The Plethron & the Xystos

The plethron was the ancient wrestling stadium of Antioch. It merited an Oration from Libanius (Oration X, "On the Plethron"). In Downey's article on the Antioch Olympics he says ".. the successive enlargements of the Plethron, which had been built under Didius Julianus in the heart of Antioch, near the site of the later Forum of Valens, for use in the athletic trials and preliminary contests in the games. In a statement by Malalas (cited by Downey) the Plethri(o)n was built on the site of the house of Asabinus of the Council (πολιτευομενου), a Jew by religion.

The structure was originally designed, with two rows of seats about its four sides, to accomodate as spectators only the trainers, patrons and present and past officials of the games, the building was enlarged by Argyrius, who gave the games in 332AD, and then by Libanius' uncle Phasganius, who gave them in 336, each doubling the former capacity of the seats. The resulting admission of students, workmen and idlers of all sorts destroyed, Libanius says, the sacred character of the contests, which were even set at a later hour to suit the convenience of the new spectators". Downey adds that Proculus, the comes Orientis of 383-4 proposed a further expansion of the seating. This last proposal is what spurred Libanius to his outburst against riff-raff at the plethron!

The Xystos was another structure used for the Games. Malalas relates that this was built (or rebuilt) by Commodus (180-192AD). This is described in some commentaries as a covered track used for sports. In a footnote A.F. Norman suggests some sort of linkage with the Theatre of Zeus and references Roland Martin in Festugiere but my reading of Martin quite clearly states the Theatre of Zeus was in Daphne, moreover Norman attributes Martin as claiming that the Xystos and Plethron were in some way connected with the theatre. Maybe our French is faulty but R. Martin says in reference to the Plethron "où il est bien distingué des deux theatres". That sounds like the contrary view.

Both of these structures were in or around the Forum, which is usually named in honour of Valens, for his rebuilding activities.

I have uploaded Richard Foerster's edition of Libanius' Oration X: "On the Plethron" and it is available here:

http://www.filefactory.com/file/ag69c90/n/plethron_oration_foerster_pdf

A Short Bibliography on the Antiochikos

We have dealt with the subject of a broad bibliography of Antioch in a previous postings here and here. A subset of Antioch studies is the study of Libanius's Oration in praise of his home city, the Antiochikos, which we posted upon here. The oration in translation, by Glanville Downey, can be found here. 

It might be useful to list here the research that deals solely with the Oration in question. Here are the articles I know of:

Les fondations d’Antioche dans l’Antiochikos (Or. XI) de Libanios, Catherine Saliou, Aram 11-12 (1999-2000), p. 357-388

Libanius' Oration in Praise of Antioch (Oration XI): Glanville Downey - Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 103, No. 5, (Oct. 15, 1959), pp. 652-686

Antioche décrite par Libanios. La rhétorique de l’espace urbain et ses enjeux au milieu du quatrième siècle, Catherine Saliou, in  M. Steinrück, E. Amato, A. Roduit (dir.), Approches de la troisième sophistique (Mélanges J. Schamp), Bruxelles, 2006, p. 273-285

Libanius the Mythographer: Cultural Competition in the Antiochikos, Alex Lee, Florida State University. 112th annual meeting of CAMWS, 16-19 March 2015 

Vergangenheit und Gegenwart im “Antiochikos” des Libanios. Wiemer, H-U. 2003. Klio 85(2): 442-468.

Libanios' Antiochikos as the First Independent City Praise to Contain an Extent City Description or the Last Evolutionary Stage of a Rhetorical Genus, Alexandra

Voudouri, University of Athens, Greece, I.S.H.R Twentieth Biennial Conference,

Tübingen, July 31, 2015

Antiochikos - Zur heidnischen Renaissance in der Spätantike Aus dem Griech, Tilman Krischer & Georgios Fatouros, 286 S., ISBN 978-3-85132-006-0

Der Antiochikos des Libanios; eingeleitet, übersetzt und kommentiert, Leo Hugi.

Solothurn, "Union," 1919. 164 p.

Antioch as a Centre of Hellenic Culture, as Observed by Libanius, A. F. Norman,  Liverpool University Press | Series: Translated Texts for Historians | 2000, 199p   

The Sarcophagus "Industry" in Antioch

Antioch was way more than just an Eastern outpost or some staging post on the way to campaigns against the Parthians. As the former capital of the Seleucid Empire for centuries it was where the wealth of that empire gravitated attracting the "big spenders" on not only its own area of dominion but from a broader region (as evidenced by Herod's gift of the Colonnaded Street). It was plugged into various strands of the Silk Road and the Red Sea trade as well as connections through to Palmyra providing interaction with that entrepôt.

So jewellery, textiles and perfumes were the prime stock in trade of the merchants and craftsmen dealing with the Syrian "carriage trade". All of these involved conversion of inputs from distant lands into products for local consumption or export to points west in the Roman Empire.

However, one range of products has received less focus mainly because it is so difficult to pinpoint the exact origin of where work was undertaken. This subset of the city's production was its carved output. With so little in situ to be seen at the site of ancient Antioch and the excavations in the 1930s throwing up little in the way of statuary it has fallen to scholars to see commonality in widely dispersed objects and using the style similarities to source them back to workshops in Antioch. This has resulted in a typology for work of this nature originating in the Syrian metropolis.

Most prominent in cultivating this view was the prominent (and controversial) art historian Josef Strzygowski who in his paper entitled "A Sarcophagus of the Sidamara type in the collection of Sir Frederick Cook, and the influence of stage architecture upon the art of Antioch" (published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. XXVII 1907, p. 99-122, planches V-XII) launched his thesis upon the art world.

In this article he posits: "It now remains to prove that the Asia Minor sarcophagi also belong to this school of plastic art, and depend from a centre of which till now we knew very little, namely Antioch. For to the sphere of influence of this Syrian metropolis belongs also the region on this side of the Taurus whence the art tendency noticeable in the Richmond fragments may have travelled to the west of Asia Minor just as well as to Macedonia, Greece, Italy and Rome. For the present nothing can be determined with certainty, but it is my firm conviction that the Asia Minor type of sarcophagus had its origin neither at Ephesus nor in any other district of western Asia Minor, neither in Greece nor Rome, but in the angle which lay nearest to Mesopotamia, and had Antioch as centre of culture".  

Here can be seen a few of the pieces of the sarcophagus that prompted this theory: 

A French review of the book at the time sums it up well as: "L'étude du sarcophage conservé dans la collection de sir Frederick Cook, à Richmond, amène M. Strzygowski à établir que les sarcophages de type dit d'Asie Mineure proviennent d'une école de sculpture d'Antioche qui chercha à combiner les motifs de l'ornement impressionniste venu de Mésopotamie avec les plus belles formes plastiques de l'art grec. Parmi les huit figures en haut relief qui ont été conservées (trois adolescents nus du type des Dioscures, deux figures masculines aux draperies flottantes, trois figures féminines également drapées), les trois premières semblent dériver de l'Hermès de Praxitèle; les figures drapées présentent des analogies avec la Muse de Praxitèle de la base de Mantinée et la matrone d'Herculanum du musée de Dresde; les deux dernières se rattachent à la même inspiration que les « pleureuses » du sarcophage de Sidon. L'élégante coquille qui encadre les figures comme une niche trahit l'influence mésopotamienne. Enfin le décor même du sarcophage de Richmond, qui se retrouve sur tous les sarcophages d'Asie Mineure, ne serait, avec ses trois portes surmontées d'un fronton, qu'une copie du « proskenion » des théâtres antiques dont la restitution a pu être tentée grâce aux peintures du quatrième style de Pompeï. L'influence de ce style d'Antioche se retrouve dans le panneau central du trône d'ivoire de Maximien, archevêque de Ravenne, et dans le bel ivoire du Musée Britanique qui représente un archange porteur du sceptre et du globe crucigère. En réunissant ces monuments si éloignés en apparence les uns des autres, on peut donc arriver à reconstituer le mouvement de syncrétisme artistique dont la façade de Mschatta reste la manifestation la plus éclatante".

Strzygowski's thesis could be summed up as that the artists in Antioch took the proscenium of the theatre as their mise en scene for all manner of relief carving but most particularly with regard to sarcophagi. It would seem that Antioch had established quite a niche (excuse the pun) in this type of product and that marble from very distant quarries (as far away as Prokenessos in the Sea of Marmara) was shipped to Antioch to be transformed and then re-exported to a wealthy costumer base across the Empire. 

Better-Than-Antioch II

I came across some more information on the destruction and relocation of the city by Khosroe in a paper by Katarzyna Maksymiuk entitled "Mass Deportations in Syria and Northern Mesopotamia under the rule of Xusrō I Anōšīrvān (540-542)", in. War and Population Displacement. Lessons of History, eds. Fernando Puell de la Villa and David García Hernán, Brighton-Portland-Toronto, Sussex Academic Press. 2018, 46-53. 

I excerpt here the specifics related to how "Better-Than-Antioch" was effected:

"According to Jacob of Edessa, the Roman prisoners of war from the cities of Sula, Beroea, Antioch, Apamea, Callinicum, and Batnae were deported to Weh  Antioch Xusro (Jacob of Edessa, 1907: 320-321). As far as Sula and Apamea are concerned, no other sources confirm the information that deportations from these two towns took place. In the case of Beroea, Procopius of Caesarea clearly states that its inhabitants remained in Sergiopolis, and the majority of other authors, representing different cultural circles, mention the deportation of the inhabitants of Antioch.

Many sources describe complete destruction of Antioch. For instance, John Lydus states that "The statues, however, with which the city was adorned, he [Xusro] seized as booty, along with slabs of marble, precious stone and pictures; it was the whole of Syria that he carried off to Persia" (John the Lydian, 1812: III.54). It might seem that the pillage was not the goal of Xusro. A fragment of the chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius shows he planned and systematic actions of Iranian king towards Antioch: "They stripped it and removed even the marble slabs which overlaid the walls, and took them away to their country, since they also were building in their country a city like this one and named it Antioch" (Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, 1933/1989: II, 69.7-15). The shahanshah decided to move into Iran not only the population but virtually the entire city.

Weh Antioch Xusro was "situated at the side of al-Mad'in" (Tabari, 1999: I.898), "in a place one day's journey distant from the city of Ctesiphon" (Procopius, 1914: II.14. I). It was known as al-Romiyyah (Tabari, 1999: 1.959; Shahid 1995: 209-236).

Most information about building of the new city can be found in the testimonies of Procopius and the Arabic chronicles Tabari and Dinawari (Dinawari, 2012: 70). The new city was to be built on the original plan of the Syrian metropolis. "He [Xusro] then gave orders that a plan should be made for him of the city of Antioch exactly to scale (literally, according to its extent), with the number of its houses, streets and everything contained in it" (Tabari 1999: I.898).

The authors point out the special status of the city. It was excluded from the administrative system of the state. The city was a special district (kurah) for them consisting of four wards (tassujs): Upper Nahrawan, Lower Nahrawan Badaraya, Bakusaya. "He [Xusro] allotted living allowances for the people whom he had transported from Antioch to al-Romiyyah" (Tabari 1999: I.959-860). The inhabitants were called "king's subjects, so as to be subordinate to no one of the magistrates, but to the king alone" (Procopius, 1914: II.14.3-4).

An interesting legal aspect can be observed in the testimony of Procopius who wrote that "if anyone else too who was a Roman slave ran away and succeeded in escaping to the Antioch of Chosroes, and if he was called a kinsman by anyone of those who lived there' (Procopius, 1914: II.14.4), then in such a situation his owner would lose the ownership over the escapee even if the owner was a member of Iranian aristocracy. We can believe that escapes of this sort must have been quite common if special law regulated such events.

The inhabitants of Weh Antiok Xusro were not treated as captives but almost like guests. The ruler did not impose the Iranian religion (Jullien, 2006: 116; Maksymiuk, 2015c: 123-134) or Iranian habits on them (Dignas and Winter, 2007: 254-263). Barz, a Christian from Gondesapur, was appointed an administrator of the city, "because he was their co-religionist" (Tabari, 1999: I.960). Xusr6 provided at his expense the pastimes corresponding to culture and tradition of the inhabitants. According to Procopius, "a bath and a hippodrome", were built in the city so that the Antiochenes could have "free enjoyment of their other luxuries' (Procopius, 1914: II.14.1-2). The author of the Chronicle of Seert mentions that "when Xusro died, Antiochean Greeks whom he captured and settled in the city which he built for them, venerated him after his death, by their Christian habit, by following his remnants on their last way" (Chronicle, 1911: 197)".

As one of my prime interests is the physical heritage of the city it is interesting to note how the creation of the new city involved the wholesale removal of statues from Antioch. This might be a good explanation as to why so little sculptural material was recovered by the expeditions of the 1930s. However one wonders also after the destruction of the earthquakes and around 150 years of Christian ascendancy how much statuary remained in the city to be carried off. For instance was the famous Tyche still extant? It might be ironic if the original statuary of Antioch ended up being preserved at Khosroes' new city whereas the original Antioch has proven to have been destroyed so many times and ultimately made so inaccessible to archaeological work.    

Then the comment that the city was built to the original plan of Antioch is intriguing. One wonders whether this could be true but only identification and excavation of the site of the duplicate city could reveal the truth of this.      

Procopius of Caesarea on the Earthquake in Antioch in 526 AD

There is a comment by Procopius on the earthquake at Antioch in 526 AD in this paper:

FATE, DIVINE PHTHONOS, AND THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE: THE RECEPTION OF HERODOTEAN THEOLOGY IN EARLY AND MIDDLE BYZANTINE HISTORIOGRAPHY

by Vasiliki Zali in Histos Supplement (2015 ) pages 85-126.

Zali notes that Procopius wrote when relating the fate of the city of Antioch (2.10.4–5): 

"But I become dizzy as I write of such a great calamity and transmit it to future times, and I am unable to understand why indeed it should be the will of God to exalt on high the fortunes of a man or of a place, and then to cast them down and destroy them for no cause which we can perceive (τί ποτε ἄρα βουλοµένῳ τῷ θεῷ εἴη πράγµατα µὲν ἀνδρὸς ἢ χωρίου του ἐπαίρειν εἰς ὕψος, αὖθις δὲ ῥιπτεῖν τε αὐτὰ καὶ ἀφανίζειν ἐξ οὐδεµιᾶς ἡµῖν φαινοµένης αἰτίας). For it is wrong to say that with Him all things are not always done with reason (αὐτῷ γὰρ οὐ θέµις εἰπεῖν µὴ οὐχὶ ἅπαντα κατὰ λόγον ἀεὶ γίγνεσθαι), though he then endured to see Antioch brought down to the ground at the hands of a most unholy man, a city whose beauty and grandeur in every respect could not even so be utterly concealed".

This was taken from Dewing, H. B., tr. (1914–40) Procopius, vols. 1–5 (Cambridge, Mass.).

Towards a Prosopography of Ancient Antioch - Visualising Networks

Lawrence Stone gave a definition: “Prosopography is the investigation of the common back-ground  characteristics of a group of actors in history by means of a collective study of their  lives ”(1971: 46).

The most comprehensive source of prosopographical material on Ancient Antioch was undoubtedly its most voluminous writer, Libanius. His trove of writings spawned a more narrowly focussed work by the French expert on Antioch, Paul Petit. In this volume he specifically focussed upon the public functionaries that Libanius mentioned in his letters and orations. This work is:

Petit Paul. Les fonctionnaires dans l'oeuvre de Libanius : analyse prosopographique. Préface de André Chastagnol et de Jean

Martin. Besançon : Université de Franche-Comté, 1994. pp. 5-286. (Annales littéraires de l'Université de Besançon, 541)

doi : 10.3406/ista.1994.2515

Which is available here on the Persee website:

http://www.persee.fr/doc/ista_0000-0000_1994_mon_541_1

When I first read this work it struck me that here was the potential foundation for "populating" the Antiochepedia with more characters than just Libanius, Chrysostom and Malalas. Here we have administrators, senators, patrons, clients and a host of the elites that peopled the corridors of power in Antioch and Constantinople and dined at the symposia of Daphne in its heyday. 

Finding the correct software to visualise this social network was tough and after some false starts I came upon GEPHI, a free network visualisation software which suited my purposes. I had even at one point thought of using Linkedin for my purposes. 

Using Petit as a base and overlaying the other works dealing with Libanius' interactions I have created an initial database and started on bolting on names and linked up the relationships, even if tenuous, between those in Libanius' relationship with the good, bad and indifferent of his times.   

The basic index of Petit's book provided me with the basic "one-to-many" relationship between Libanius and the 299 characters that Petit awards with entries. Now the task is to interconnect the personalities from the specific entries and include players without entries (Julian, Chrysostom and many less well-known figures). Moving on to Norman's work on the Antiochene booktrade we get mention of more humble non-administrators, like the copyist Maeonius. Such works will add extra names to the mix.

Rather than a work in process, I call this a Visualisation in Progress. I welcome others to the cause. Click here for the first output of a few hours works. 

A Thesis on Hippodrome Curses in Ancient Antioch Finally Surfaces

Many moons ago I wrote of Dr Florent Heintz's thesis on agonistic curses in the ancient Roman world. 

Agonistic Magic in the Late Antique Circus, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1999, Florent Heintz

A failed attempt at getting my hands on the original text via Interlibrary loans at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue yielded only a bunch of microfiche (yes..) that was impossible to work with as it could not be searched, nor copied nor printed.

Time has passed and now Dr Heintz's thesis has finally appeared on www.academia.edu in a three volume posting.   

He starts with a reference to the 1959 film Ben Hur which is best remembered for its chariot race which was set in the hippodrome of Antioch. The start of the chariot scene involves the various competing charioteers using invocation to the gods (or curses) to advance their chances in the race.

On the specific parts of the thesis related to Antioch we can finally record verbatim here:

"During the 1934 and 1935 seasons of excavations in the Antioch hippodrome, the Princeton expedition uncovered five lead curse tablets in the area of the central barrier: 'There were drains along both sides of the spina and across both ends between it and the metae; these yielded a number of lead tabellae defixionum." Although their imminent publication was announced shortly after their discovery, at this point in time only two out of the five tablets have been fully unrolled, and only one deciphered. The inscription contains 61 lines of Greek, of which two-thirds are taken up by an unusually lengthy invocation to some chthonic aspects of otherwise Olympian deities (Zeus, Dionysos, Poseidon), and to Hecate in particular. The cursing formula is reduced to a minimum (three imperatives: καταδησ[ατε, ερημωσατε and καταστρεψατε) and is followed by a list of names of 41 "horses of the Blue faction" (-τουζ ιππουζ του καλλαινου), the same faction cursed in Beirut (C5) and Apamea (C6). 

Some of the cursive letter shapes clearly place the inscription within the Late Antique period (roughly 4th to mid 6th c.). Evidence for the presence of the Blues and Greens in Antioch appears only in the late 5th century with the report of a violent confrontation between circus factions under the reign of Zeno (490). It is possible that our tablet predates this riot and thus provides the first testimony for the presence of circus factions in Antioch. But it is equally possible that it post-dates the riot; in any case, the question will remain open until further work can be done on the Antioch excavations field-books so as to narrow down the date of the tablet based on archaeological evidence.

The three remaining tablets are heavily corroded and brittle and present such a daunting array of technical challenges that only one of them stands a chance of being unrolled without too much damage. One is pierced with an iron nail and will probably have to be left untouched. Two tablets appear to be made of unusually large sheets of lead which have been first rolled up very tight before being folded in two; both ends then seem to have been pressed together on a convex surface intentionally to form a more compact object. It is conceivable that the folding and pressing process had a ritual function similar to the piercing of other tablets with nails: to lock the spell in place and symbolically immobilize the target. 

C7.2. ANTIOCH (lead horse figurines). 

Also from Antioch comes a series of nine small horse figurines made of lead. Although they are not archaeologically documented like the curse tablets from the same site (they were brought to the museum by a local), they are still extremely interesting in that they seem to represent a three-dimensional counterpart to the figures of horses and charioteers engraved on some circus defixiones (C1.2; 2.3). Each horse figurine is engraved with either one or two names of horses. All together the names amount to a number of 12, which roughly coincides with the average number of horses cursed for each faction on circus tablets from necropoleis in Rome (C1.2) and Carthage (C2.4). It has been noted that the figurines show no trace of mutilation, piercing or binding, which could arguably speak against their magical function. But the nine pieces were probably part of a magical ensemble which included written curses and other implements (F7.3-4). In the absence of a documented context, one is left to wonder where the figurines were originally deposited, whether in the hippodrome itself or in a grave".