Antioch: Rome in the East
Antioch on the Orontes — modern Antakya in southern Turkey near the Syrian border — was the third city of the Roman Empire and the capital of its eastern operations. After Rome and Alexandria, no city in the Mediterranean world was larger or more strategically important. It was the administrative center for the Syrian provinces, the supply base for Rome’s eastern wars, the commercial hub connecting the Mediterranean trade network to the silk and spice routes of Asia, and an early center of Christian organization so significant that the word Christian — Christianoi — was first used there. The city that matters to understanding Rome’s eastern empire is Antioch, and it is among the most underrepresented in the popular historical imagination.
Antioch was a Seleucid foundation, established around 300 BC by Seleucus I Nicator — one of Alexander’s generals — and named for his father Antiochus. It occupied a commanding position on the Orontes River roughly twenty-five kilometers from the sea, accessible to the Mediterranean via the port of Seleucia Pieria, sheltered from the coastal climate by the mountain ranges that separated the coastal plain from the Syrian interior, and located at the western end of the major routes east toward Mesopotamia and the Persian empire. The Seleucids built it as their western capital and invested in its architecture and institutions accordingly; by the time Rome inherited the city through the annexation of Syria in 64 BC under Pompey, Antioch was already a developed metropolis with a Greek-speaking elite and a mixed population of Syrians, Jews, and immigrants from across the Hellenistic world.
Roman Antioch was extensively developed under the emperors, particularly Augustus and his successors. A marble-paved colonnaded avenue — the cardo maximus — ran several kilometers through the city center, an urban infrastructure investment whose only comparable predecessor was the great colonnaded streets of other major eastern cities. The palace quarter, the hippodrome, the theaters, the extensive bath complexes, and the suburb of Daphne — a pleasure garden and sanctuary several kilometers from the city, famous for its groves, its spring, and eventually for the libertine reputation that the moralistic Libanius and others documented — all mark a city of the first order that took its role as the empire’s eastern operational center seriously.
The Christian community at Antioch was among the earliest and most important in the Mediterranean world. Paul of Tarsus used Antioch as his base for the missionary journeys described in Acts of the Apostles; the community there was sufficiently large and organized by the 40s AD to have its own leadership structure and to be sending delegates to Jerusalem to negotiate with the mother community over questions of doctrine and practice. The Council of Jerusalem, in which Paul and Barnabas from Antioch argued against requiring circumcision of Gentile converts, was in part a consequence of Antioch’s large and growing Gentile Christian population. The Church of Antioch was one of the five great patriarchates of early Christianity — alongside Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem — and its theological tradition influenced the development of Christian doctrine through the patristic period.
The city’s vulnerability was geopolitical: it sat in the zone of perpetual competition between Rome and its eastern rivals. The Parthians and their Sassanid successors challenged Roman control of the eastern frontier repeatedly, and Antioch was the logistical center from which Roman responses were organized. In 260 AD, the Sassanid king Shapur I captured the Roman emperor Valerian at the Battle of Edessa — the first Roman emperor taken prisoner by a foreign enemy — and sacked Antioch during the same campaign. The city recovered, but the event demonstrated its vulnerability and contributed to the broader crisis of the third century.
The earthquake of 526 AD — one of the most destructive in ancient history — killed tens of thousands of people in Antioch and effectively ended the city’s classical phase. The population that had made it the empire’s eastern metropolis was devastated; the physical infrastructure was destroyed; the reconstruction was incomplete when the Arab conquest of Syria in the 630s AD transferred the city to Islamic rule. The city that became Antakya bore some continuity with the ancient Antioch in site and in some of its physical structures, but the cosmopolitan Roman-Christian city of the first through sixth centuries was effectively ended by the combination of earthquake and conquest.
What Antioch represents in the history of Rome is the eastern face of an empire whose western face — Rome itself, with its gladiators and its Senate and its Latin literature — is better remembered. The Roman Empire was thoroughly bilingual at its highest levels and thoroughly Greek in its eastern half: the administration, the philosophy, the theology, and the commercial culture of Roman Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Asia Minor operated in Greek, not Latin, and produced texts, arguments, and institutions that shaped the subsequent development of Christianity, Islamic philosophy, and Byzantine civilization in ways that the Latin West, for all its architectural majesty, did not. Antioch is where the eastern empire was lived, argued over, traded in, and believed in. Its relative obscurity in the western historical imagination says more about that imagination’s geography than about the city’s importance.