ABSTRACT
The chapters in this volume examine the period of late antiquity by turning our attention to the peripheries of its intellectual, social, and literary domains. This exploration of the margins and borderlands of culture can offer a new perspective on the cultural transformations of the late ancient world, in part by allowing a glimpse of how boundaries were circumnavigated or even redrawn.1 This present chapter considers one such linguistic and geographic boundary, the divide between Greek and Syriac cultures in late antiquity. Between the Aramaic cultures of Mesopotamia and the Greek world of the Eastern Mediterranean, a new hybrid Syriac intellectual community developed west of the Euphrates in the fourth through seventh centuries.2 Fergus Millar, Dan King and others have argued that
1 While an attention to the boundaries of culture is new, discussion of cultural transformation is now a standard narrative in scholarship on late antiquity, prima facie evidence being the title of the conference series which produced this volume, “Shifting Frontiers,” or the similarly-titled monograph series by the University of California Press, “The Transformation of the Classical Heritage.”
