Bet Rhomaye: Being and Belonging in Syriac in the Late Roman Empire

Bet Rhomaye: Being and Belonging in Syriac in the Late Roman Empire  

Wolfe, James

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2020, Greek and Latin

My dissertation investigates how Syriac-speakers conceptualized their communal subjectivities within a Roman imperial context. I argue that Syriac literature from the Roman empire, and especially Syriac historiography and Syriac liturgical texts, provided Syriac-speakers with the discursive tools with which they could interpret recent history and formulate conceptions of the self within a Roman context. I argue that Syriac identity prior to the formation of the Syriac Orthodox Church was articulated through a dialectic with contemporary Roman imaginaries of ethnicity and citizenship. In doing so, I problematize scholarship that supposes `Syriacness' and `Romanness' were antithetical in the late Roman period. Instead, I contend that Syriac-speaking communities adopted, manipulated, and redefined discourses of Romanness in order to create their own Syriac-speaking Roman subjectivities.

Committee: Anthony Kaldellis (Advisor); David Brakke (Committee Member); Fritz Graf (Committee Member)