ABSTRACT
From the third through the sixth centuries AD the ‘Roman’ law schools in Berytus trained numerous legal, bureaucratic, and religious authorities of the Later Roman Empire. The city was known as the ‘most Roman city’ in the East; Latin inscriptions survived there longer than anywhere else in the Greek-speaking half of the empire, and Latin legal rescripts poured forth from Berytus. Greek at all periods was the language used by all classes in every mode of verbal expression. Yet references to the Phoenician–Punic heritage marked the literary and religious writings of the second and third centuries, and the Syriac language gradually gained importance as a vehicle of theological and historical writings.
