Urban Violence in Fifth Century Antioch: Riot Culture and Dynamics in Late Antique Eastern Mediterranean Cities
David A. Heayn
History
In the early fourth century, during the reign of the first Christian emperor, Constantine the Great (AD 324-337), Antioch was one of the largest and most important political, cultural, and religious centers of the Greco-Roman and Christian world
Christians, Jews, Pagans, Greeks, Syrians, et al, vied for control within the city. This form of internal urban violence and armed revolt were common in the Greek East. Antioch was a city attempting to transition from a Greco-Roman Pagan society to an orthodox Christian society in a recently Christian empire.
The Persian invasion and a deficiency of source material hinder further historical inquiry of this period until the later writings of John Chrysostom and Libanius in the mid-fourth century. Until the natural disasters of the early sixth century AD and the subsequent Persian and Arab invasions, Antioch flourished as the jewel of the East, and its people fought for domination and control of its wealth, power, and authority.
During the fifth century, riots erupted in the city due to the transition towards becoming a truly Christian empire. Questions surrounding Christian doctrine and authority across the empire and region fueled the rhetoric, while economics and politics fed the violence.
The unresolved difficulty of Acts 18.12–17 involves finding an adequate explanation for the (seemingly) unprovoked hostile reaction of the crowd toward Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue in Corinth. This investigation places this incident within the larger social context of urban uprisings and mob violence in the Roman world in order to highlight the socioeconomic factors (poverty, overcrowding, etc.) that inevitably gave rise to such frequent outbursts of urban aggression during this period. As such, this study illumines not only Acts 18, but other passages in Acts where mob violence plays a leading role. Whenever a blast of turbulence falls upon the assembly. .. we find jibes and brawling and laughter. Dio Chrysostom Luke's brief account of the mobbing of Sosthenes in Acts 18.12–17 presents historians and exegetes with a fascinating set of questions, not least of which is accounting for the sudden rush of the crowd on Sosthenes, the unsuspecting and unprepared ruler of the synagogue in Corinth. Surprisingly, this issue receives scant discussion in commentaries and secondary literature, with most appealing without argument to an anti-Jewish bias on the part of the assembly and the pro-consul Gallio, who turned a blind eye to the disturbance. 1 While xenophobic 1 E.g. H.
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The rituals of popular justice that characterized the urban life of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries are also one of the most obvious links we can establish between popular culture and the urban space. Forms of collective sanction, such as the public humiliation and the menacing parade, the destruction of properties, and the lynching of offenders, were all public performances that took place in the streets and squares of cities. Such performances also depended on customary practices of occupation of the urban space and shared some features with the festive rituals that paced the urban life. For all these reasons, in its conception and in its enactment, popular justice can properly be viewed as a kind of “street theatre”. Historians of other periods had for long explored such links between riot and carnival and the ways customary forms of popular justice could be adapted to different social contexts. But as Nicholas Rogers has rightly stressed, an obsession with symbolism and ritual can easily lead to a “cosmic populism”, that is, to the exaltation of irreverent counter-cultures, to the detriment of analyses of power. In this essay, I would like to identify some of the main characteristics of popular justice and street theatre in Late Antiquity, paying special attention to their rituals, mechanisms and processes. But in order to understand the historical significance of these practices, we must also to replace them in the broader political context of the Late Roman cities, at a time of increasing mobilization of the common people in the struggles for power in the urban space.
