ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the character of Syrian migration in the West during Late Antiquity and attempts to better understand the outlook of the agencies involved as they confronted foreign social, economic, and political frameworks. The fact that clusters of Syrian immigrants emphasised their origins attests to how, during Late Antiquity, the Roman Empire succeeded in moving and incorporating people across boundaries. With the cultural crossbreeding that occurred in the Italian peninsula at the dawn of Late Antiquity, attempting to assign a specific provenance to the artist of the Caralis mosaic is a pointless exercise. The chapter deals with the analysis of a unique example of mobility in the ancient Mediterranean. It considers this phenomenon as illustrated by the textual and visual evidence and proposes some interpretational frameworks. Epigraphic dossiers from northern Italy attest to the spread of Syrians, most of whom came from villages whose locations can be firmly situated in the territories of Apamea and Antioch.
