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Home > Magazines > Archaeology Odyssey > November/December 2000

Polyglot Antioch

Will archaeologists ever find the city described in the literary sources?

By Florent Heintz

Antioch-on-the-Orontes was one of the four great cities of the Greco-Roman-Byzantine world. Although almost unknown today, it once rivaled Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople. Ancient writers described it as a breathtakingly beautiful city with grand civic buildings, baths, houses, temples, synagogues, churches and colonnaded streets—all bordered by the Orontes River and surrounded by mountains. According to the patriarch John Chrysostom (c. 345–407 C.E.), who was born and educated in Antioch, the city was home to 200,000 souls: Greeks, Persians, Syrians, Phoenicians, Judeans and Romans. Antioch was the most multicultural city of Late Antiquity; for centuries, pagans, Jews and Christians lived […]

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Footnotes

1.

Seleucus built 15 other cities named Antioch. Since both Seleucus’s father and son were named Antiochus, scholars have disputed who was the actual eponym of any particular city, the father (as was the more common practice) or the son.

2.

Mithras, originally a Persian deity, appears in a different form in the Roman world around the middle of the first century C.E. He was especially worshiped in the border regions where armies were stationed. His cult involved secret initiations and ceremonial meals, and was centered on the myth of the god slaying a bull, a symbol of the victory of good over evil.

3.

The Nestorians, who accepted the doctrines of an early fifth-century priest named Nestorius, held that Christ’s two natures, the divine and the human, were completely separate entities.

Endnotes

1.

Christine Kondoleon, “The City of Antioch: An Introduction,” in Antioch: The Lost Ancient City, ed. Christine Kondoleon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 7.

2.

Athenaeus, The Learned Banquet 5.194, 10.439. See Glanville Downey, Ancient Antioch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 59.

3.

Bernadette J. Brooten, “The Jews of Ancient Antioch,” in Antioch, p. 30.