various individual and collective identities filtered through text. We can see both elements of public disputation in face of theological differences⁵⁰ and interest in the well-being of the city as a whole. These groups and named individuals interact, share emotions and experience sometimes rapid changes of state, which binds them together.⁵¹ But they also fit into the framework of Christian discontent in which they take over public spaces to express their grievances.⁵² Framing the events in Edessa as an example of collective behaviour is simplistic, as is, in general, the purely collective approach to crowds and public outrage.⁵³ Instead, we need to see what happened in Edessa through the text itself as a filtered, perhaps directed, but still genuine expression of critique and discontent.⁵⁴ The cries of the crowd, the petition-giving, the pleas and the oaths are to a degree staged, but these staged acts remain expressions of genuine unrest, in line with the urban political culture of the Roman Empire. The staged character (even if it sometimes cracks) does not deny the real tension behind those actions. We would make a grave mistake if we were to deny that these reports were textual expressions of emotion as well. Chaereas is often frustrated and, at times, clearly fed up; the crowd is angry; the clergy, at times, baffled.

The contents are rich in material. Hiba was accused of all possible things in the cries of the crowd. He sold church property, races were organised in his name, he took liturgical clothing for his own needs, but he also sinned against the veracity of the written word: he falsified written reports.⁵⁵ It sounds at least suspect to us that a crowd would shout such accusations unprompted, but there are clear indications that there is a spontaneous element in the whole affair. Hiba is repeatedly accused of being a friend of the Jews or even a “Jewish bishop”,⁵⁶ which does echo the particularly sharp anti-Judaism of Syriac Christian rhetoric.⁵⁷ At the same time, some elements seem too specific to be just spontaneous expressions of discontent. The comment on the liturgical clothing provides information on the exact church from which they were taken.⁵⁸ The crowd “proposes” three concrete candidates to be the next bishop – Heliades, Flavianos or Dagalaiphos – who seem to be “placed” there to give them a veneer of popular support. This is consistent with the less stereotypical nature of cries that express concrete wishes.⁵⁹ Interestingly, the cries of accusation against Hiba that appear non-formulaic seem also to parallel the virtues of Rabbula from his Vita. Rabbula wore simple clothes⁶⁰ while Hiba clothed himself in liturgical vestments;⁶¹ Rabbula detested the venationes and forbade them⁶² while Hiba let games be organised in his name.⁶³ All this shows how two visions of the same city clashed in two texts: one a hagiography, the other a protocol of an unrest. Based on the dating of the Life of Rabbula as coming from Hiba’s first episcopacy,⁶⁴ we can assume that those who set the tone of the acclamations were either aware of the Vita or at least of the atmosphere and topoi of Rabbula’s life that shaped it. The Vita was written to defend the legacy of the now dead bishop in light of the controversies building up to 449.⁶⁵ It is not a stretch to imagine these phonai to be directly inspired by Rabbula’s hagiography or redacted to be so when put to text. It is a perfect insight into how texts or the circumstances of their creation were shaping the behaviour of various social strata within the city.

The phonai as a vehicle of political communication were nothing unusual.⁶⁶ Acclamations were a common way of textually praising (or rather over-praising) emperors. Those inserted in the Historia Augusta give us a taste of the rhetorical style such cries represented. The senate cried to Severus Alexander: “Antonini nomen di cognoscant, Antoninorum honorem di conservent. in te omnia, per te omnia. Antonine, aveas”.⁶⁷ “In you are all things, through you are all things” might sound excessive but, over the course of the fourth and fifth centuries, acclamations were an increasingly important part of the imperial ritual. To modern eyes they might appear over the top but they were an authorised part of the administrative system. Constantine actively encouraged reporting on governors by bringing transcripts of acclamations.⁶⁸ Provincials who were bringing acclamations to the emperor were allowed to use the cursus publicus.⁶⁹ An acclamation was a way of legitimate communication between a city and the central authorities. It was also a means of mediation if tensions were too high or the bureaucratic process ineffective.⁷⁰ The Acts are one of the examples that show how the phonai were an accepted way of signalling and communicating discontent, a dark side of the force if you will, a codified way of expressing civil unrest. There are other precedents as well: in c. 435 the governor of Euphratesia reported on his mission to depose Alexander of Hierapolis and included a brief account of acclamations made during the protests in the city.⁷¹ This is a viable administrative procedure and not a sign of the decline or dysfunctionality of urban bureaucracy.

In the Acts, the first report begins with a priest and a notary reading out the acclamations of the urban populace. This goes on for one and a half folios in an endless litany that reads uncannily like a prayer.⁷² On the next day, selected groups, the priests, the monks, the office-holders are putting their grievances “on record”. This is very much a formalised way, a textual way of expressing civil unrest but, directly afterwards, “craftsmen and all those who dwell in Edessa”⁷³ request that they also be admitted. They express their grievances as a series of (anti-)acclamations:

The Simonian no-one accepts – The enemy of Christ no-one wants – no-one accepts the one who is jealous of Christ – no-one wants a depraver of Orthodoxy. The confidant of Nestorius into exile – the man who has confessed in writing the doctrine of Nestorius nobody accepts […] – Hiba alone has robbed the Church – his relatives detain the goods of the Church.⁷⁴

These two forms of registering a textual complaint – an official entry to the protocol and the cries of the populace – are given equal standing in the report but are clearly separated. The phonai contain subtle echoes of accusations towards Hiba – the use of a Syriac word for jealous mirrors a statement of Hiba that he is not jealous of Christ.⁷⁵ Even though we are in an edited text and not in a raw transcript, this difference reveals perhaps something about how immediate scribe John’s source material was. While Claudia Rammelt sees this as a transmission error,⁷⁶ we can also see it as the remains of a theological misunderstanding on the streets. The city’s unrest is quite literally a text – we get a sequence of short series of declarations that take us through all the grievances.⁷⁷

These kinds of depictions are often seen as made-up accounts, but this is a misleading perspective. They were staged and embellished but not imaginary. In the phonai, we can see the inhabitants participating in a social movement against their bishop; we can observe how there is a subtle mistrust between the populace and the imperial official. The rift between the theology of the bureaucratic apparatus and the theology of the streets is already pronounced (and no doubt made more visible by John or at least, in part, left intact). The phonai are also cunningly crafted as a text. Their rhythm, for example, is an active element. In the three series of phonai, the anti-acclamations take increasingly more space. While the first is overwhelmingly positive, the second and the third are increasingly negative. Concrete human resources proposals come always after first building up a crescendo of complaints, never before. The third report lacks any because the negotiations between the crowd and the officials have moved to a different level – that of more organised and precise depositions. The cries of the street have been edited here to reflect the spirit, not the letter, of their expression.

When it comes to the staged or spontaneous nature of these cries, we have some parallels that might help us to take the matter further. As the papyri example from Egypt shows, it is possible that they were led by “cheerleaders” who worked from written templates.⁷⁸ The Akta dia Kalopodion (Acclamations against Calopodius) are perhaps the most interesting example but also the most difficult to interpret. Preserved, in different forms, in the Chronicle of Theophanes and in the Chronicon Paschale, they are in essence a shouting match between the circus factions and an imperial official.⁷⁹ It is difficult to date this precisely, although we can safely ascribe it to the reign of Justinian.⁸⁰ There is clearly a spontaneous element in these exchanges but at the same time they are not without direction. They betray a certain use of set phrases and rhythmic forms but, similarly to the case of Edessa, they betray reactivity as well. These acclamations underline how a public exchange could never be fully controlled and posed a risk to the imperial apparatus.⁸¹

The phonai are not the only way of expressing discontent. We have the “reports” (anaphorai) from the people of Edessa, as well as “records” (hypomnemata) and “depositions” (katatheseis);⁸² there are petitions and “written results of the will of a majority” (psephisma)⁸³ and, of course, oaths given to protocol.⁸⁴ Come to think about it, most of the city’s discontent is distilled into a form of text; this was refined into a fuel with which both the secular and the ecclesiastical authorities could work⁸⁵ and to which they could respond.

Taking this into account, the response to the events was, by the standards of the time, remarkably subdued. The imperial power embodied by Chaereas, who next to the people of Edessa is the protagonist of the Acts, enters into dialogue rather than reacting with violence. Compared with the reaction of, for example, Theodosius to the so-called Riot of the Statues in Antiochia in 387, where baths, theatres and the hippodrome were closed and the imperial commissioners were explicitly tasked to punish the instigators,⁸⁶ the “hot” April in Edessa was rather calm, even if the authorities were compelled to (successfully) intervene. Nor is it comparable to Valens and his rash reaction to Nicene Christians gathering around the martyrium of Thomas.⁸⁷ There are various reasons why this is the case. First and foremost, Chaereas seems to have similar goals to the protesters but the April events in Edessa might also just be an example of the quotidian dissent, the bread and butter of urban governance, that reaches boiling point but does not spill over into violent confrontation. Such examples rarely make it into historiography.

Some have seen expressions of urban political engagement like those in the Acts as a symptom of the decline of the Roman city.⁸⁸ The precedence of the clerics over the politeuomenoi in the signatures is supposed to reflect the progressive disintegration of urban government.⁸⁹ Nothing could be further from the truth. Such a view is a form of nostalgic projection of long-obsolete civic standards onto a world that was highly dynamic in its solutions. The city appears in the reports of Chaereas as a lively stage of power-politics, in which various groups had a chance to not only express their positions but also actively to take part in governance. New groups start to appear, although their functions are still being negotiated.⁹⁰ There is a self-consciousness here that is hardly comparable with Senate acclamations, to which the events in Edessa are sometimes compared. Such urban politics are, if anything, a sign of the vitality of the urban space and not its decline. Also, seeing these documents as proof of side-lining of urban councils and functionaries seems to be misjudged. The councillors and the elites of the city are all over this text as active participants, including their internal stratification with politeumenoi⁹¹ and axiomatikoi.⁹² Contrary to what Liebeschuetz proposed,⁹³ the city council is still an institution seen as shaping urban politics in the cries of the crowd and capable of enacting justice.⁹⁴ Undoubtedly, its role has changed but it has not disappeared; that the council takes a back seat at the acclamations (but in multiple places influences them or influences whether they will be heard) is nothing surprising. The point is not to deny change but rather to see it beyond the decline paradigm.

The image of the city emerging from these protocols is that of a complex political machine, and one that produces immense amounts of written bureaucracy. This machine might have a user interface different from the Roman city seen as a polis, and this might make us think that it is in decline. To operate this machine, the knobs that must be turned were different, even if the way the city is presented is deceivingly old-fashioned. This can make some judge it by the standards of a different epoch but every Roman official of the mid-fifth century worth his salt (and Chaereas at least lived to tell the tale) already knew how powerful religious dissent and doctrinal differences could be in an urban context and that representation in urban politics worked differently. What Chaereas was doing was not unique; imperial officials had intervened in doctrinal politics before and been seen as legitimate actors in that context even if their position was sometimes contested.⁹⁵ Most inhabitants of the empire were not personally present in the immense sea of documents that cities and such events as the April in Edessa produced but rather either as members of groups or through second- or third-hand reports. This did not make them absent from this documentation, but simply represented in a different form. Even if just as a fraction of a tax tally, most people in the Roman Empire were, at some point, subject to textual representation. The fall of Hiba gives us a chance to see how the textual representation of urban inhabitants in the mid-fifth century worked: as dynamic groups of individuals that operated within their corporate identity.

An important part of this dynamic is a threat of violence, falling under broader definitions of the term as the “possibility of violent outcomes”.⁹⁶ The threat of it is omnipresent even if its actual dimension remains distant. Chaereas repeats that the situation can explode at any minute and wants to “spare the details” for the addressees of his reports. Obviously, apart from simply sticking to form, this is a way of showing that things are, ultimately, under control. Chaereas is doing what every single governor always has done, pretending nothing is happening for as long as possible. The city finds itself in a state of superposition when it comes to unrest and at times it is difficult to say who is manipulating whom. Chaereas has an axe to grind but the anti-Hiba party are careful in building up their escalation. Finally, it transpires that the border between calm and unrest, between violence and peace is, indeed, thin: as thin as a sheet of papyrus. If we read the reports carefully, we notice that the main fight is about texts. The inhabitants of the city not only want written reports to be passed “higher up” but also fight for control over what documents will be included in the dossier. The city (collectively, as a system of interest groups consisting of individuals) wants control over its textual representation; in a way it fights to write itself. Stakes are high; after all, one of the accusations about Hiba was, lest we forget, that as a bishop he falsified “written reports”.⁹⁷ There is no doubt, however, about what we are dealing with: the text describes the situation in the city as a riot, unrest.⁹⁸ This riot is not a stable issue; it may wax and wane over the course of a week and even a day; the report offers plenty of examples of how things flare up again after initially calming down.

Keeping this unrest from boiling over was no mean feat. Comparing these reports with the petitions, administrative reports and litigation from Roman Egypt, we can see that the state was often unsuccessful in asserting social control through such interventions or missions as that of Chareas.⁹⁹ So the image of the jungle of petitions, acclamations, anti-acclamations and a handful of officials trying to make sense of it and fulfil their brief, caught in the middle of a restless city, rings true with comparative evidence. Paradoxically, the phonai also bring Chaereas as a protagonist to the fore; at the end of the day, it was the bureaucrat on the spot who had control over what ended up in the protocol and what did not.¹⁰⁰ But the reports, with their depositions, oaths and petitions, also reveal who was “making it” in Late Antique Edessa. Monks as an urban factor were already established by that point.¹⁰¹ In Edessa, Chaereas was faced with a machine in which the lever labelled “monasticism” could not be left untouched. And so, before we look at the city as a whole, we need a short intermezzo with a monk.

5. Interlude: Monastics and Urban Politics

We soon notice that monastics are responsible for quite a few elements inf the affair, from the very beginning. They have provided testimonies against Hiba.¹⁰² At a pivotal point, it is the monks from Edessa who present to the synod in Ephesus the written typos of Theodosius and Valentinian.¹⁰³ Monks take part in city cries and in acclamations and also are present in the party welcoming Chaereas to Edessa. They, together with the clerics, have the right to insert evidence directly into the protocol.¹⁰⁴

It becomes very evident, very quickly that, in this case, the difference between being a bishop and not being a bishop of Edessa is simple: monks. Hiba’s deposition was supported not only by monks but also clearly by the members of the covenant (bnay and bnat qyāmâ). Curiously no monastics were present on his side. The letter that was written in defence of Hiba in 449 and presented in Beirut was signed by 65 (according to some manuscripts sixty-six) members of the clergy but none of them were monks.¹⁰⁵ We hear that there was another letter of support – presented at Antiochia in 448 – and only one member of the clergy valiantly refused to sign it. Apparently “on his return from there [Antiochia], he [Hiba] plotted against him, a man who has been orthodox for fifty years and has never washed since the time he renounced this life, and to whom the whole city bears witness”.¹⁰⁶ This lonely opponent betrays ascetic characteristics and can be seen as an urban monastic, his refusal in line with the monastic opposition to Hiba. It comes as no surprise, then, that there are 11 monks among 38 oath givers who stand against Hiba.¹⁰⁷ Hiba was framed by the urban monks.

The role of monks in this whole debacle is evident and reflects the changing mid-fifth-century urban circumstances. We find ourselves before Chalcedon, when there is little to no ecclesiastical regulation of monasticism.¹⁰⁸ The reports are still compiled in a world of different monastic registers. They differentiate between monks, dayrāyē, or sons and daughters of the covenant, bnay and bnat qyāmâ, and members of various schools, of which some led a quasi-monastic existence.¹⁰⁹ In Edessa (and in other Syriac-speaking cities) monasticism remained highly polyvocal throughout the late fourth and early fifth centuries.¹¹⁰ Particularly the institution of the bnay and bnat qyāmâ offered a parallel ascetic development, present in the urban space and connected to actual day-to-day Christian practice. These members of the community performed important administrative and liturgical functions but could also be simply following individual piety and ascetic regimes. Most broadly speaking, they were people who were following some ascetic precepts but were not considered monks or nuns. Their origins are not entirely clear but probably reach into the early fourth century and the term itself has a broader meaning, not only reserved to those following ascetic practice.¹¹¹ The main difference between the qyāmâ and the monks seems to be, at least from the perspective of the fifth century, a marked difference in the rules they should follow and a greater expectation of involvement in both urban and village life. Originally, there was no expectation of withdrawal whatsoever.¹¹² Becoming a member of the covenant¹¹³ was connected with a certain pledge, although it might be not enough to call it a “vowed life”. Some bnay qyāmâ might later become monks or priests but others would not.

It is an easy way out, though, to think that the lines were clear-cut and the terms set. The Acts give such an impression by delineating the ascetic groups rather neatly, but literary texts show how these definitions and identities were negotiated. Aphrahat, in the mid-fourth century, still used various terms for ascetics interchangeably.¹¹⁴ Rabbula in his “rules” put the bnay and bnat qyāmâ together with clerics and not with the monks,¹¹⁵ and numerous manuscripts substitute “covenant” with “church”.¹¹⁶ One gets an impression that, while orthodoxy of practice was a concern from early on, the precise borders between the groups were very fluid. Even later, in the early sixth century, Jacob of Serugh uses the term ihîdāyê (solitaries), technically meaning a separate category, when he means monks.¹¹⁷ But these groups, when meeting the immovable object of bureaucracy, had to get a definition and had to be named. For Chaereas’s clerks (but no doubt also many before him) and for the synodal transcript writers, people had to be put into drawers, even if imperfect.

The city, in a kind of reciprocal foundation, was an important factor in the creation of these distinctions between monastic forms. The key was the city as text, perceived and read, because it is in texts that these distinctions had to be negotiated and set. Civil unrest contributed to the reproduction of these distinctions (and definitions) through giving a reason for a production of texts such as the reports of Chaereas or of synods (also overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon). Conflict situations result in a need for definitions, for drawing the lines not only between parties but also inside them. Social groups coalesce into genres that are still fluid but gain a format within which they can write themselves. There is a growing literarisation, both of monasticism and of urbanism.¹¹⁸ And so, under stress, the literarisation of urbanism helped in drawing the front lines of monastic definitions. While some categorise the dayrāyē as “extra-urban”,¹¹⁹ their ubiquity on the streets of Edessa shows how closely they were bound with the city.

But not all of these monastic groups are treated equally, and being categorised in one and not the other does have repercussions. While both monks and the bnay qyāmâ act as witnesses, only monks swear oaths, which points to a legal distinction of status. Monks are also the spiritus movens of the whole affair. They are consulted about Hiba’s position and, at least in Chaereas’s report, it is their judgement “[a]nathemised is, who says such things”¹²⁰ that gives the decisive push to the whole affair, serving as a catalyst for the urban unrest. Archimandrites and “leaders of the monastic community” continue to feature in the urban crowds. On the other hand, the role of the bnay and bnat qyāmâ is more limited; they are less prominent and never outward facing – they do not represent the city before the synod, for example. Does this mean that everyone categorised as “monk” by Chaereas and his staff was surely not bnay qyāmâ? Not at all. Just try to choose an occupation missing in the dropdown menu of your local government’s website to find out why. However, what monks clearly can do is to change a bishop, even though they need to amass huge resources to do so. Hiba exits, pursued by a monk. And that, as it happens, is a bit of a problem.

Monks exercising undue pressure, or being used to exercise such pressure, constituted a reason to make a synod move to get some legislation going. Chalcedon, just two years later, would try to deal with the problem of monks wielding too much power. The council fathers were unhappy with the fact that monks could have been used to influence episcopal choices by sitting in the grey zone between ecclesiastical and lay authority.¹²¹ Plotting to remove a bishop of the city was also seen as a major problem.¹²² And finally, the use of monks as a pressure factor in cities was to remain the sole privilege of the bishop.¹²³ Given the role and importance of monks in the social unrests in Late Antique cities, it was clearly an attempt to institutionalise the role of the bishop as the one carrying the monastic nuclear suitcase. Taking into account that the landowners are already seen at the margins of the events in Edessa,¹²⁴ this addresses the leverage that donors were having on urban politics through monks. These provisions were prompted by concerns over the influence of monks in Constantinople and the history of complicated power struggle in the capital, involving the monk Issac and John Chrysostom as well as the followers of Alexander Akoimetos.¹²⁵ But it is also hard to see these provisions and their origins outside of the events in Edessa and then in Ephesus. In Ephesus, Eutyches was reinstated under monastic pressure and this must have greatly impressed the fathers at Chalcedon and prompted them to act.¹²⁶ At the same time, however, Hiba’s case and particularly Chaereas’s reports constituted a perfect storm of monastic meddling in urban ecclesiastical politics. Perhaps the attention given to one and not the other has to do with the way the Acts were transmitted. The point remains that Chalcedon exemplifies extremely well the entanglement of monks in secular society – and the difficulty in actually pinpointing who was and who was not a monk. In the urban context, monks and nuns would remain members of both worlds for centuries to come but now they have landed on the radar of ecclesiastical legislation, and the way they were co-writing the urban text has started to change.

The “monks and brothers of the covenant”, a difficult-to-categorise group of monastics that is neither lay nor ecclesiastical and that enjoys substantial street credibility, may still lie somewhat in the background in the Acts. However, their threshold status allowed them to both subscribe to the petitions of the clergy and to take part in anti-acclamations. In the urban context, the monastics are still not in only one drawer, but the city is not just them. There are artisans, merchants, working people, men and women, who also get to participate in the whole literary exercise.

6. Edessa as Text and as Discourse

But what do we mean when we talk of urban text and of our adventure as a literary exercise? Applying the framework of the city as text delivers us a whole new set of questions originating from the city as a readable object. This does not mean seeing the city only through a lens of a textual metaphor or reflected in literary texts¹²⁷ but rather focusing on its readability and structure as a web of power and social relationships.¹²⁸ This notion has found an interesting reception in urban studies, where existing urban landscapes are read as texts.¹²⁹ However, in order to apply this to Late Antiquity, we need to go through one more level; we can only work with texts that already reflect the reading of the urban landscape and urban society as text. In other words we are working with various readings of the urban text that are then in turn preserved as texts to which we have access. This framework only works if we allow multiple readings of a city to coexist or, in other words, if we allow for Edessa to be a discursive phenomenon. We should also remark here that we just have to live with a certain confusion: the actual texts (such as the Acts) and the texts as bases of reading of the city are not easily separated. Instead of trying to wish this confusion away, we should incorporate it into our analysis. Just as the Acts are a result of multiple translations and re-translations,¹³⁰ so is Edessa in these Acts a city as text in translation between various registers and readings that enter into various interactions.

For example: Who constitutes a city? The Acts, the clerks of Chaereas and the scribe John who compiled them, have an answer to that, but not a uniform one. It depends, they say. The city can be an expression of the unity of clergy and laity when it gathers to welcome Chaereas, wary of the imperial official, showing a united front: “all those that inhabit the city, the metropolis of Edessa, together with the venerable archimandrites and monks and women and men of the same city”.¹³¹ Read in that way, it appears to be a more horizontal structure, flatter in its character.

But the city can also be read differently. When it sends a petition, its structure is recombined, the hierarchical differences are more pronounced, and it becomes vertical. When Edessa springs into action, it still does it as a “whole city” but, this time, we learn in detail how it is stratified, just as we would learn in the subscriptions of a synod. Some groups get lost when the kaleidoscope moves and the perspective becomes vertical. The most visible loss in this reconfiguration are women. Nowhere is it stated that they were not members of the city but they are no longer listed explicitly. That tells us something about the perception of who represented the city in a hierarchical order.

The subscriptions of the whole City: I, Flavius Theodosius, was present at what has happened. Then subscribed the whole body of the clerks, and the archimandrites, and the monks, and the sons of the covenant and the dignitaries, and the leaders of the city, and the Romans, and the scholai of the Armenians, Persians, Syrians, and the artisans, and all the city. Every person, with their own hand, subscribed and assented to what was negotiated and to the presentation of the petition.¹³²

But mind you, they are not happy, our Edessenes: “And there was a clamour for three or four days”, we hear immediately after.¹³³ There is a striking hierarchy; first to sign are the “clerks”, then the clergy, then monks. There is also the ever-so-important fiction of universal textuality and literacy of every inhabitant signing the petition “with their own hand”.¹³⁴ It is almost as if the city on its own could be read as if it were a synod, a collegial body able to reach unanimous conclusions to be put down in writing. The city is shown as a cosmopolitan collection of various groups possessing distinct identities. The inclusion of the scholai is interesting and no doubt meant to increase this image of a cosmopolitan, broad metropolis.¹³⁵ The presence of the “School of the Persians” is suspect; it had been a hotbed of Theodore of Mopsuestia’s thought and Hiba’s power base not long previously,¹³⁶ so it was unlikely to wholeheartedly oppose Hiba unless pressured. Nevertheless, perhaps this is precisely why it was so important to include them in the redacted report, as “decisive” proof that Hiba had alienated the whole city, even those groups that were expected to support his intellectual positions. That the schools are there just stresses how important they were in the urban space at the time.¹³⁷

Yet another way of reading the city can be identified, and this has to do with literacy. On the one hand, we have those who are able and permitted to make their depositions in writing themselves, among them “venerable clerics and God-loving archimandrites and monks and brothers of the covenant” (again, perhaps a precious fiction). And on the other, those who make oral complaints, “the workmen and inhabitants from the Metropolis of Edessa” standing before the sekretarion and whose complaints are written down by imperial clerks.¹³⁸ There is a marked difference between the two at the level of their textual expression: those who make it on their own and those who express text orally and are then recorded by imperial bureaucrats. This practice makes the whole city (as represented by all its inhabitants) participate in writing, a literary activity, even if for some groups only by proxy.

We can keep on asking these questions about the various states in which the city of Edessa exists in the manuscript, but it remains clear that the Acts provide us with a form of a textual portrait. This leads us to another aspect of “city as text”: a city that exists in a textual form. In it, the dramatis personae – the monks, the priests, the laypeople – act before our eyes in a carefully choreographed depiction of civil unrest. This unrest, even though it involves plenty of cries and demonstrations, comes back to a text, and written-down text at that, over and over again. It is the “written reports” that are the core of the whole event. The depositions are written down, read, re-read and redacted. At some point, Cheareas is threatened (very ritually and politely) that if he will not reopen the case of Hiba, new written reports will be sent by the inhabitants. In his third report, he states that “the city will know no peace if I do not send a report”.¹³⁹ In fact, the office holders of Edessa complain that there has been a delay in sending their (written down) grievances, and on another occasion plead to be given a chance to write their complaints down and deliver them straight to the emperors. But Cheareas remains, to an extent, in control of the textual situation; he limits the addressees of the complaints to the prefect and the magister officiorum against the wishes of the urban crowd.¹⁴⁰

On the canvas of a late Roman city, various textual worlds are spanned. There is the world of imperial bureaucracy, still operating with “clerks, notaries and office holders” who accompany Chaereas. There is the world of the urban clergy, already playing at the front row of the urban orchestra but still accompanied by a whole array of civic officials, sometimes displaced by them at the top of the hierarchy. In Cheareas’s reports, monks still appear somewhat awkward with the power they have over the urban masses.

All these various ways of dividing a city try to present a form of unity, often expressed by presenting different categorisations of the urban community, as if to give readers the impression that, no matter how we structure the city, it is against Hiba. We can actually attempt to describe these categorisations. In the most basic form, there are simply people in Edessa or the whole population of the city.¹⁴¹ Then there are all who live in the city of Edessa, “including archimandrites, monks, women and men of the city”.¹⁴² We also have characterisations that are more granulated and deal in stratified opposites: “clerics, archimandrites, monks and brothers of the covenant” on one side and “artisans and the inhabitants of Edessa” on the other.¹⁴³ Finally we come to the most elaborate characterisations, expressing corporate bodies within the city: “all the clerics, archimandrites, monks, brothers of the covenant, dignitaries, councillors and Romans; schools of the Armenians, Persians and Syrians; artisans and the whole city”.¹⁴⁴ There are various permutations of these ways of expressing the city as a combination of groups but, in general, they become increasingly elaborate as the reports progress. It is worth noting that there is a gender aspect too; the text differentiates between the brothers of the covenant and the daughters of the covenant and mentions deaconesses at least once as part of the crowd that protests.¹⁴⁵

On the one hand, as already noted, this serves the creation of an illusion of the whole city standing against Hiba. On the other, it is also a way of communicating various messages; these divisions are not introduced haphazardly. Sometimes, it is to introduce social and educational class through access to textuality. On other occasions, it is about making clear who is actually behind a particular move or proposition. This matters, as the main function of these protocols is to communicate a city to a higher authority.

As Roman emperors at this stage rarely, if ever, visited provincial cities we are confronted with a simple yet poignant question: how did they experience the urbanism of the world they were supposed to rule beyond Constantinople, Ravenna or Milan? Their access to the non-capital urbanity and, most importantly, the increasing diversity of Late Antique cities, was limited physically. They chiefly experienced these cities as texts, not only in the description of their appearance or architecture, which would be rather mundane, but most importantly in the phenomenology of their urban landscapes as lived-in spaces with their own dynamic, where various groups competed with each other and also with the imperial bureaucracy. From the point of view of the Roman central government, the most important element of the imperial governance tissue was like an interactive text adventure. The importance of this observation goes beyond simple questions of bureaucracy and administration: these modes of access to provincial urbanism also shaped the views of other authors in the imperial entourage. A city for them was mainly accessed as a text. And, while the local governance produced and used large amounts of written bureaucracy, administrators like Chaereas had the opportunity to gather oral statements and to actually be on the spot. Gathered by the clerks of the secretarium, they were accessible to the functionaries in Constantinople mainly as texts, and the choices and decisions made were also, ultimately, textual. The city exists as a system of these different configurations and, from the point of view of both the imperial bureaucracy and the inner urban groups, it exists as long as it communicates, within and outside it.¹⁴⁶ In a way, we can see this approach as a method to deduce a grammar of the texts that are the basis of the various readings of Edessa.¹⁴⁷ This communicative potential makes Edessa in the Acts into a centre on its own. The various divisions allow various communicative levels; they amplify the signals being relayed and, through these signals, the imperial bureaucracy accessed Edessa. While this process was also visible in reverse, the difference was the presence of various imperial protagonists such as Chaereas on the spot, who moved inside an urban landscape that was lived-in but also had to be interpreted.

Our knowledge of the topography of Edessa in the fifth century is hindered by the lack of a comprehensive archaeological survey of the city. Thus, we need to face yet another level of complexity: we are now also somewhat forced to see Edessa first and foremost as a text. We can deduce some elements from the Chronicle of Edessa that shows particular interest in buildings.¹⁴⁸ Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite provides scattered references to the topography of the city,¹⁴⁹ as does the broader text of the “Chronicle of Zuqnin”.¹⁵⁰ There is also the more detailed list in the Chronicle of 1234.¹⁵¹ The latter is most interesting to us as it details Hiba’s activity and mentions the “Great Church” that he had built. It was long seen erroneously as reflecting the situation in the fifth century,¹⁵² but it is a very complicated source that cannot be taken at face value; it mixes Late Antique and medieval topography and itself has multiple sources.¹⁵³ The topic of building was a contentious one and of major importance in the fight between Hiba and Rabbula. The latter was, according to his Vita, against spending money on buildings, although a close reading of the text reveals that he was not as reserved as the author of his hagiography wants us to think:¹⁵⁴ he is mentioned as a builder of xenodochia and at least one church, that of St Stephen.¹⁵⁵

What we can reconstruct from the available material shows us a city with a rich landscape of churches, martyria and monasteries. While it has been posited that, unlike places such as Antiochia, urban monasticism in Edessa was not yet dominated by monks at the time of Rabbula,¹⁵⁶ but the situation is dramatically different 15 years later. The Acts are full of monks and these monks are clearly at home in the city, although the presence of monasteries inside Edessa at that time is disputed. While the Chronicle of 1234 fails to mention any monasteries inside the city by name, it maintains there were many.¹⁵⁷ Egeria, at the beginning of the fifth century, mentions monasteries surrounding the city and martyria inhabited by monks, and implies that these are inside Edessa.¹⁵⁸ The Acts refer to such a martyrium, that of Zaccheus, as the first place inside the city that Chaereas visits.¹⁵⁹ Rabbula still seems to regard monks as existing in a rural context,¹⁶⁰ although this may be just a form of distancing from the urbanity of Edessa itself, but the fact remains that monks and archimandrites are ubiquitous in the Acts. It seems, then, that we can indeed see the events leading to 449 alongside Rabbula’s programme as the catalyst for a monastic presence inside Edessa. Whether there were indeed any monasteries inside the city walls at this point is hard to establish, but what is sure is that monks were a fixed part of the urban landscape.

The Acts offer us their own spatial dimension. There is little precise urban topography in these reports, but we can read the text as a source for the production of space in Edessa.¹⁶¹ The border between the city and not-the-city may be blurred but it remains important. The city does not start in the city, of course, but outside it, where Chaereas is received. As a governor of Osroehene, he was, technically, coming to his own turf, but it is clear that certain borders and spatial rituals had to be respected. Inside the city, there are two main stages: the secretarium, where Chaereas and the imperial bureaucracy control access and produce space,¹⁶² and the “holy church”, where it is the clergy who have the upper hand. The movements inside and outside these spaces play a principal role in sketching the inner urban hierarchy for us. These spaces are very much produced by the actors in them; the secretarium is shaped by the presence of Chaereas himself but also of his clerks, who write down in the protocol what is happening. The “holy church” is the stage for the final, and most intense, expression of urban dissent, one that forces Chaereas’s hand (or so he would have us believe) to send further reports. While it is tempting to assume this is the cathedral, the Syriac text refers only to “a holy church”. The possibility remains open that the church in question was the “Great Church” built by Hiba, but this would mean a very different location on the opposite side of the city; while the old cathedral was close to the citadel, Hiba’s church was in the north-western part of the city. Hiba was inescapable in the cathedral too, however: in 438, he put a massive silver altar in the old church.¹⁶³ What we know of the way the cathedral looked is also thanks to a text, a seventh-century sugitha, a liturgical hymn, which contains an ekphrasis on the old church.¹⁶⁴ Sadly, it reflects the way the church looked after the Justinianic rebuilding in 523/524 (after a flood destroyed the cathedral) and not as it was in 449.

These spaces are, of course, not a coincidence. They express a certain degree of unity but also the important role of all manners of administration within the city and the diversity of fora where inhabitants could express their grievances or be made to express them. We get scattered references to other points in the city, such as the church of St Barlāhā¹⁶⁵ and the bishop’s home¹⁶⁶ and its triclinium, where Hiba stages his most egregious abuses of power.¹⁶⁷ This almost minimalistic, theatrical structuring and the movements of groups and individuals in and out of them add to the way Edessa is topographically textual in these reports. They also stress that the spaces in Edessa are social products – of the imperial bureaucracy and Chaereas in particular, of the monks, of the various groups taking part in the expressions of unrest, but also of Hiba and even Rabbula. For even the grumpy old bishop, long dead, produces spaces in these Acts and a lived-in urban landscape by making the city restless.

So the Acts present us with a city that is highly functional, and functional as a system that communicates. Its various spaces communicate with each other and contribute to the communication of the city itself with the wider world, both secular and ecclesiastical. Their production is an inherent part of the governance of the metropolis, which, with the broadened participation became, paradoxically, more difficult in Late Antiquity. Edessa in the Acts shows just how complex this system could be, involving two main stages, the secretarium and the holy church, and a number of secondary ones. Who appears where and in what circumstances remains a constituent part of the phenomenology of the urban landscape in Edessa. In this Edessa, remains a text with various readings but also a discourse, an object of negotiation of these readings.

7. Conclusions

We assume Chaereas survived his horrible first week in the job. Hiba did manage to get his bishop’s seat back. Together with Edessa and its unrest, they all get a protagonist’s spot in our text. Be it through phonai or the reports by Chaereas, Edessa is here always framed as text. The “restless city”, with its various readings, is a window into the stratifications of Late Antique urban spaces and how they were used in different contexts. We have seen how Edessa’s structure, inside one document, can be read in different ways: a horizontal one in the face of an imperial official, a vertical one when petitioning the emperor, and a binary one when recording a grievance. Edessa’s various readings by Chaereas in his reports and by John in his compilation might look as if they are fictions, and, even worse, contradictory, but that is not the point. The point is that they make the city and its unrest work for various purposes and mutate according to these different needs. And so they are different readings, not mutually exclusive realities. This flexibility of readings (and ingenuity of techniques, subverting classical tropes, as in the phonai) is what makes Edessa in the throes of anti-Hiba unrest such an important text.

Governing a city in the mid-fifth century became more, not less, complicated but it remained within “a continuous history”.¹⁶⁸ Various new actors have been added to the equation. To clump them all together as urban masses misses the subtle differentiations that Chaereas’s reports take into scrupulous consideration. Edessa might be in upheaval but its urbanity is far from being in crisis. While the conflict between Rabbula (at this point long dead but still so alive through various textual interventions) and Hiba (not even in the city when the April events were taking place) might be the reason why this whole affair started, we cannot reduce these events to a mere theological spat. The unrest is an impulse that momentarily switches the lights on in Edessa.

While this was, without a doubt, a portrait of a city at a particularly tumultuous moment in its history, it is not its full biography. Rather, it is a textual snapshot taken from another textual snapshot. The aim was, hopefully, clear: to show that the Syriac Acts of Ephesus have protagonists on whom the spotlight has not yet sufficiently focused: Flavius Chaereas, monks, and Edessa itself, and to offer a different way of understanding both civil unrest in the later Roman Empire – as a fundamentally textual phenomenon, dependent on written transmission and reception of texts – and of Edessa itself, as a city as text. The Acts offer but one set of readings but they are vital for our understanding of urban unrest and governance and they do not exist in isolation. Their theological importance has, to an extent, eclipsed their contribution to the history of governance and urbanity.

This particular moment in the history of Edessa can only be fully grasped in tandem with the role monasticism plays in it. Monks, daughters and sons of the covenant, and ascetics in general are here at their defining moment. The city is their stage, where lines are drawn and limits established. While it will ultimately be Chalcedon in 451 that will enshrine these and other affairs, like that of Eutyches, the three reports of Chaereas and the unrest in Edessa in April 449 also played a role. Thus, the Acts tell us about the interwoven developments of urbanism and monasticism in Late Antiquity. At this point, the city’s dynamics seem incomprehensible without the monastics. The unprecedented access and action space that they have cannot be wished away. Chaereas, not simply a leader of a team of clerks, understands that well, perhaps better than Hiba did before 449. That the monastics are more at ease with the secular authority than with the ecclesiastical should not surprise us. Monasticism was still in-between but it had already found a sure footing in the urban space.

Barely a week in April of 449 delivered a unique opportunity. Rarely can we observe Late Antique cities at such a level of detail. We saw a city where established modes of governance co-existed with spontaneous expressions of the will to participate, a city with a lively political culture, far from atrophy. We saw that the monks used the city to frame Hiba but also that the unrest in Edessa and the city itself will only make sense for us if we factor in this textual mode of being. The key is Edessa as text and as discourse. Ultimately, what began as a fairly bad first day on the job for a high-ranking Roman official ended as a window into urban governance and the changing nature of urban politics.

Acknowledgements

The author of this article would like to thank Veronika Egetenmeyr, Hartmut Leppin, Jakob Riemenschneider, Sarah Schlüssel, Jörg Rüpke and Robin Whelan as well as the anonymous peer reviewers for their helpful suggestions and comments. The publication of this article was possible thanks to the support of the DFG-funded Humanities Centre for Advanced Studies “Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations” (FOR 2779).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft: [Grant Number FOR 2779].

Notes

1 Akten der ephesinischen Synode vom Jahre 449, ed. Johannes Flemming (Berlin: Weidmann, 1917), p. 14; Robert Doran (trans.), “Acts of the Second Council at Ephesus”, in Stewards of the Poor: The Man of God, Rabbula, and Hiba in Fifth-Century Edessa (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2006), pp. 133–88,es p. 139. In what follows, for the editions of the Acts I shall use Flemming, Akten; and for the English translation either my own or Doran, “Acts”, with corrections where necessary.

2 Flemming, Akten, 16; Doran, “Acts”, 140.

3 Daniëlle Slootjes, The Governor and His Subjects in the Later Roman Empire (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 106–9.

4 Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbours and Rivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 33–4.

5 Muriel Debié, “The Eastern Provinces of the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity”, in The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 11–32.

6 See chapters in Edessa in Hellenistisch-Römischer Zeit: Religion, Kultur und Politik, eds. Lutz Greisiger, Jürgen Tubach, and Daniel Hass [Beiruter Texte und Studien, volume CXVI] (Würzburg: Orient Institut Beirut, 2009); on its integration into a broader imperial narrative, see John Kee, “Writing Edessa into the Roman Empire”, Studies in Late Antiquity 5/ 1 (2021): 28–64.

7 See The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King (London: Routledge, 2020).

8 Jan Willem Drijvers, “The School of Edessa: Greek Learning and Local Culture”, in Centres of Learning: Learning and Location in Pre-Modern Europe and the Near East, eds. Jan Willem Drijvers and A.A. MacDonald [Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, volume LXI] (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 49–59.

9 Wilhelm Baum, “Edessa in Der Auseinandersetzung zwischen Byzanz und der Syrischen Kirche (6.–12.Jahrhundert)”, in Edessa in Hellenistisch-Römischer Zeit: Religion, Kultur und Politik, eds. Lutz Greisiger, Jürgen Tubach, and Daniel Hass [Beiruter Texte und Studien, volume CXVI] (Würzburg: Orient Institut Beirut, 2009), pp. 11–30.

10 Hartmut Leppin, “Creating a City of Believers: Rabbula of Edessa”, in Urban Religion in Late Antiquity, eds. Asuman Lätzer-Lasar and Emiliano Rubens Urciuoli (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 186–7.

11 Leppin, “Creating a City of Believers”.

12 Ibid., 189.

13 Jan Willem Drijvers, “Rabbula, Bishop of Edessa: Spiritual Authority and Secular Power”, in Portraits of Spiritual Authority, eds. Jan Willem Drijvers and John Watt (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 139–54; Leppin, “Creating a City”, 198.

14 Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, “Introducing the Rabbula Corpus”, in The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns, eds. Phenix and Horn (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017), lxx.

15 ”The Life of Rabbula”, trans. and eds. Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, in The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns, eds. Phenix and Horn (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017), p. 49.

16 Jan Willem Drijvers, “The Man of God of Edessa, Bishop Rabbula, and the Urban Poor: Church and Society in the Fifth Century”, Journal of Early Christian Studies 4/2 (1996): 235–48.

17 Drijvers, “School of Edessa”, 149, 152.

18 Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, eds., “Rabbula, Homily in Constantinople”, trans. and eds. Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, in The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns, eds. Phenix and Horn (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017), pp. 84–93; Claudia Rammelt, Ibas von Edessa: Rekonstruktion einer Biographie und dogmatischen Position zwischen den Fronten (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), p. 119.

19 Phenix and Horn, “Collections of Canons”, trans. and eds. Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, in The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns, eds. Phenix and Horn (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017) 94–125 ; for the discussion on their authenticity, see “Introducing the Rabbula Corpus“., ccxxv–ccxxix.

20 For an excellent overview of the life of Hiba, see Rammelt, Ibas von Edessa, pp. 40–61

21 Although we should probably not make too much of it, as this is corroborated by a later tradition, beginning with Abdišo’ in the fourteenth century; see Daniel King, “Introduction. Aristotle in the Syriac World”, in ibid., The Earliest Syriac Translation of Aristotle’s Categories (Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. 1–17.

22 Doran, “Acts”, 171; Rammelt, Ibas von Edessa, 113.

23 Drijvers, “Man of God”, 244.

24 “For Cyril, as he desired to reject the words of Nestorius was found to fall into the teachings of Apollinaris” (Doran, “Acts”, 170); for the identity of Mari, see Michael van Esbroeck, “Who Is Mari, the Addressee of Ibas’ Letter?”, Journal of Theological Studies 38/1 (1987): 129–35.

25 For and overview, see Henry Chadwick, “The Christological Debate, II: From Reunion (433) to a Breakdown of Unity (449)”, in idem., The Church in Ancient Society: From Galilee to Gregory the Great (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 557–91.

26 “Chronicon Edessenum”, ed. I. Guidi, in Chronica Minora [CSCO, volumes I–II, Scriptores Syri 3–4 (Paris/Leipzig: Poussielgue/Harrassowitz, 1903), text I: 1–11, trans. II: 1–13, chapt. LIX.

27 Flemming, Akten, 18; “He consecrated his nephew Daniel bishop of the city of the pagans”. See The Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, eds. Richard Price and Michael Gaddis, volumes I–III [Translated Texts for Historians, volume XLV] (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), II: 284, X.73.6.

28 Leppin, “Creating a City”, 188–9.

29 See Price and Gaddis, Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, II: 283–86; Apparently, the anti-Hiba party was advised by “certain people” in Antioch to steer clear of theological points and focus on mismanagement. These “certain people” knew that Domnus would otherwise point-blank dismiss the case and the claimants would lose the money invested in the process; see Flemming, Akten, 56; Doran, “Acts”, 178

30 Slootjes, Governor and His Subjects, 108.

31 Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and Christian Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 230 n. 12: “We must remember that he [Chaereas] was Theodosius’s man in the region, sent there for a particular purpose, and that Theodosius had already decided in whose favour the council would judge”.

32 Price and Gaddis, Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 34: “[…] Chaereas, sent to investigate”.

33 Eckhard Meyer-Zwiffelhoffer, “Mala Desidia Iudicum? Zur Rolle der Provinzstatthalter bei der Unterdrückung paganer Kulte (von Constantin bis Theodosius II.)”, in Spätantiker Staat und religiöser Konflikt, ed. Johannes Hahn (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 93–132.

34 See the case of Pergamius in Alexandria in 482 related by Liberatus in his Breviarium; see Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, eds. Eduard and Johannes Straub, volumes I–V (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1936), I: 127. On Liberatus, see Mischa Meier, “Das Breviarium des Liberatus von Karthago: Einige Hypothesen zu seiner Intention”, Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 14/1 (2010): 130–48.

35 Emperors have previously deposed bishops of Edessa on the basis of doctrinal controversy; see Robin Whelan, “Modestus at Edessa: Imperial Officials in the Ecclesiastical Histories of Rufinus, Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret”, Millennium 20/1 (2023): 149–92.

36 Price and Gaddis, Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, II: 273, X.1.

37 Especially in Session 10; see ibid., 265–309

38 BM Additional 14530.

39 The most recent analysis of Ephesus II is Patrick T.R. Gray, Claiming the Mantle of Cyril: Cyril of Alexandria and the Road to Chalcedon (Leuven: Peeters, 2021), pp. 157–82

40 For a day by day breakdown of the events in April 449, see Claudia Rammelt, “Die Vorgänge in Edessa im April des Jahres 449 nach den syrischen Konzilsakten des so genannten Iatrociniums”, in Edessa in Hellenistisch-Römischer Zeit: Religion, Kultur und Politik, eds. Lutz Greisiger, Jürgen Tubach, and Daniel Hass [Beiruter Texte und Studien, volume CXVI] (Würzburg: Orient Institut Beirut, 2009), pp. 231–54, esp. 236

41 Thomas Graumann, The Acts of the Early Church Councils: Production and Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 202.

42 Acclamations could be multilingual and could, in some cases, mix languages within a single cry. See F. Biville, “Le rituel des acclamations: De Rome à ‘Byzance’”, in Latin in Byzantium I: Late Antiquity and Beyond, eds. A. Garcea et al. [Corpus Christianorum Lingua Patrum] (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), pp. 247–64, esp. 260–1; the language of acclamations was not always the language of the people who wrote them down, see Lajos Berkes and Ágnes T. Mihálykó, “A Greek Acclamation in Praise of an Illustris from Seventh-Century Egypt (P.Berol.inv. 5603 Reconsidered)”, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 59/2 (2019): 295–310, p. 301; for the possible original Latin version of Chaereas’s report, see Fergus Millar, “The Syriac Acts of the Second Council of Ephesus (449)”, in Chalcedon in Context: Church Councils 400–700, eds. Mary Whitby and Richard Price (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 45–69, esp. 60.

43 For some important studies on violence and crowds in Late Antiquity, which either omit it completely or just mention it in passing, see e.g. Timothy E. Gregory, Vox populi: Popular Opinion and Violence in the Religious Controversies of the Fifth Century A.D (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1979); W.H.C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement: Chapters in the History of the Church in the Fifth and Sixth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 35–44, which gives a positivist and frankly now outdated description of events in the Acts; Silvia Acerbi, “Polarizzazioni sociali, clientelismi e rivolte popolari a Edessa in epoca tardoantica: Un approccio attraverso gli Atti siriaci del II Concilio di Efeso (449)”, Veleia 27 (2010): 267–83, a fairly recent study that offers an interesting interpretation of the Acts as a testimony to clientism inside the Roman urban space. The text of the Acts does play an important role in the discussion on acclamations, on which see below.

44 Graumann, Acts of the Early Church Councils, 250.

45 See Christopher Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Roger S. Bagnall, Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

46 The question as to what extent Egypt was a representative province remains; see Dominic Rathbone, “The Romanity of Roman Egypt: A Faltering Consensus?”, Journal of Juristic Papyrology 43 (2013): 73–91.

47 For someone responsible for such a large source, who in that source actually speaks in his own words and whose impact is seen all over it, Chaereas has only managed to get the briefest of mentions in PLRE; see J.R. Martindale, The Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, volume II: AD 395–527 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 282; see also additions in Avshalom Laniado, “Some Addenda to the ‘Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire’ (Vol. II: 395–527)”, Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 44/1 (1995): 121–8, p. 122, especially the tile “hegemon civitatis”; of John we hear nothing.

48 There might have been local copies in Edessa, as the local government kept records of judgements made in the province; see Jill Harries, “The Roman Imperial Quaestor from Constantine to Theodosius II”, Journal of Roman Studies 78 (1988): 148–72, p. 149; but the petitions were sent to the capital.

49 On crowds and violence in Late Antiquity see Gregory, Vox populi, esp. pp. 3–14; and chapters in Violence in Late Antiquity: Perceptions and Practices, ed. H.A. Drake (London: Routledge, 2016).

50 On the role of such disputations, see Richard Lim, Public Disputation, Power, and Social Order in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

51 On the importance of these markers, see James B. Rule, Theories of Civil Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), pp. 271–73

52 Neil B. McLynn, “Christian Controversy and Violence in the Fourth Century”, in idem, Christian Politics and Religious Culture in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Routledge, 2009), pp. 15–44.

53 See Rule, Theories of Civil Violence, 91–118.

54 These forms of unrest are signals of a new world and new agency, far from crisis: see Julio Cesar Magalhães de Oliveira, “Late Antiquity: The Age of Crowds?”, Past & Present 249/1 (2020): 3–52.

55 Flemming, Akten, 18.

56 Ibid., 16.

57 Adam H. Becker, “Syriac Anti-Judaism: Polemic and Internal Critique”, in Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections across the First Millenium, eds. Aaron Michael Butts and Simcha Gross [Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, volume CLXXX] (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), pp. 47–66.

58 Flemming, Akten, 26.

59 Hans-Ulrich Wiemer, “Akklamationen im Spätrömischen Reich: Zur Typologie und Funktion eines Kommunikationsrituals”, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 86 (2004): 27–74, p. 49.

60 Phenix and Horn, “Life of Rabbula”, 32.184.

61 Flemming, Akten, 26.

62 Phenix and Horn, “Life of Rabbula”, 26.179.

63 Flemming, Akten, 26.

64 Phenix and Horn, “Life of Rabbula”, chapt. LXX.

65 Drijvers, “Rabbula”, 140.

66 On phonai, see Charlotte Roueché, “Acclamations in the Later Roman Empire: New Evidence from Aphrodisias”, Journal of Roman Studies 74 (1984): 181–99, pp. 181–90; Gregory S. Aldrete, Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), esp. pp. 100–64; Wiemer, “Akklamationen”; Charlotte Roueché, “Acclamations at the Council of Chalcedon”, in Chalcedon in Context: Church Councils 400–700, eds. Mary Whitby and Richard Price (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), pp. 169–77; Peter van Nuffelen, “Playing the Ritual Game in Constantinople (379–457)”, in Two Romes, eds. Lucy Grig and Gavin Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 183–202; Michael Williams, “Hymns as Acclamations: The Case of Ambrose of Milan”, Journal of Late Antiquity 6 (2013): 108–34; and Philip Michael Forness, “Representing Lay Involvement in the Christological Controversies”, in Konzilien und kanonisches Recht in Spätantike und frühem Mittelalter, eds. Wolfram Brandes, Alexandra Hasse-Ungeheuer, and Hartmut Leppin (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), pp. 57–80.

67 Historia Augusta, trans. David Magie and David Rohrbacher, volume II [Loeb Classical Library, volume CXL] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022), Severus Alexander VII.1, p. 179.

68 John Noël Dillon, The Justice of Constantine: Law, Communication, and Control (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), pp. 133–4.

69 Theodosiani libri XVI: Cum Constitutionibus Sirmondianis et Leges novellae ad Theodosianum pertinentes, eds. Theodor Mommsen and Paul M Meyer (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905), 8. 5. 32.

70 Peter van Nuffelen, “Beyond Bureaucracy: Ritual Mediation in Late Antiquity”, in State, Power, and Violence, eds. Margo Kitts et al. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), pp. 231–46, esp. 238–40.

71 Collectionis Casinensis sive synodici a Rustico diacono compositi pars altera, eds. Eduard Schwartz and Johannes Straub, volume IV of Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum, tomus I: Concilium Universale Ephesenum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1965), p. 200–1; see brief discussion in Fergus Millar, A Greek Roman Empire: Power and Belief under Theodosius II (408–450) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 164.

72 In fact, the way such acclamations were conducted might have resembled actual litany with intonations and responses from the crowd; see Berkes and Mihálykó, “Greek Acclamation”, 298.

73 Flemming, Akten, 16; Doran, “Acts”, 141.

74 Flemming, Akten, 18; Doran, “Acts”, 141.

75 Doran, “Acts”, 141 n. 25.

76 Rammelt, Ibas von Edessa, 102 n. 157.

77 Rabbula is there with the Edessenes: “Holy Rabbula, petition with us!” they shout. The charisma of dead holy persons was beginning to play an increasingly important role. Doran, “Acts ”, 142.

78 Berkes and Mihálykó, “Greek Acclamation”, 298.

79 Chron. Pasch. ad a. 531, p. 620.4–13, Theoph. Conf. AM 6024.

80 Probably after 547, so late in his reign; see Barry Baldwin, “The Date of a Circus Dialogue”, Revue des Études Byzantines 39/1 (1981): 301–6, even though some older scholarship still insisted on the Nika riots, following the framing by Theophanes; see Patricia Karlin-Hayter, “Les ’Ακτα Δια Καλαποδιον”, Byzantion 43 (1973): 84–107, p. 93.

81 See comments in van Nuffelen, “Beyond Bureaucracy”, 232.

82 Flemming, Akten, 4.

83 Ibid., 20.

84 Ibid., 29.

85 A witness to this process of distillation is the way many of these terms were kept in Greek and simply transliterated into Syriac.

86 Kelly, Ruling the Later Roman Empire, 242.

87 Robin Whelan, “The Imperial Official as Doctrinal Troubleshooter between Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451)”, 2024, forthcoming.

88 Wiemer, “Akklamationen”, 66.

89 J.H.W.G. Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall of the Roman City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 106.

90 Avshalom Laniado, “From Municipal Councillors to ‘Municipal Landowners’: Some Remarks on the Evolution of the Provincial Elites in Early Byzantium”, in Chlodwigs Welt: Organisation von Herrschaft Um 500, eds. Mischa Meier and Steffen Patzold (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014), pp. 545–66, esp. 558.

91 Flemming, Akten, 22; on the term and its meaning in Late Antiquity, see K.A. Worp, “Bouleutai and Politeuomenoi in Later Byzantine Egypt Again,” Chronique d’Egypte 74, no. 147 (January 1999): 124–32.

92 Flemming, Akten, 24.

93 Liebeschuetz, Decline and Fall, 107.

94 “His brother Eusebios should be given to the [judgement] of the city council!” (Flemming, Akten, 18; Doran, “Acts”, 143).

95 Whelan, “Imperial Official”.

96 Larry Ray, Violence and Society (New York: Sage, 2018), p. 8.

97 Flemming, Akten, 18.

98 Ibid., 34.

99 Benjamin Kelly, Petitions, Litigation, and Social Control in Roman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

100 Wiemer, “Akklamationen”, 64.

101 Mateusz Fafinski and Jakob Riemenschneider, Monasticism and the City in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages [Elements in Late Antique Religion, volume II] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

102 Flemming, Akten, 6.

103 Ibid., 14.

104 Ibid., 16.

105 Price and Gaddis, Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 10.141, pp. 299–303.

106 Ibid., 2:10.106, p. 290.

107 Flemming, Akten, 32.

108 Peter Hatlie, The Monks and Monasteries of Constantinople, ca. 350–850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Daniel Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity [The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, volume XXXIII] (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Ewa Wipszycka, “The Canons of the Council of Chalcedon Concerning Monks”, Augustinianum 58/1 (2018): 155–80; Fafinski and Riemenschneider, Monasticism, 21–2, 42–6.

109 See Arthur Vööbus, History of the School of Nisibis (Louvain: Peeters, 1965).

110 Columba Stewart, “The Ascetic Taxonomy of Antioch and Edessa at the Emergence of Monasticism”, Adamantius 19 (2013): 207–21.

111 On the origins of qyāmâ as a term before its monastic reconfiguration, see Arthur Vööbus, “The Institution of the Benai Qeiama and Benat Qeiama in the Ancient Syrian Church”, Church History 30/1 (1961): 19–27; Robert Murray, “‘Circumcision of Heart’ and the Origins of the Qyāmâ”, in After Bardaisan: Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour of Professor Han J.W. Drijvers, eds. G.J. Reinink, Alexander Cornelis Klugkist, and H.J.W. Drijvers [Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, volume LXXXIX] (Leuven: Peeters en Departement Oosterse Studies, 1999), pp. 201–12.

112 Florence Jullien, “Religious life and Syriac monasticism”, in The Syriac World, ed. Daniel King (London: Routledge, 2020), 89.

113 On the difficulty in rendering the term in English and its various possible meanings, see Sidney Griffith, “Monks, ‘Singles,’ and ‘Sons of the Covenant’”, in Eulogēma: Studies in Honor of Robert Taft, eds. E. Carr et al. [Studia Anselmiana, volume CX] (Rome: Ateneo S. Anselmo, 1993), pp. 141–60, esp. 145–53

114 Stephanie K. Skoyles Jarkins, Aphrahat the Persian Sage and the Temple of God: A Study of Early Syriac Theological Anthropology (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2014), p. 73.

115 “Collections of Canons”, trans. and eds. Robert R. Phenix and Cornelia B. Horn, in The Rabbula Corpus: Comprising the Life of Rabbula, His Correspondence, a Homily Delivered in Constantinople, Canons, and Hymns, trans. and eds. Phenix and Horn (Atlanta, GA: SBL Press, 2017), pp. 94–125, esp. 102–17.

116 Ibid., 102 n. 31.

117 Griffith, “Monks”, 159.

118 On literarisation as a process in Late Antiquity, see Mateusz Fafinski and Jakob Riemenschneider, “Literarised Spaces: Towards a Narratological Framework for Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”, in The Past Through Narratology: New Approaches to Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, eds. Fafinski and Riemenschneider [Das Mittelalter. Perspektiven Mediävistischer Forschung. Beihefte, volume XVIII] (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Press, 2022), pp. 7–23.

119 Stewart, “Ascetic Taxonomy”, 219.

120 Flemming, Akten, 46.

121 Price and Gaddis, Acts of the Council of Chalcedon, 2:242 6.17.

122 Ibid., 2:100, Canon 18.

123 Ibid., 2:242, 6.17.

124 Laniado, “From Municipal Councillors”, 558.

125 See Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks, 137–50, 190–8.

126 George A. Bevan and Patrick T.R. Gray, “The Trial of Eutyches: A New Interpretation”, Byzantinische Zeitschrift 101/2 (2009): 617–57.

127 As seen, for example, in Cynthia White, “Rome, the City as Text: Response”, Classical Outlook 91/2 (2016): 56–63.

128 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Joint Center for Urban Studies, 2005); James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

129 Especially in the context of “texting” and “textualisation” of urban space, see Tiit Remm, “Textualities of the City: Fom the Legibility of Urban Space towards Social and Natural Others in Planning”, Σημϵιωτκή-Sign Systems Studies 44/1–2 (2016): 34–52.

130 Note, for example, that, while Hiba’s letter to Mari was composed in Syriac, the version we have in the Acts is probably a retranslation from Greek; see Millar, “Syriac Acts”, 61.

131 Flemming, Akten, 14; compare with the translation in Doran, “Acts”, 139.

132 Flemming, Akten, 24; compare with the translation in Doran, “Acts”, 148.

133 Flemming, Akten, 24.

134 The question of how immediate these signatures were is another matter. During synods, blank sheets were sometimes signed after a matter was agreed and the transcripts were added later; see Graumann, Acts of the Early Church Councils, 254

135 Peter Bruns, “Die sog: ‘Perserschule’ von Edessa und ihr Einfluß auf die Synoden im Zweistromland”, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 35/1–2 (2003): 290–306.

136 Drijvers, “School of Edessa”, 58.

137 Becker, Fear of God, 64. Becker suggests that the presence of the schools means that they were purely ethnic in character, not theological. I disagree and see their presence as lying somewhere between initial propaganda and later redaction.

138 Flemming, Akten, 16.

139 ., 32.

140 Lukas Lemcke, Bridging Center and Periphery (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020), p. 79.

141 Flemming, Akten, 4, 6.

142 Ibid., 14; compare with the translation in Doran, “Acts”, 139.

143 Flemming, Akten, 16.

144 Ibid., 24; compare with the translation in Doran, “Acts”, 148.

145 Flemming, Akten, p. 24

146 See Luhmann’s systems theory: Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); and his vision of political communication in Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, ed. André Kieserling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002); this is also consistent with the semiotic approach to the city (often at odds with the systemic one) in which the “application of the model of communication seems the be among the most productive” for thinking about cities; Algirdas Julien Greimas, “For a Topological Semiotics” in The City and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics, eds. M. Gottdiener and A.Ph. Lagopoulos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 25–54, esp. 38.

147 In this approach, the city is an “utterance” in which two forms of doing, the individual and the social, interweave, just as in Edessa in the the Acts we see both individual and collective networks; see Greimas, “Topological Semiotics”, 39–40.

148 Guidi, “Chronicon Edessenum”, 12ff.

149 Pseudo-Joshua, The Chronicle of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, trans. Frank R. Trombley and J.W. Watt [Translated Texts for Historians, volume XXXII] (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000).

150 Jean-Baptiste Chabot, Incerti auctoris Chronicon Pseudo Dionysianum vulgo dictum, volumes I–II [CSCO, volumes XCI/43 and CXXI/66] (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1927, 1949).

151 Chronicon anonymum ad annum Christi 1234 pertinens, ed. J.B. Chabot, volumes I–II [CSCO, volumes LXXXI/36–LXXXII/37] (Louvain: L. Durbecq, 1916–1920), I: ch. 43, 141–3; II:179–82.

152 Anton Baumstark, “Vorjustinianische kirchliche Bauten in Edessa”, Oriens Christianus 4/1 (1904): 164–83; he worked from old editions and trusted the texts too much.

153 Ernst Kirsten, “Edessa: Eine römische Grenzstadt des 4. bis 6. Jh. im Orient”, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 6 (1963): 144–72, p. 151; Kirsten’s article remains important as a discussion of the topography of Edessa, but his work cannot be seen in isolation from his activities in the NSDAP and SA, as well as his service in occupied Greece in the so-called Kunstschutz der Wehrmacht; see Eckart Olshausen, “Kirsten, Ernst”, in Der Neue Pauly Supplemente I: Geschichte der Altertumswissenschaften: Biographisches Lexikon, eds. Peter Kuhlmann and Helmuth Schneider (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2012), pp. 656–7; on the sources of the Chronicle of 1234, see Andy Hilkens, The Anonymous Syriac Chronicle of 1234 and Its Sources [Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, volume CCLXXII] (Leuven: Peeters, 2018).

154 Leppin, “Creating a City”, 191.

155 St Stephen’s was probably a former synagogue or a church of the Audians, a sect supposedly professing a radical anthropomorphism of Christ. The identification of the passage in the Chronicle of Edessa remains contested. For a summary of the discussion, see Phenix and Horn, “Introducing the Rabbula Corpus”, cl–clii.

156 Stewart, “Ascetic Taxonomy”, 218–21.

157 Chabot, Chronicle to 1234, I: ch. 43, p. 181/II: 142.

158 Kai Brodersen, ed., “Reise der Aetheria”, ed. Kai Brodersen, in Egeria: Reise ins Heilige Land, ed. Brodersen (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 146.

159 Flemming, Akten, 17.

160 Leppin, “Creating a City”.

161 On the concept of production of space, see Henri Lefebvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1974).

162 It has been suggested that the secretarium was in the former royal palace in the citadel, thus also giving a form of vertical separation; J.B. Segal, Edessa: The Blessed City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 120

163 Guidi, “Chronicon Edessenum”, 8.

164 See text and translation in Andrew Palmer and Lyn Rodley, “The Inauguration Anthem of Hagia Sophia in Edessa: A New Edition and Translation with Historical and Architectural Notes and a Comparison with a Contemporary Constantinopolitan Kontakion”, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 12 (1988): 117–68.

165 Flemming, Akten, 26; built by Bishop Diogenes and fairly new at the time of Hiba as its construction started in 408; see Guidi, “Chronicon Edessenum”, 7

166 Flemming, Akten, 42.

167 Ibid., 40.

168 Mark Whittow, “Ruling the Late Roman and Early Byzantine City: A Continuous History”, Past & Present 129 (1990): 3–29.