Antioch
Aerial View of Antioch from 1930s showing the city sited between the Orontes River
on the lower left and the range of mountains capped by Mount Silpios. Also visible is the long modern street
which follows the same lines as those of the Roman colonnaded north-south streetKondoleon (2000)
| Transliterated Name | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Antioch | English | |
| Antioch on the Orontes | English | |
| Antiochia ad Orontem | Greek | Ἀντιόχεια ἡ ἐπὶ Ὀρόντου |
| Antiókheia hē epì Oróntou | Greek | Ἀντιόχεια ἡ ἐπὶ Ὀρόντου |
| Antiókheia | Greek | Ἀντιόχεια |
| Antiochia | Latin | |
| Antakya | Turkish | |
| Andiok | Armenian | Անտիոք |
| Anṭākiya | Arabic | أنطاكية |
| Theoupolis | Greek | |
| Epiphaneia | ||
| Meroe | settlement which pre-dated Antioch |
| Transliterated Name | Source | Name |
|---|---|---|
| Harbiye | Turkish | |
| Harbiyat | Arabic | حربيات |
| Harbiye | Arabic | دفنه |
| Dàphne | Greek | Δάφνη |
- Antioch and surrounding
Region from Kondoleon (2000)
Antioch and surrounding Region
Kondoleon (2000) - Fig. 0.1 Archaeological
sites in the Hatay region of Turkey from De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
Fig. 0.1
Archaeological sites in the Hatay region of Turkey
De Giorgi and Eger (2021) - Map of the Orontes
River from wikipedia
Map of the Orontes. White lines are country borders, river names are italic on a blue background,
current cities or major towns on white backgrounds, other places of significance on orange backgrounds.
Click on image to open a larger version in a new tab
wikipedia - Erp - CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Ancient City of Antioch
from The Cleveland Art Museum
The Ancient City of Antioch
Click on image to open a larger version in a new tab
The Cleveland Art Museum - Map of Antioch in Roman
and early Byzantine times from wikipedia
Map of Antioch in Roman and early Byzantine times
Click on image to open a larger version in a new tab
wikipedia - Cristiano64 - CC BY-SA 3.0 - Fig. 27.2 Map of earthquake
damage from the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch from De Giorgi et al. (2024)
Fig. 27.2
A map of earthquake damage from the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch (by Stephen Batiuk).
- Atrium House, new mosaics after earthquake
- Bath C, destroyed after EQ with long break in occupation
- House of Trajan's Aqueduct, damaged and abandoned after EQ
- 19-M, new colonnaded street
- Aqueduct of Trajan
- Temple Zeus Soter
- House of the Drunken Dionysus, earthquake before mosaic floors
- 16-P, Street destroyed and repaired after 115
- Hippodrome,evidence of capitals for repair after 115
- House of the Evil Eye, Lower Level, repairs due to EQ
- Villa near Bath B:mosaics / repairs after 115
- Theater, later 1st AD destroyed 341 but repaired, persists into 6th c.
- Bath E destroyed
- Bath F, evidence of capitals for repair after 458 earthquake
- 13-R Destruction Deposit
- 15-M Large Building destroyed
- 16-O vaults over Parmenius
- Bath A: abandoned after 526
- Stadium on island: this quarter destroyed 526 and thereafter outside Justinian’s city wall
- Villa 14-S on Mt Staurin destroyed
- House of the Phoenix; late ceramics and coins as TPQ for laying of mosaic here after EQ
- House of the Bird Rinceau, coin sealed between successive floors dates repairs after EQ
- House of the Buffet Supper Upper Level, below plaster floor covering mosaics were coins dating plasterfloor to post-526
- Kaoussie Church; final reconstruction after EQ
- Church at Seleucia Pieria destroyed, rebuilt anddamaged again in 528?
- 17-O Forum of Valens and Nymphaeum.
De Giorgi et al. (2024)
- Antioch and surrounding
Region from Kondoleon (2000)
Antioch and surrounding Region
Kondoleon (2000) - Fig. 0.1 Archaeological
sites in the Hatay region of Turkey from De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
Fig. 0.1
Archaeological sites in the Hatay region of Turkey
De Giorgi and Eger (2021) - Map of the Orontes
River from wikipedia
Map of the Orontes. White lines are country borders, river names are italic on a blue background,
current cities or major towns on white backgrounds, other places of significance on orange backgrounds.
Click on image to open a larger version in a new tab
wikipedia - Erp - CC BY-SA 4.0 - The Ancient City of Antioch
from The Cleveland Art Museum
The Ancient City of Antioch
Click on image to open a larger version in a new tab
The Cleveland Art Museum - Map of Antioch in Roman
and early Byzantine times from wikipedia
Map of Antioch in Roman and early Byzantine times
Click on image to open a larger version in a new tab
wikipedia - Cristiano64 - CC BY-SA 3.0 - Fig. 27.2 Map of earthquake
damage from the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch from De Giorgi et al. (2024)
Fig. 27.2
A map of earthquake damage from the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch (by Stephen Batiuk).
- Atrium House, new mosaics after earthquake
- Bath C, destroyed after EQ with long break in occupation
- House of Trajan's Aqueduct, damaged and abandoned after EQ
- 19-M, new colonnaded street
- Aqueduct of Trajan
- Temple Zeus Soter
- House of the Drunken Dionysus, earthquake before mosaic floors
- 16-P, Street destroyed and repaired after 115
- Hippodrome,evidence of capitals for repair after 115
- House of the Evil Eye, Lower Level, repairs due to EQ
- Villa near Bath B:mosaics / repairs after 115
- Theater, later 1st AD destroyed 341 but repaired, persists into 6th c.
- Bath E destroyed
- Bath F, evidence of capitals for repair after 458 earthquake
- 13-R Destruction Deposit
- 15-M Large Building destroyed
- 16-O vaults over Parmenius
- Bath A: abandoned after 526
- Stadium on island: this quarter destroyed 526 and thereafter outside Justinian’s city wall
- Villa 14-S on Mt Staurin destroyed
- House of the Phoenix; late ceramics and coins as TPQ for laying of mosaic here after EQ
- House of the Bird Rinceau, coin sealed between successive floors dates repairs after EQ
- House of the Buffet Supper Upper Level, below plaster floor covering mosaics were coins dating plasterfloor to post-526
- Kaoussie Church; final reconstruction after EQ
- Church at Seleucia Pieria destroyed, rebuilt anddamaged again in 528?
- 17-O Forum of Valens and Nymphaeum.
De Giorgi et al. (2024)
- Antioch in Google Earth
Antioch in Google Earth
click on image to explore this site on a new tab in Google Earth
Table 4.1Known Church Sites in Antioch and Vicinity
De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
Fig. 0.2Antioch Earthquakes by year, 250 BC to 1900 CE
De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
- Fig. 2.16 The House of
Trajan's aqueduct from De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
Fig. 2.16
The House of Trajan's aqueduct
Source: Courtesy of the Antioch Expedition Archives, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University; Princeton
De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
- 1799 Engraving of the walls
of Antioch from Kondoleon (2000)
View of remains of walls and towers at the southern end of Antioch
(Detail of engraving from Cassas 1799, no. 1, pl. 7 Harvard University Art Museums)
Kondoleon (2000)
- Fig. 2.19 The Remains of
Trajan's aqueduct from De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
Fig. 2.16
The Remains of Trajan's aqueduct in Antakya
Source: Photograph by Andrea U. De Giorgi
De Giorgi and Eger (2021)
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:436-438) does not list any archaeoseismic evidence for the ambiguously dated
Malalas Confusion Quake.
The earliest earthquake attested at Antioch, probably for the year 130 BCE, is described by the local Antiochene historian John Malalas (c. 490–570 CE) as θεομηνία, or “the wrath of God.
After Demetrianos, Antiochos, grandson of Grylos and son of Laodike, daughter of Ariarathes, emperor of the Cappadocians, reigned for nine years. At that time Antioch the Great suffered from the wrath of God, in the eighth year of his reign, in the time of the Macedonians, 152 years after the original laying of the foundation of the wall by Seleukos Nikator, at the tenth hour of the day, on 21st Peritios-February. It was completely rebuilt, as Domninos the chronicler has written It was 122 years after the completion of the walls and the whole city that it suffered; it was rebuilt better. (Malalas 8.25)Malalas was a late antique chronographer, a time writer. He recorded events annalistically, year-by year, with only very brief comments or literary structure to evaluate their causes or contexts, in this case some 600 years later. Malalas points to the now-lost chronicler Domninos (c. 300 CE) as his source,8 who claimed the city was “entirely rebuilt” (άνενεώθη πάσα) and “rebuilt better” (βελτίων εγένετο). There is confusion and contradiction here, for the when and who – by rulers’ genealogy, years into whoever’s reign, and date since the laying of the city walls – do not agree easily.9 Malalas seems to point to Antiochus VI by sequence (r. 148–142/1 BCE) but Antiochus VII (r. 138–129 BCE) is more likely insofar as the earthquake occurred “in the eighth year of Antiochus,” and only Antiochus VII had at least eight years in his reign! Antiochus VII is also remembered later by the epithet Euergetes or “generous,” a term typically connected to beneficence in public construction.10
Problems in chronology should be a warning to take heed of our primary sources. Whatever our author’s confusion around the year of this event, Malalas also provides a precise time and day by which the 130 BCE earthquake was later remembered to have occurred (“the tenth hour of the day, on 21st Peritios-February”). Malalas lacks any detailed description of the event or its effects, or the nature of state engagement with the reconstruction effort.
Better insight into Hellenistic earthquake recovery, at Antioch or otherwise, can come with wider context. Reports of earlier Classical earth quakes were concerned primarily with these events as portents or warnings, and unusual occurrences during wars (Thucydides I.101.2, I.128.1, III.89.2–5; Diodorus XI.63, XII.59; Plutarch Life of Cimon 16). After the age of Alexander the Great’s successors after 323 BCE, earthquakes were remembered as stimuli for international diplomatic engagement. Notably, an earthquake at Rhodes in 228 BCE causing severe damage and perhaps toppling the famous Colossus, one of the ancient world’s seven wonders, in a city renowned for its naval prowess– brought an influx of wealth into the city from all of Alexander’s competing successors, the tyrants of Sicily, and dynasts from Anatolia and the Levant. Polybius gives a lengthy account of these gifts, including not only money intended for rebuilding gymnasia and temples but also vessels for temples, catapults, statues, 170,000 pounds of wheat, the labor of master builders, and raw materials such as timber for ship buildings, pitch, iron, and lead. Such gifts were not merely magnanimous: they were intended to gain the favor of Rhodes, a critical naval power, during a period of heated warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean (Polybius 5.88–90). Polybius’s account, written several decades later with the benefit of hindsight, also takes the opportunity to shame miserly rulers of his own day (c. 140 BCE) who gave four or five talents after catastrophe, when Ptolemy III had given three hundred to Rhodes in 228 BCE. Polybius also praises the Rhodians for their ability to adroitly “convert this misfortune into an opportunity” (5.88).
Thus, earthquakes entered into the historic and diplomatic record of Mediterranean states after Rhodes in 228 BCE, with relief understood as a means for currying favor or establishing obligation between cities, states, or rulers. Seleucid kings engaged in similar efforts.11 Besides Seleucus’s gift to the Rhodians of duty free passage for their ships in his ports, he had also given substantial quantities of wheat, timber, resin, and hair (Polybius 5.89). Antiochus III had, after an earthquake of 199/8 BCE (Justin 30.4), helped to rebuild a sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos at Cos,12 repaired houses and city walls at Aegean Telos,13 a famous sanctuary at Panamara in Caria,14 and an unnamed temple near Stratonikeia.15 Such inscriptions point at a minimum toward the sustained interest of Hellenistic monarchs in financial support for the repair of temples and walls after earthquakes, besides the broader support available in extraordinary circumstances as at Rhodes after 228 BCE. Mostly lacking– though our sources would prob ably neglect such details anyway, by nature of their genres– are indicators that the Seleucids or their peers acted to rebuild rural areas, or artisanal zones in cities, or markets.
Records from a later earthquake at Antioch in 69 BCE are similarly thin on details: a later source, Justin, simply gives the improbable number of 170,000 dead (Epitome XL. 1/271), while Pompey Magnus is perhaps more plausibly attributed with reconstruction of the city’s collapsed bouleuterion after he took the city and annexed Syria for the Romans a short time later, in 64 BCE.16
8 On Domninus’s position among the sources of Malalas,
see Van Nuffelen (2017, 263).
9 Downey (1938).
10 Ambraseys (2009, 94) is also therefore incorrect in
placing the earthquake in 148 BC
11 Note, especially, Robert (1987) and Ma (1999, 88) for
Seleucid inscriptions.
12 Segre (1993, ED178, 31–32) and Habicht (1996:88). This
inscription records destruction around the sanctuary of
Aphrodite Pandamos. Note the similar text at Samos
(Habicht, 1957).
13 IGXII, 3, 30l.6–7 for Telos.
14 Holleaux (1952:209–210)for Panamara.
15 Sahin (1981, 4, l. 16–18) [... συνσεισθέ[ν]των των τεινεων ύπο του σεισμού...].
16 Malalas 8.30: κτίσας τό βουλευτήριον πεσόντα γάρ ην. For Pompey’s arrival at Antioch, see DeGiorgi and Eger (2021,71).
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:436-438) does not list supporting archaeoseismic evidence for the
~65 BCE Pompey Quake.
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:436-438) does mention, however, that Malalas reports that Pompey had the collapsed bouletarian rebuilt.
The earliest earthquake attested at Antioch, probably for the year 130 BCE, is described by the local Antiochene historian John Malalas (c. 490–570 CE) as θεομηνία, or “the wrath of God.
After Demetrianos, Antiochos, grandson of Grylos and son of Laodike, daughter of Ariarathes, emperor of the Cappadocians, reigned for nine years. At that time Antioch the Great suffered from the wrath of God, in the eighth year of his reign, in the time of the Macedonians, 152 years after the original laying of the foundation of the wall by Seleukos Nikator, at the tenth hour of the day, on 21st Peritios-February. It was completely rebuilt, as Domninos the chronicler has written It was 122 years after the completion of the walls and the whole city that it suffered; it was rebuilt better. (Malalas 8.25)Malalas was a late antique chronographer, a time writer. He recorded events annalistically, year-by year, with only very brief comments or literary structure to evaluate their causes or contexts, in this case some 600 years later. Malalas points to the now-lost chronicler Domninos (c. 300 CE) as his source,8 who claimed the city was “entirely rebuilt” (άνενεώθη πάσα) and “rebuilt better” (βελτίων εγένετο). There is confusion and contradiction here, for the when and who – by rulers’ genealogy, years into whoever’s reign, and date since the laying of the city walls – do not agree easily.9 Malalas seems to point to Antiochus VI by sequence (r. 148–142/1 BCE) but Antiochus VII (r. 138–129 BCE) is more likely insofar as the earthquake occurred “in the eighth year of Antiochus,” and only Antiochus VII had at least eight years in his reign! Antiochus VII is also remembered later by the epithet Euergetes or “generous,” a term typically connected to beneficence in public construction.10
Problems in chronology should be a warning to take heed of our primary sources. Whatever our author’s confusion around the year of this event, Malalas also provides a precise time and day by which the 130 BCE earthquake was later remembered to have occurred (“the tenth hour of the day, on 21st Peritios-February”). Malalas lacks any detailed description of the event or its effects, or the nature of state engagement with the reconstruction effort.
Better insight into Hellenistic earthquake recovery, at Antioch or otherwise, can come with wider context. Reports of earlier Classical earth quakes were concerned primarily with these events as portents or warnings, and unusual occurrences during wars (Thucydides I.101.2, I.128.1, III.89.2–5; Diodorus XI.63, XII.59; Plutarch Life of Cimon 16). After the age of Alexander the Great’s successors after 323 BCE, earthquakes were remembered as stimuli for international diplomatic engagement. Notably, an earthquake at Rhodes in 228 BCE causing severe damage and perhaps toppling the famous Colossus, one of the ancient world’s seven wonders, in a city renowned for its naval prowess– brought an influx of wealth into the city from all of Alexander’s competing successors, the tyrants of Sicily, and dynasts from Anatolia and the Levant. Polybius gives a lengthy account of these gifts, including not only money intended for rebuilding gymnasia and temples but also vessels for temples, catapults, statues, 170,000 pounds of wheat, the labor of master builders, and raw materials such as timber for ship buildings, pitch, iron, and lead. Such gifts were not merely magnanimous: they were intended to gain the favor of Rhodes, a critical naval power, during a period of heated warfare in the Eastern Mediterranean (Polybius 5.88–90). Polybius’s account, written several decades later with the benefit of hindsight, also takes the opportunity to shame miserly rulers of his own day (c. 140 BCE) who gave four or five talents after catastrophe, when Ptolemy III had given three hundred to Rhodes in 228 BCE. Polybius also praises the Rhodians for their ability to adroitly “convert this misfortune into an opportunity” (5.88).
Thus, earthquakes entered into the historic and diplomatic record of Mediterranean states after Rhodes in 228 BCE, with relief understood as a means for currying favor or establishing obligation between cities, states, or rulers. Seleucid kings engaged in similar efforts.11 Besides Seleucus’s gift to the Rhodians of duty free passage for their ships in his ports, he had also given substantial quantities of wheat, timber, resin, and hair (Polybius 5.89). Antiochus III had, after an earthquake of 199/8 BCE (Justin 30.4), helped to rebuild a sanctuary of Aphrodite Pandemos at Cos,12 repaired houses and city walls at Aegean Telos,13 a famous sanctuary at Panamara in Caria,14 and an unnamed temple near Stratonikeia.15 Such inscriptions point at a minimum toward the sustained interest of Hellenistic monarchs in financial support for the repair of temples and walls after earthquakes, besides the broader support available in extraordinary circumstances as at Rhodes after 228 BCE. Mostly lacking– though our sources would prob ably neglect such details anyway, by nature of their genres– are indicators that the Seleucids or their peers acted to rebuild rural areas, or artisanal zones in cities, or markets.
Records from a later earthquake at Antioch in 69 BCE are similarly thin on details: a later source, Justin, simply gives the improbable number of 170,000 dead (Epitome XL. 1/271), while Pompey Magnus is perhaps more plausibly attributed with reconstruction of the city’s collapsed bouleuterion after he took the city and annexed Syria for the Romans a short time later, in 64 BCE.16
8 On Domninus’s position among the sources of Malalas,
see Van Nuffelen (2017, 263).
9 Downey (1938).
10 Ambraseys (2009, 94) is also therefore incorrect in
placing the earthquake in 148 BC
11 Note, especially, Robert (1987) and Ma (1999, 88) for
Seleucid inscriptions.
12 Segre (1993, ED178, 31–32) and Habicht (1996:88). This
inscription records destruction around the sanctuary of
Aphrodite Pandamos. Note the similar text at Samos
(Habicht, 1957).
13 IGXII, 3, 30l.6–7 for Telos.
14 Holleaux (1952:209–210)for Panamara.
15 Sahin (1981, 4, l. 16–18) [... συνσεισθέ[ν]των των τεινεων ύπο του σεισμού...].
16 Malalas 8.30: κτίσας τό βουλευτήριον πεσόντα γάρ ην. For Pompey’s arrival at Antioch, see DeGiorgi and Eger (2021,71).
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:438-440) mentions a mix of historical and possible archaeological evidence for rebuilding efforts after earthquakes
in 17, 37, and 41 CE.
Roman hegemony brought with it more detailed accounts of rebuilding efforts after earthquakes throughout the Mediterranean. An earthquake in 17 CE that shook cities through out western Asia Minor is especially well documented by primary sources, who report that Augustus decreed widespread remission of taxes, direct financial support, and the visit of imperial officials to assist the affected cities (Tacitus, Annals 2.47 and 4.13.1;Strabo13.4.8).17 This package of state response set a precedent for later earthquakes (including at Antioch in 37, 41, and 115 CE), and for which local Antiochene perspectives from Malalas are supplemented by inscriptions and historians including Dio Cassius, who wrote from a senator’s perspective back at Rome. Generally, imperial Roman sources were con cerned with top-down administrative details of immediate state response and issues of finance: they were less concerned with local casualties, the documentation of events from local perspectives, or even the long-term consequences of catastrophe. Two recorded earthquakes at Antioch followed in quick succession, in 37 and 41 CE.
A description of the 37 CE event during the reign of Caligula survives only in Malalas (10.18). Lacking details of destruction or casualties, the Antiochene account nevertheless preserves three key features of typical Roman earthquake response. First, money was sent directly from the emperor to the city. Second, a larger program of new urban infrastructure was set in motion or stimulated by the disaster: in this case the earthquake was quickly followed by construction of a new aqueduct, baths, and temples. Third, two senators and a prefect were sent from Rome “to protect the city and to rebuild it from the benefactions made by the emperor, and equally to make donations to the city from their private income and to live there.” Malalas adds the interesting detail that– besides a bath complex (the Varium), and a nymphaeum (the Trinymphon) decorated with statues – the senators sent from Romealso “built very many dwellings out of their private incomes.” While governmental attention to public buildings has been typical since the Hellenistic period, the focus on private housing stock seems novel. Apart from the new infrastructure that followed in the 37 CE earthquake’s wake according to Malalas– his testimony has been associated with the remains of a Roman aqueduct coming from Daphne, whose construction technique is consistent with a date in the first century CE18 – the only archaeological evidence for this event may come from Princeton’s excavations of the so-called Atrium House, where mosaics may be dated to the period after 37 CE.19
Just four years later in 41 CE, another earthquake during the reign of Claudius was accompanied by further destruction of houses, beside damage to the temples of Artemis, Ares, and Herakles (Malalas 10.23). Malalas again records here the quintessential Roman state response: the remission of local taxes paid from cities to Rome, so that cities affected by earthquakes could use these funds to directly pay for repairs themselves, instead. In the case of the 41 CE earthquake at Antioch, the “emperor Claudius relieved the guilds ... of the public service [or tax] of the kapnikon / καπνικόν, which they were providing to reconstruct the city’s roofed colonnades which had been built by Tiberius Caesar” (Malalas 10.23). Καπνικόν, from καπνός or smoke, is usually translated as a hearth tax, that is to say a tax on chimneys, which were easier to count than people; it appears here in its first instantiation, though the precise mean ing of the passage is unclear. Either the hearth tax which had been supporting the colonnade restoration (presumably after the previous earthquake of 37 CE) was lifted entirely; or the hearth tax’s funds were diverted to restoration of the colonnades (meaning that the guild members still paid, but its funds went to a new purpose).20 The hearth tax appeared rarely throughout the medieval period, before it reappeared more widely in early modern times.21 In those later forms, at least, the hearth tax was progressive in the sense that a large house or workshop would have more chimneys (and presumably money) than a smaller household.22
The first earthquake at Antioch for which we can meaningfully compare textual and archaeological evidence came in 115 CE (see Figure 27.2). It was vividly described by the Roman senatorial historian Dio Cassius (c. 155–235 CE), who was neither an eyewitness nor a contemporary. Dio Cassius recalls, however, the name of a consul who died there, and so presumably he relied on a closer source for his own account (68.24–25). Such unusual details may have been preserved because the emperor Trajan was in residence at Antioch at the time of the earthquake, to manage war with the Parthian Persians. Trajan only narrowly escaped from a collapsing building through a room’s window. He stayed outdoors in the hippodrome throughout the aftershocks. Dio Cassius reports significant destruction of houses and the loss of life – “the crash and breaking of timbers together with tiles and stones ... an inconceivable amount of dust ... The number of those who were trapped in the houses and perished was past finding out ...Great numbers were suffocated in the ruins.”
The participation of survivors in community sponsored offerings of thanksgiving, including even the construction of whole temples, may have fostered community cohesion in future earthquakes. After the 115 CE earthquake, Malalas tells us that “the surviving Antiochenes who remained then built a temple on which they inscribed ‘Those who were saved erected this to Zeus the Savior’” (11.8).
Dio Cassius says little concerning the recovery or reconstruction effort that must have followed the 115 CE earthquake, however. Malalas gives more details, indicating a major construction program sponsored by Trajan that followed the 115 CE earthquake: beginning with the sacrifice of a virgin girl named Kalliope, we are told, Trajan restored the city’s colonnades and built a new aqueduct and bath, named for himself, besides a theater (11.8–11).23
The Princeton excavators at Antioch understood the 115 CE event as a watershed in the city’s history. Literary sources became a point of reference for interpretation and dating of changes in buildings throughout the city, including damage and repair, but also abandonment or new construction: new mosaics were added in the so-called Atrium House and the House of the Drunken Dionysus,24 repairs were made at the Hippodrome, as suggested by new column capitals dated to the reign of Hadrian,25 and the city cardo was built anew26 while other streets were repaired.27 On the other hand, Bath C was destroyed in the 115 earthquake and abandoned, so too was the so-called House of Trajan’s Aqueduct.28
Leaving aside aspersions of child sacrifice from Christian chronicler Malalas, and the difficulties posed by evaluation of claims made by the Princeton excavators some 90 years later, it still stands that the initiation of significant new infra structure projects and repairs to public or private buildings followed the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch, in a pattern typical for major cities under the Roman empire. We turn now to the Byzantine.29
17 See also Ambraseys(2009).
18 Antioch II, 52; Gatier, Leblanc, and Poccardi (2004,241–242).
19 See Levi(1947, 16).
20 Downey (1961, 196,n. 145).
21 s.v. “HearthTax” and “Kapnikon” in Kazhdan (1991, 906, 1105).
22 Gurrin(2004).
23 Jeffreys (1990, 56) says “much of Malalas’ narrative on
Trajan’s activities is uncorroborated by other sources and is probably fictitious.”
24 Levi(1947, 16,40).
25 Antioch III, 150.
26 Antioch V, 30–33.
27 Antioch V,72
28 Levi(1947,289,28).
29 Mordechai and Pickett (2018)
De Giorgi and Eger (2021:99-106) and
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:438-440) report
on some ambiguously dated rebuilding activity that may be related to the
115 CE Trajan Quake.
Downey (1961:213-218) notes that
whether most of Trajan's varied building activity in Antioch was occasioned by the damage caused by the earthquake cannot be
determined
however the restoration of the colonnades along the main street almost certainly followed earthquake damage
.
It is no overstatement that Antioch became virtually the second imperial capital under the reign of Trajan (98-117 CE). Cassius Dio's vivid description of the city at the time of the 115 CE earthquake, which opens this chapter, gives us a glimpse of the city's size and degree of urbanization.179 The event must have reached a high magnitude, killing thousands of people; again, the words of the historian capture the gravity of the drama:
There had been many thunderstorms and portentous winds, but no one would ever have expected so many evils to result from them. First there came, on a sudden, a great bellowing roar, and this was followed by a tremendous quaking. The whole earth was upheaved, and buildings leaped into the air; some were carried aloft only to collapse and be broken in pieces, while others were tossed this way and that as if by the surge of the sea, and overturned, and the wreckage spread out over a great extent even of the open country. The crash of grinding and breaking timbers together with tiles and stones was most frightful and an inconceivable amount of dust arose, so that it was impossible for one to see anything or to speak or hear a word.Trajan himself miraculously escaped the fury of the event; in all likelihood he resided on the Island and then sought shelter in the hippodrome. To appease the gods, he offered a generous thanksgiving in Daphne. Yet the numbers of Antiochenes killed by the earthquake must have been staggering. Klaudia may have been one of the casualties, or, if she chanced to survive, may have been an eyewitness of the calamity (Figure 2.15). The laconic, succinct text of her epitaph "Farewell, you are now without pain (ALUPE XAIRE)" leaves a lot of room for the imagination. Further, the formulaic early second-century CE iconography hardly reveals anything meaningful about Klaudia's life. Yet one could imagine that it was people like her who experienced those momentous days and contributed to rebuilding Antioch, once the rattles had subsided. Indeed, the surviving Antiochenes wasted no time in recovering from the earthquake and quickly tapped into provincial funds for the reconstruction of the city. After hastily offering their thanksgiving in a new shrine to Zeus Soter in Daphne, they went on to deploy efforts and labor in the areas where assistance was most needed. How the relief effort was coordinated we are not in position to tell, nor is the financial output from the imperial authorities known.
But the earthquake of 115 CE did not only elicit large-scale, state-sponsored responses and top-down optimism. Countless citizens of Antioch had lost their homes, goods, and bonds across generations. They were living now in that sort of estrangement, having lost the perception of belonging to a recognized and recognizable place, while entering the realm of the displaced. Facing a traumatizing field of ruins in lieu of a densely inhabited space, some decided to part company with the place that had framed their lives for many decades.
The so-called House of Trajan's Aqueduct (26-L) may be a good representative of buildings that were abandoned after the earthquake (Figure 2.16).180 Heavily damaged around that time and subsequently buried by a landslide, this house, unlike other units in the district, was never reoccupied. Its foundations rested on the vaulting of the Trajanic aqueduct that from Daphne flows all the way to the lower slopes of Mt. Silpius, serving a reservoir and a host of baths. Two weathered pavements with decoration of shaded cubes and a winged female figure are the only remaining decor of a house that may have been in use for a few decades only. While the aqueduct was restored after the earthquake, the house was abandoned to its fate of ruins.
But In the context of widespread destruction, some people conversely resorted to reconstructing their emotional and material dimension, both public and private. The House of the Calendar (15-R), on the slope of Mt. Staurin, brings testimony to new expressions of resistance; through its reconstruction and aggrandizing, the domestic unit becomes the locus where nature and natural disasters are questioned while new modes of understanding human frailty are enabled. This house of Hellenistic origin was presumably razed by the 115 CE earthquake. Its debris, ashes, and broken mosaic pavements formed the bedding for the construction of a new, larger unit provided with a triclinium, colonnaded portico, and pool. The eccentric visual program of the triclinium is of interest, for it accommodated, among panels with apotropaic symbols and marine deities, the representation of a calendar. Though weathered, only the winter and spring quadrants survive; the composition includes names of the months in Greek (Dustros, Xanthikos, Artemeisios, Daisios) and personified seasons (Spring-Trope Earine) (Figure 2.17).
In his analysis of the iconography of this pavement, Doro Levi stressed the allusions to divinities and rituals suggested by the personified months, carrying paterae (vessels), torches, and pouring libation.181 While this angle should not be discounted, it is apparent that what mattered the most to the patrons and the artists of the House of the Calendar was illustrating the cyclical alternation of the seasons and months at a critical moment in the history of the city. More poignantly, they aimed at celebrating the overall restoration of the course of nature against the catastrophe.
The main artery of traffic, that is the colonnaded street, formerly paved by Herod the Great and embellished architecturally by Tiberius, in the aftermath of the earthquake was in all likelihood no longer serviceable. Of course, in a context of widespread destruction, ease of movement along the main axis of traffic is vital, whether for hauling away heaps of rubble or simple movement of goods and people. How Antioch quickly reacquired mobility and used reconstruction to mint a new version of the main thoroughfare can be gleaned thanks to the 1930s excavation data sets.
Amid sparse investigations in the territory of Antioch, the Princeton Excavations in 1934 devised a thoughtful, albeit complicated, plan of "street digs" with large and deep soundings loosely following Antakya's Kurtulus Caddesi, the modern reincarnation of the cardo.182 Soundings 19-M and 16-P documented the stratigraphy of the main road, and altogether its "biography." Narrow and redolent with cultural phases, these sounding had to be peeled off from twelfth-century houses all the way down to the Hellenistic levels. However, these excavations illustrated one fundamental aspect of the issue at stake; the dismantling of the street of Herod and Tiberius and the wholesale replacement of it with a new, monumental axis of traffic in the aftermath of the earthquake. This enterprise entailed clearing heaps of debris for at least a 40 m width.183
The new road of Trajan was grounded in deep foundations, essentially a 1 m layer — thick with debris and rubble. The road alone was 9.25 m wide and flanked by porticoes and tabernae (shops) each 16 m wide, as apparent in sector 19-M (Figure 2.18).
Put simply, after the 115 earthquake, to planners and architects it seemed more expeditious and cost-effective building a new colonnaded street from scratch rather than seeking to repair the old one. In so doing, the overall width of the operations must have exceeded 40 m of width in clearing of structures for the entire length of the cardo, approximately 7 km.
Ultimately, the project almost doubled the size of the previous road and poticoes, and presumably went on until the mandate of Antoninus Pious (138-161 CE),184 when the decoration of the colonnade was officially completed. Through this project, however, Antioch was presented with a new logic of space for vehicles, pedestrians, and retail. The monumental aesthetics and functionality of the time brought to bear an architectural configuration that was going to change life in Antioch. More to the point, the imposing size of this undertaking resonated with the solutions that Trajanic planners and builders had adopted around the same time in Rome at the Markets of Trajan. In particular, the realization of the great hemicycle and its lining of small barrel vaulted tabernae, curvilinear configuration aside, reverberates with the same bent for stimulating movement along and behind these retail spaces, fueling commerce and fostering a new sense of community. It should be stressed, though, that with the exception of a few fragments of entablature and columns, not a scrap of the ancient boulevard survives, thus making its volumetric and monumental appearance impossible to determine. Tenuous traces of basalt slabs and red and gray granite columns are all that is left of this magnificent axis of traffic.
In Trajan's view, Antioch's new thoroughfare was the centerpiece of an organic plan that included the Mese Pule, the middle gate near the Temple of Ares and spanning the Parmenius. Presumably, this served a celebratory purpose only, for it was located on the slope of Mt. Silpius near the space that in the late fourth century became forum of Valens. It may have been conspicuous and visible from a distance, though. Moreover, its decorative apparatus could not be more telling: on it was a relief of the she-wolf of Rome's founding legend.185
Overall, Trajan's tenure also had positive effects, inasmuch as the emperor commissioned the construction of a number of other monumental projects, some of which may have started before the 115 CE cataclysm. In that vein, the frenzy of repairs and new building programs also included the construction of new baths as well as completion of the theater.186 The latter's sculptural program deserves attention: on the proscenium was apparently a nymphaeum with the sculptural Kalliope group. Malalas's detailed description makes plain that this statue replicated that of the Tyche, with the addition of kings Seleucus and Antiochus bestowing a crown upon her. More to the point, the legendary powers of the city were still being referenced in the sixth century and beyond.187
The suburb of Daphne, too, received post-earthquake assistance, and the re-construction of the temple of Artemis must be seen in this context.188 Major repairs and, presumably, new feeders and ramifications of the aqueduct of Daphne were also undertaken at this time. The 8 km-long and 1 km-wide valley separating Antioch from Daphne was then traversed by another major system of tunnels, bridges, and conduits. Again, extrapolating the exact agency amid a mesh of waterworks spanning the Seleucid to Crusader periods is complicated. The 1930s archaeologists identified at least three systems on the ground when conditions and visibility were optimal,189 but whether these belong to Seleucus, Caligula, or Trajan, respectively, remains to be established. Nevertheless, it appears that the series of bridges overcoming the roughness of the valley between Antioch and Daphne may be assigned to Trajan's project. To reduce the velocity of water (100 m of fall over 8 km) and thus enable a steady and regular flow downstream into, presumably, a terminal castellum, the builders resorted to a winding pattern of curves at right angles. A first, heavily battered segment of this aqueduct survives in Antioch between Yayla Sokak and Dere Sokak over the Phyrminus gorge in the Bagriyanik quarter. Possibly connected to it are the remains of a large reservoir, very similar to one in the Havuzlar quarter. A second surviving stretch of the aqueduct survives in the Siimerler area, near Dere Sokak (Figure 2.19).
New beginnings and a city rising from its ashes: it is no overstatement that Trajan acted as new founder of Antioch.
Central though the earthquake may have been, it nevertheless represents but one episode in the complicated mesh of events occurring in the city during Trajan's reign. Malalas, for instance, informs us of a Persian coup in the days preceding the military campaign against the Persians in 113 CE.190 The city at that time probably harbored a not-so-latent pro-Persian sentiment, with the presumably vast constituency of local Easterners keen on handing the city over to Persia's Arsacid rulers. But as soon as Trajan entered the city, it became a "base" for the emperor and accommodated the logistics of a massive expedition. Ultimately, the war against the Parthians produced two new appendices to the Roman Empire: the provinces of Mesopotamia and Armenia. Though abortive in a few years, these novel entities required a conspicuous investment in the military and in the logistics of the supply system, especially considering the numbers of troops entering the province and the equally high number of captives.191 As Denis van Berchem points out, the naval base at Seleucia and the military headquarters of the expedition in Antioch were working at full swing between 113 and 116 CE.192 The output of the Antioch mint, too, was critical in sustaining the demands of the military; fittingly, the volume and diversity of types replicated those of Vespasian. Recourse to other mints, namely Tyre and Caesarea in Cappadocia, proved effective in meeting the challenges of the provincial government. There were also important ties with the mint of Alexandria, as shown by the resemblance of several tetradrachms and at least one die link.193
Altogether, Trajan resided in Antioch between 114 and 117 CE; at that juncture, the city became a de facto military headquarters for the Roman army, a tradition that continued under emperors Lucius Verus, Pescennius Niger, and Caracalla.194 Violence against Christians is reported during Trajan's sojourn. Their community was no doubt enjoying momentous growth; incidentally, the gospel of Matthew, presumably written in the city during the 80/90s BCE, attests to the local reception of Christ's message and stresses the role of the ekklesia, that is the assembly.195 Under Trajan, the pastoral guide of Ignatius set the example for the role that the ecclesiastical authority was to have in the following centuries, with regard to the enforcement of theological doctrines and the configuration of the local church. From the matyrdom of Ignatius, later to be elevated as saint, to five virtuous Antiochene women who were burned alive in front of Trajan, it is nevertheless apparent that the imperial administration flexed its muscles in front of a fast-growing Christian community.196 The violence pitted against Antioch's church also spawned new legends and examples to follow: the myth of Saint Thecla and her extraordinary virtues in making proselytes once again placed Antioch prominently on the map of early Christianity.197
179 Dio Cass. 68. 24. 1-2 (transl. by E. Cary and H. B. Foster):
For as Trajan was wintering there, and many soldiers had gathered there as well as many civilians, whether for judicial hearings or on embassies or as traders or out of curiosity, there was not a province or a community which remained unharmed, and thus in Antioch the whole world under the Romans suffered disaster.180 Levi, Pavements, 34-36.
181 Levi, Pavements, 36.
182 Antioch V, 146.
183 See especially ibid., 41—81.
184 Malalas 11.24.
185 Malalas 11.9.
186 Dio Cass. 8.404-409; on the water infrastructure, see Leblanc and Poccardi 2004, 239-256; Levi, Pavements, 1.34. Stretches of the aqueduct survive between Harbiye and Antakya; see Pamir 2014a.
187 Malalas 11.9. See also Lib. 1. 102-103.
188 Malalas 11.11.
189 Antioch Archives, Diary 1934-1937.
190 Malalas 11.3.4.
191 Millar 1993, 103.
192 Van Berchem 1985, 47-87.
193 McAlee, Coins 2003, 187. Silver issues of Trajan radiating from Antioch, following the so-called "Antioch style," began in 108/109 CE. Of interest is the interplay with the Rome mint, with the latter striking coins for the East in the early part of Trajan's reign. See Butcher 2004, 88-91.
194 Dio Cass. 69.18; SHA, life of Marcus Aurelius 8.12; Dio Cass. 71.2.2; 75.8-9; 78.20; 79.4-7. Antioch's continuous role as military base continued, albeit in an intermittent way, until the campaigns of Heraclius in 634 CE.
195 Harvey 2000, 39.
196 John of Nikiu 72, 1-12. In this context of persecution the earthquake of 113 CE reads like a sign of the "wrath of God."
197 Acts of Thecla, Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1965, 2: 353-364.
While the emperor was thus passing the winter in Antioch between his campaigns, the city suffered one of the most severe of its many earthquakes. The disaster began at dawn on 13 December A.D. 115.59 Because of the emperor's presence, the city was filled with soldiers and with civilians who had come for business or for pleasure.60 The shocks continued for several days and nights, and the destruction, both in Antioch and in Daphne, appears to have been considerable. Many people were killed, including M. Pedo Vergilianus, one of the consuls for the year.61 Trajan himself escaped with a few slight injuries; he had, it was said, been led to safety through a window of the room in which he was staying by a being of supernatural size. During the remainder o£ the earthquake he lived in the open in the circus.62 The future Emperor Hadrian, who was then governor of Syria, was likewise in the city when the earthquake occurred.63 After the disaster, the survivors, in gratitude for their preservation, built a temple to Zeus Soter in Daphne.64
Apparently the Christians were accused of having been responsible for the earthquake, which Malalas calls a theomenia, a "sign of divine wrath." Elsewhere is given an account of how Ignatius, the bishop of the city, was arrested, condemned, and sent to Rome, where he was executed by being exposed to wild beasts. Other executions took place in Antioch itself.65
Whether most of Trajan's varied building activity in Antioch was occasioned by the damage caused by the earthquake cannot be determined.66 The restoration of the colonnades along the main street almost certainly followed earthquake damage.67
One of the principal works was the Μεση Πνλη, which appears to have been a monumental arch (not a real city gate) bearing the group of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, traditional symbol of Roman citizenship.68 This stood near the torrent Parmenios which ran down from the mountain into the Orontes, flowing under the principal street at a point where there was a slight change in the direction of the thoroughfare. The arch is also said to have been near the Temple of Ares and "very close" to the Macellum, which are associated with the basilica of Julius Caesar and with the site that later became the Forum of Valens. These data suggest two possible locations for the arch: astride the principal street at the point where the thoroughfare, crossing Parmenius, changed its course slightly or to one side of the main street, astride the transverse avenue which ran from the main street up toward the mountain, parallel with Parmenius, and past the Temple of Ares and the Macellum.69
Another major work of Trajan, apparently not connected with the earthquake, was the completion of the unfinished theater. This theater is presumably the one which had been rebuilt by Julius Caesar. It had been enlarged by Agrippa, in the time of Augustus, because of the increase in the population of the city, and again enlarged under Tiberius, but left incomplete.70 We are not told precisely what the completion involved, and in particular whether it included an enlargement of the seating capacity.
In the theater, Trajan placed a statue of Calliope.71 This Muse ranked with Zeus and Apollo as a tutelary deity of the city.72 Libanius repeatedly speaks of her as presiding over the life of Antioch, and mentions her temple, which was in the central part of the city, as one of the principal shrines of Antioch; he also alludes particularly to the honor that was paid to her in the theater, referring presumably to the rhetorical exhibitions that took place there.73 Trajan's statue was of gilded bronze and showed the Muse in the guise of the Tyche of Antioch, seated above the Orontes river, being crowned by Seleucus and Antiochus (evidently to symbolize the honor that had been paid to Calliope at Antioch from earliest times).74 The group was placed, Malalas says, "above four columns in the middle of the nymphaeum of the proscenium." This nymphaeum may have been a deep, semicircular exedra of the type used in other theaters of the Roman period.75
It has been supposed that Trajan also built a nymphaeum which was a separate building, not identical with the "nymphaeum" in the theater mentioned, and that this nymphaeum of Trajan stood near a temple of Calliope. The evidence for such a building is, however, far from certain, and it seems more likely that a separate nymphaeum was not built.76
The final work of Trajan's to be recorded is the construction of a Temple of Artemis at Daphne, mentioned by Malalas. Taken at its face value, the chronicler's notice would mean that the original temple had been destroyed in the earthquake and had to be replaced. However, Malalas' procedures are such that he might describe as a new undertaking work that was only repair of an existing monument. Thus we cannot be sure whether Trajan built a new temple, or repaired the old one.77
In addition to the emperor's own contributions toward the restoration of the city after the earthquake, work was carried out by P. Aelius Hadrianus (later the Emperor Hadrian), the emperor's ward and nephew by marriage, who was governor of Syria at the time, and by a number of Roman senators who were in the city with the emperor when the disaster occurred. These were all ordered by the emperor to build houses and baths, presumably with their own money.78
In the reign of Trajan we find one of the few pieces of evidence for the koinon or provincial assembly of Syria, in the form of a bronze coin among the local municipal issues of the mint.79
59 A vivid description of the catastrophe is preserved in the account of Dio Cassius 68.24-25;
Malalas records the disaster more briefly, 275.3-10. A passage in Juvenal, Sat. 6.411, appears to refer to this earthquake.
The date, which is given by Malalas, has been disputed. Since the day of the week on which Malalas says the disaster
occurred does not agree with his other chronological data, scholars have either rejected the whole date, or emended parts of it.
However, it seems plain that the weekday is an addition which was wrongly introduced into the date from another source, and that its
inaccuracy need not invalidate the remainder of the chronological data. See the detailed discussion of the problem by Lepper,
Trajan's Parthian War 54-83, whose conclusion is adopted here. Malalas lists this as the "third" earthquake at Antioch in a
series of disasters to which he assigns numbers. Presumably this means that it was the third major disaster, for there is independent
evidence for other earthquakes at Antioch which the chronicler either does not mention or does not include in his numbered series;
see Downey, "Seleucid Chronology" 107, 119, n. 2.
60 Beurlier, "Koinon de Syrie" 289, followed by Dieudonne, "Monnaies grecques de Syrie" 9, suggests that the crowding that Dio Cassius
mentions was caused by the arrival of visitors who had come for the games o€ the koinon of Syria. It seems im¬plausible that such
games would be held in the middle of the winter (this considera¬tion may not have occurred to Beurlier and Dieudonne, who speak
only of the year of the earthquake and do not mention the month). It seems clear that the presence of the emperor and of his staff
and army would have attracted all kinds of people to the city for a variety of reasons. Dio Cassius (68.24.1), giving the reasons
why so many people had come to the city, says that some of them had come Karl Oewptay. Beurlier and Dieudonne take theoria to refer
to games and spectacles, but the word would equally well be taken to mean "sightseeing," e.g. in connection with the arrival of the
emperor. On the games of the koinon, see above, n. 36.
61 Although Dio Cassius 68.25.2 calls Pedo 6 (Swarm, it is not clear whether he was acting as consul at the time of his death, or whether
he had already ceased to be consul and had become a consular (uraT,K6s). See Lepper, Trajan's Parthian War 84-87.
62 Muller is mistaken in stating (Antiq. Antioch. 88) that the circus in which Trajan found refuge was in cameo extra urbem. The only
circus at Antioch for which there is evidence at this period is that on the island (see above, Ch. 6, ,§3). Trajan's seeking safety
there might be taken to mean that the building in which he was staying was on the island, and this might suggest, in turn, that what
was called the palace, or the building which emperors occupied on their visits, was located on the island. However, there is no real
evidence for the existence of such a building at Antioch before the time of Diocletian (see Ch. 22, §2), and it would be hazardous
to find in the circumstances of Trajan's escape evidence for both the existence and the location of a palace.
63 Malalas 278.20ff.
64 Malalas (275.9-10) gives an ostensible quotation of the inscription which was placed on it: [Greek Text].
65 See the history of the early church at Antioch, below Ch. 1, §4.
66 Malalas places his description of Trajan's buildings after his account of the earthquake, but this need not be taken to indicate
sequence in time; see above, n. 51. One may speculate whether some of Trajan's work at Antioch may have been executed by his famous architect,
Apollodorus of Damascus; see the account of his career by Fabricius, "Apollodoros," no. 73, RE I (1894) 2896.
67 Malalas (275.21-22) says only that Trajan "raised the two great emboloi." These must have been the colonnades along the main street,
which were the colonnades par excellence at Antioch; we hear of no others which were so important that they could be mentioned thus
without more exact description.
68 Malalas 275.13ff. A statue of the she-wolf with Romulus and Remus had been placed on the Eastern Gate, which was traditionally ascribed to
Tiberius; on this gate and on the symbolism of the statue, see Ch. 8, nn. 87-88. Trajan's Middle Gate was presumably not a central city gate
because so far as we know there was no city wall in the region where it stood. Stauffenberg (Malalas 477480 is mistaken in supposing that the
Middle Gate was at the south of the city and that it was identical with the main gate in the southern wall of the city; the maps of the city
which were available to him were not correctly oriented, and it was not until 193r, the year in which Stauffenberg's book was published,
that jacquot's map, the first properly oriented one, was published (see Excursus 8-9).
69 The Forum of Valens and the topography of this region will be described below in Excursus 12. Malalas relates that at the construction of the
Middle Gate, Trajan sacrificed a maiden. This tale and its significance are discussed below in n. 71.
70 Malalas describes the completion of the theater, 276.3-9. On the site of the theater and its "building" by Caesar, see Ch. 7, §2. Its enlargements
by Agrippa and Tiberius are mentioned above, Ch. 8, §2.
71 Malalas (275.19-21) states that when Trajan built the Μεση Πνλη he sacrificed a maiden named Calliope, "in expiation and for the purification of the city,"
and that he made a [Greek text] for her. Later the chronicler records (276.3-9) that the emperor set up in the theater a statue of the slain maiden, in gilded
bronze, seated above the Orontes river, being crowned by Seleucus and Antiochus, "in the fashion of the Tyche of the city" ([Greek text]).
The group stood, Malalas says, "in the middle of the nymphaeum of the proscenium" of the theater. It is impossible, of course, that Trajan should have performed
a human sacrifice of this kind. The numerous stories that appear in Malalas of such immolations, accompanying the foundation of cities or the erection of buildings,
are Christian legends, designed to cast discredit on pagan practices; see Muller, Antiq. Antioch. 27, n. 2 and 71, n. 6; Weber, Studien 48, n. 5; Stauffenberg, Malalas 158-159,
216-217, 469-470. It is sometimes possible to see, in the name of the victim or in the circumstances of the supposed incident, the origin of the legend. In the
present case it seems plain that the story was connected with the statue in the theater. Muller (Antiq. Antioch. 40) believed that the figure Trajan set up in the
theater was the original Tyche of the city, which Trajan removed from its original location to the theater. However, it seems more natural to believe, with
Stauffenberg (Malalas 471-473), that the statue was of Calliope, represented, as Malalas says, in the guise of the Tyche; certainly (as Stauffenberg points out)
there would be more reason to place a statue of Calliope in the theater than to set up a Tyche there. In another place (158-159) Stauffenberg writes that the statue was a
Tyche. One must suppose that the opinion which he expresses on pp. 471-473 represents a conclusion reached after he had written pp. 158-159.
In his text of Malalas, Stauffenberg is mistaken in placing a comma after [Greek text] and omitting a comma after roxews (275.20), for according to this punctuation,
the sentence would mean (to Stauffenberg) that Trajan "sacrificed . . . Calliope, building a nymphagogia for her for the atonement and purification of the city."
Apparently Stauffenberg believes that the meaning is that the nymphagogia was built as an atonement for the sacrifice of Calliope; but it seems more likely that
the passage means that Calliope was sacrificed for the atonement and purification of the city after the earthquake, and that the nymphagogia was built in memory
or in honor of her. This interpretation is supported by the fact that Malalas says that when Perseus founded Tarsus he sacrificed a maiden named Parthenope
[Greek text] (37.5-6), and that when Augustus built walls about Arsinoe and changed its name to Ancyra he sacrificed a maiden named
Gregoria [Greek text] (221.22). It is necessary therefore to follow the punctuation of Dindorf's edition, in which a comma is placed after [Greek text].
[Greek text] here means "bridal procession," not "nymphaeum" or "aqueduct"; see below, n. 76.
72 Julian Misop. 357 C; Libanius Ep. 1317 W. = 1182 F.
73 Libanius Or. 1.102; Or. 15.152; Or. 20.53; Or. 31.40; Or, 60.13 (location of temple). With reference to the statue in the theater, Stauffenberg (Malalas 473)
cites a passage in a letter of Libanius (Epist. 722 W. = 811 F.) in which there is an allusion to sacrifices offered to Calliope in the theater. Stauffenberg
appears to think that this means that actual rites of sacrifice to the Muse were performed in the theater. Libanius' phrase is, however, more probably metaphorical,
referring to literary exhibitions presented in the theater during the Olympic games, which would be, symbolically, offerings in honor of the Muse; see further
remarks on the same subject in Libanius, Epist. 1311 W. = 1175 F. and Epist. 1317 W. = 1182 F., and the discussions of the subject by Sievers, Leben des L
ibanius 1o2-103, 119, and by Seeck, Brie/c des Libanius 423.
74 The statue presumably resembled that of Eutychides (on which see above, Ch. 4, nn. 92-94) the difference being, as Stauffenberg points out (Malalas 472),
that the statue of Calliope, since the Muse was shown being crowned by Seleucus and Antiochus, would have lacked the turreted crown that the Tyche of Eutychides wore.
See also Toynbee, Hadrianic School 131-133.
75 On the use in Roman theaters of the nymphaeum as an architectural decoration, see 0. Reuther, "Nymphaeum," RE 17 (1937) 1517-3524, especially 1522.
76 Muller (Antiq. Antioch. 88, n. 4) and Stauffenberg (Malalas 159) take Malalas' statement (275.21) that Trajan made a [Greek text] for Calliope ([Greek text])
to mean that the emperor built a nymphaeum, possibly in the neighborhood of the Temple of Calliope (the evidence for which has been cited above, n. 73).
This seems unlikely. In the Latin translation that accompanied the Oxford edition of Malalas, [Greek text] is rendered Nymphaeum, and this sense is accepted by
Muller and Stauffenberg. However, the word ordinarily means a bridal procession, and the present writer has been unable to find any instance of its use to mean
a building; Reuther, in his collection of material on the nymphaeum cited above (n. 75), cites only [Greek text] and [Greek text] as designations of the building.
In speaking of the setting in which the statue was placed in the theater, Malalas (276.5) writes [Greek text]. Thus it seems clear that in writing [Greek text]
he was not referring to a building, but to a "bridal procession" which formed a part of the ceremony in which the maiden was sacrificed.
77 Malalas 277.11. On the chronicler's methods, see above, Ch. 2, §4. On the original Temple of Artemis, see above, Ch. 3, .n. 8.
78 Malalas 278.20-279.2 (in the account of Hadrian's reign).
79 See D. B. Waage, "Coins" 38-39; Beurlier, "Koinon de Syrie" 288, and Dieu-donne, "Monnaies grecques de Syrie" 8-9.
On the games of the Koinon, which appear in the reign of Domitian, see above, n. 36.
Roman hegemony brought with it more detailed accounts of rebuilding efforts after earthquakes throughout the Mediterranean. An earthquake in 17 CE that shook cities through out western Asia Minor is especially well documented by primary sources, who report that Augustus decreed widespread remission of taxes, direct financial support, and the visit of imperial officials to assist the affected cities (Tacitus, Annals 2.47 and 4.13.1;Strabo13.4.8).17 This package of state response set a precedent for later earthquakes (including at Antioch in 37, 41, and 115 CE), and for which local Antiochene perspectives from Malalas are supplemented by inscriptions and historians including Dio Cassius, who wrote from a senator’s perspective back at Rome. Generally, imperial Roman sources were con cerned with top-down administrative details of immediate state response and issues of finance: they were less concerned with local casualties, the documentation of events from local perspectives, or even the long-term consequences of catastrophe. Two recorded earthquakes at Antioch followed in quick succession, in 37 and 41 CE.
A description of the 37 CE event during the reign of Caligula survives only in Malalas (10.18). Lacking details of destruction or casualties, the Antiochene account nevertheless preserves three key features of typical Roman earthquake response. First, money was sent directly from the emperor to the city. Second, a larger program of new urban infrastructure was set in motion or stimulated by the disaster: in this case the earthquake was quickly followed by construction of a new aqueduct, baths, and temples. Third, two senators and a prefect were sent from Rome “to protect the city and to rebuild it from the benefactions made by the emperor, and equally to make donations to the city from their private income and to live there.” Malalas adds the interesting detail that– besides a bath complex (the Varium), and a nymphaeum (the Trinymphon) decorated with statues – the senators sent from Romealso “built very many dwellings out of their private incomes.” While governmental attention to public buildings has been typical since the Hellenistic period, the focus on private housing stock seems novel. Apart from the new infrastructure that followed in the 37 CE earthquake’s wake according to Malalas– his testimony has been associated with the remains of a Roman aqueduct coming from Daphne, whose construction technique is consistent with a date in the first century CE18 – the only archaeological evidence for this event may come from Princeton’s excavations of the so-called Atrium House, where mosaics may be dated to the period after 37 CE.19
Just four years later in 41 CE, another earthquake during the reign of Claudius was accompanied by further destruction of houses, beside damage to the temples of Artemis, Ares, and Herakles (Malalas 10.23). Malalas again records here the quintessential Roman state response: the remission of local taxes paid from cities to Rome, so that cities affected by earthquakes could use these funds to directly pay for repairs themselves, instead. In the case of the 41 CE earthquake at Antioch, the “emperor Claudius relieved the guilds ... of the public service [or tax] of the kapnikon / καπνικόν, which they were providing to reconstruct the city’s roofed colonnades which had been built by Tiberius Caesar” (Malalas 10.23). Καπνικόν, from καπνός or smoke, is usually translated as a hearth tax, that is to say a tax on chimneys, which were easier to count than people; it appears here in its first instantiation, though the precise mean ing of the passage is unclear. Either the hearth tax which had been supporting the colonnade restoration (presumably after the previous earthquake of 37 CE) was lifted entirely; or the hearth tax’s funds were diverted to restoration of the colonnades (meaning that the guild members still paid, but its funds went to a new purpose).20 The hearth tax appeared rarely throughout the medieval period, before it reappeared more widely in early modern times.21 In those later forms, at least, the hearth tax was progressive in the sense that a large house or workshop would have more chimneys (and presumably money) than a smaller household.22
The first earthquake at Antioch for which we can meaningfully compare textual and archaeological evidence came in 115 CE (see Figure 27.2). It was vividly described by the Roman senatorial historian Dio Cassius (c. 155–235 CE), who was neither an eyewitness nor a contemporary. Dio Cassius recalls, however, the name of a consul who died there, and so presumably he relied on a closer source for his own account (68.24–25). Such unusual details may have been preserved because the emperor Trajan was in residence at Antioch at the time of the earthquake, to manage war with the Parthian Persians. Trajan only narrowly escaped from a collapsing building through a room’s window. He stayed outdoors in the hippodrome throughout the aftershocks. Dio Cassius reports significant destruction of houses and the loss of life – “the crash and breaking of timbers together with tiles and stones ... an inconceivable amount of dust ... The number of those who were trapped in the houses and perished was past finding out ...Great numbers were suffocated in the ruins.”
The participation of survivors in community sponsored offerings of thanksgiving, including even the construction of whole temples, may have fostered community cohesion in future earthquakes. After the 115 CE earthquake, Malalas tells us that “the surviving Antiochenes who remained then built a temple on which they inscribed ‘Those who were saved erected this to Zeus the Savior’” (11.8).
Dio Cassius says little concerning the recovery or reconstruction effort that must have followed the 115 CE earthquake, however. Malalas gives more details, indicating a major construction program sponsored by Trajan that followed the 115 CE earthquake: beginning with the sacrifice of a virgin girl named Kalliope, we are told, Trajan restored the city’s colonnades and built a new aqueduct and bath, named for himself, besides a theater (11.8–11).23
The Princeton excavators at Antioch understood the 115 CE event as a watershed in the city’s history. Literary sources became a point of reference for interpretation and dating of changes in buildings throughout the city, including damage and repair, but also abandonment or new construction: new mosaics were added in the so-called Atrium House and the House of the Drunken Dionysus,24 repairs were made at the Hippodrome, as suggested by new column capitals dated to the reign of Hadrian,25 and the city cardo was built anew26 while other streets were repaired.27 On the other hand, Bath C was destroyed in the 115 earthquake and abandoned, so too was the so-called House of Trajan’s Aqueduct.28
Leaving aside aspersions of child sacrifice from Christian chronicler Malalas, and the difficulties posed by evaluation of claims made by the Princeton excavators some 90 years later, it still stands that the initiation of significant new infra structure projects and repairs to public or private buildings followed the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch, in a pattern typical for major cities under the Roman empire. We turn now to the Byzantine.29
17 See also Ambraseys(2009).
18 Antioch II, 52; Gatier, Leblanc, and Poccardi (2004,241–242).
19 See Levi(1947, 16).
20 Downey (1961, 196,n. 145).
21 s.v. “HearthTax” and “Kapnikon” in Kazhdan (1991, 906, 1105).
22 Gurrin(2004).
23 Jeffreys (1990, 56) says “much of Malalas’ narrative on
Trajan’s activities is uncorroborated by other sources and is probably fictitious.”
24 Levi(1947, 16,40).
25 Antioch III, 150.
26 Antioch V, 30–33.
27 Antioch V,72
28 Levi(1947,289,28).
29 Mordechai and Pickett (2018)
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:441-447) note that no fewer than twelve earthquakes are recorded for Antioch between the years 300 and 600
by a wide
range of sources, usually with multiple, if not always independent attestations
. However,
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:441-447) add that none of these events are easy to analyze
and they often defy our desire for modern analysis,
to coordinate literary evidence or compare it with archaeological evidence
.
9.2 DESTRUCTION, RECONSTRUCTION, AND THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL RECORD
... On May 29, 526, what appears to be one of the most devastating earthquakes of Antioch’s history struck, causing unprecedented damage, it seems. With an estimated magnitude of 7.0 on the surface wave scale and estimated intensity of IX (violent) on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale, the quake violently rattled the city, toppled buildings and killed many.43 The vehemence and the tragedy caused by the event were such that a host of voices described the effects and repercussions of the cataclysm. However, it stands to reason that the account of John Malalas may be the most reliable, for the historian may have actually been in Antioch at the time. Be that as it may, it is apparent that Antioch’s main urban foci were flattened by the quake; whether damage occurred to the church built by Constantine, the dominicum aureum, is a matter of dispute.44 As for the number of the casualties, 250,000 Antiochenes were presumably killed. Of course, much sensationalism gets in the way of demographics; nevertheless, one can speculate that a sizeable portion of the population, the urban infrastructure, and the local economy were directly impacted.
We previously stressed the dialectic of destruction and new beginnings: Constantinople was not slow in mobilizing aid and resources for quick repairs. Justin allocated the funds through the comes Orientis Carinus and other functionaries; 30 centenaria were rolled to the civic funds’ baths, aqueducts, and bridges, while repairing other structural damage to the civic infrastructure. Ten centenaria were also allocated to repairing churches. Tragically, reconstruction was underway when, in November 527, another fire allegedly affected the city. Under the comes Orientis Zacharias, and thanks to the munificence of the new emperor Justinian (527–565) and his wife Theodora (527–548), more funding was secured to restore Antioch’s functionality and overall dignity. It appears that the imperial couple had just commissioned churches and buildings at that time. The basilica of Anatolius, in particular, was greatly damaged and subsequently rebuilt by Justinian with columns from Constantinople, almost a redress for the Antiochene monuments that 200 years earlier had been stripped to contribute to the making of the new capital on the Bosphorus.45 Yet these efforts were to no avail, for, on November 29, 528, still another temblor, plausibly an aftershock of the 526 earthquake, struck; lasting one hour, it killed an additional 4,770 civilians, as reported by Theophanes.46 The days of Justinian, it seems, were witnessing the lowest degree of divine support for the city on the Orontes. This was the juncture where changing the name of the city to Theoupolis seemed the only way to curb the fury of the natural elements, and coinage reflects the transition (see Plates 14.12–14.16).47
9.3 A NEW ANTIOCH?
From Constantinople, Imperial assistance once again came to the rescue. The emperor at that point sanctioned the severing of the island from the rest of Antioch. This was a logical consequence of a decreasing importance of the island as early as in the fifth century, as a consequence of the city’s expansion to the south since the early/middle imperial periods and the earthquake of 458 CE which had wrought havoc on the island. What is more, at that juncture Justinian undoubtedly began the planning of a more compact version of the city, one that, however, was to become a reality only in the 540s after the Persian sack. The combination of geological and political factors in mapping out the future form of the city and in mobilizing new elites could not have been more decisive. In that vein, the Orontes was diverted and its channel redrawn, while the island witnessed extensive abandonment. As for the fortifications, the walls were repaired with the exception of the undamaged segments on Mt. Silpius, this time encompassing the northern tip of Mt. Silpius, later to be occupied by the Byzantine and Crusader Citadel (Figure 9.12)
The Iron Gate in the Parmenios gorge (Figure 9.13) underwent consolidation and was integrated in the new perimeter of defenses; it was not long after transformed into a dam designed to hinder the swelling of the Parmenius stream, thus seeking to curb the flooding of the city’s central and northern districts while still serving as fortification. Further, the two aqueducts tapping water into the Daphne springs (of the first and second centuries CE) were also repaired.48 In addition, a system of gates was added along the stretches of Mt. Staurin and the plain.49 New fortifications and efficient roads, one of which was recently identified on the southern slopes of Mt. Silpius (Figure 9.14), enabled the logistic for the ambitious new plan for the city, one, however, that was grounded in the old armature.
Once again, the complicated archaeological record of Antioch affords insights into the city’s transformations. Houses were rebuilt, albeit with a different orientation or with new features added like pools. However, this downsized city of Justinian measured some 452 ha, included the slopes of Mt. Silpius, and presumably still comprised several thousand houses: two domestic units only (House of Aion, House of Iphigenia) can be reasonably assigned to the sixth century. In all likelihood they were abandoned in the ensuing decades.
The city’s ubiquitous waterworks were also curtailed, as attested by the collapse of the nymphaeum in sector 17-O.50 Antioch’s sixth century baths remain hard to locate;51 though central in Justinian’s program, at least according to Procopius, they are not documented archaeologically. Yet the evidence from the island excavation is compelling: the five baths there located were abandoned after 540. Bath F (the only urban bath known through excavation) was greatly damaged in 526/528. Restored and greatly reduced in size, it reopened in 537/538, shortly after the earthquake, and then ceased to operate after the Persian sack of 540 CE. Also, to what degree the now extra muros hippodromes were still serviceable remains to be established. As per the rosy narrative of Procopius, theaters were among the buildings repaired by Justinian but the archaeological evidence is missing.
Lastly, streets, plazas, and the interface between Justinian’s plan and the previous phase of the city need to be taken up. The colonnaded street was still pivotal for the unfolding of the new plan. The section of sector 19 M ( one of the 1937 Street Digs) shows that a sediment ranging between 90 cm and 1 m covered the street of Trajan.52 A new, reduced version of the thoroughfare was thus set in place sometime between 528 and 540, when Antioch was sacked by the Persians. More to the point, the axis appears in a new configuration: 5.45 m wide, plus sidewalks. Bereft of its porticoes, Antioch was now entering a new phase: a more compact city, but still at the center of the Greek East. Overall, Justinian’s reconstruction was a concrete commitment grounded in strengthening and redesigning the civic fabric, as made manifest by a massive fortification, streets, public spaces, water supply systems, and possibly large-scale administrative buildings, if we accept an early sixth century date for the build ing complex south of the Forum of Valens recently excavated by Turkish archaeologists and still unpublished. Despite this substantial reconstruction program Antioch hardly recovered from the early sixth century series of calamities and further disasters: a recurring bubonic plague and earth quakes in 553, 557,and 588 took a further toll on a vexed community.
In financial terms, remission from taxes for three years, a measure typically implemented by emperors since the days of the Julio-Claudians, was authorized for Antioch. That earthquakes functioned as a stimulus for rebuilding and investing assets may be too far-fetched a hypothesis, but it can’t be denied that the imperial administration went to great lengths to revive Figure 9.14 Road (built in the course of the Justinianic rebuilding after the 540 sack) connecting the citadel area to the southern walls. the community and ensure continuity of settlement. There were dividends to be clinched, too: a new class of non-local imperial administrators tasked with the reconstruction of the city appeared on the scene; various patricii and their entourage hailed down from Constantinople to aid the reconstruction. As Catherine Saliou noted, there was no shortage of great resources to tap into.53 Overall, at this juncture, Justinian and his planners mapped out a city that, for all its splendid veneer,54 was conceivably 20 percent smaller than that of Trajan.
43 Malalas 17.16. See also Procop. Bell. 2.14; John of Nikiu 135–136; Chron. Edessenum 11–12; Theoph. 172–173. Guidoboni (1989, 691–694).
44 Deichmann (1972); Mayer and Allen (2012, 68–80); Brands (2016, 60–64; 2021).
45 Malalas 14.13.
46 Theoph. 177–178. Also, Saliou (2019, 201).
47 See Stahl infra.
48 Brands (2009).
49 Brasse (2010). On the city gates in the plain see Antioch 1 (Brands-Weferling)
50 Eger (2024); Brands and Döring (2025).
51 De Giorgi and Eger (2021, 107).
52 Antioch V, 19–40.
53 Saliou (2019).
54 Proc. De aed. 2.10
The gradual Christianization of the Late Roman or Early Byzantine world brought with it a new range in literary production that reflected changes throughout society more broadly, and which treated earthquakes in ways rather different than the historians and chroniclers of the imperial Roman state. While the precedents for disaster response set by the imperial Roman state changed little with Christianity, civic and social response at the level of the city and its population shifted, alongside the interests of our sources. Particularly important are hymns and homilies, written by Antioch’s local bishops John Chrysostom and Severus of Antioch, hagiographies or the lives of saints composed for local holy men such as Symeon Stylites the Younger, as well as ecclesial histories of the church at Antioch written in Syriac. Such literature sheds light on how people living in Antioch responded to disaster, and how they complemented lingering traditions for ancient historiography, maintained both at Constantinople but also in the provincial capitals, for instance at Antioch, as by the Greek chronicler John Malalas or his peer Procopius.
Altogether, no fewer than twelve earthquakes are recorded for Antioch between the years 300 and 600 by this wide range of sources, usually with multiple, if not always independent attestations. None of these events are easy to analyze, precisely because they are described by multiple authors in different languages, historical contexts, and genres of literature: they often defy our desire for modern analysis, to coordinate literary evidence or compare it with archaeological evidence.
Let us take an earthquake at Antioch of the year 341 CE as an example. Socrates Scholasticus, from Constantinople, writes in his ecclesial history about a famous church council or synod at Antioch in 341 CE, which according to him was convened at least in part to consecrate a famous octagonal cathedral built for the city by Constantine.30 The church was finished by his son Constantius II, whose theological leanings inclined with the city’s bishops toward Arianism, the idea that Christ had a single human nature. This was opposed to Socrates’s (and Constantine’s) Nicene notion of Christ’s consubstantial human and divine nature with God the Father. Arianism was a major theological and political disagreement in the fourth century, which is why it appears in Socrates’s history. Tacked on at the end of his account of the 341 CE earthquake Socrates adds that “at the same time [as the 341 Synod] there occurred violent earthquakes in the East, and especially at Antioch, which continued to suffer aftershocks during a whole year” (2.10). Socrates’s aim may be understood as the denigration of Arian bishops: they sacrileged the city and its new cathedral with their synod, and so were met with an appropriate outpouring of divine wrath.
On the other hand, these years around the 341 earthquake also appear independently in several Syriac histories, whose compositional history is murky, though we might suspect that they originated near to Antioch itself somewhere in what is today northern Syria or southeastern Turkey. Yet these sources may either not mention the earthquake at all; give roughly the same date for this event, within a few years around 341 CE; or disagree on the religious/political context, or on the duration of aftershocks.31 None of our sources for the 341 CE earthquake mention any specific physical damage to Antioch, or loss of life, or reconstruction per se. Why?
If we look for Antioch’s 341 CE earthquake in Theophanes (writing from Constantinople in the eighth century) or Malalas (writing from Antioch in the sixth), we find only more confusion. Theophanes’s account agrees with Socrates in his account of the church synod but inverts it by placing mention of the octagonal church’s consecration after the earthquake. As this text’s editors Cyril Mango and Elizabeth Jeffreys concluded, “Theophanes’ handling of this whole year is complex and involves rearrangement of material to suit his own purposes” (Theophanes, year 5833). Writing in the later years of the eighth century when no one was concerned any longer with Arianism, Theophanes here focuses on a more current issue: the proper association between an earthquake and, in its wake, the imperial reconstruction efforts that should follow. Curiously, in the year following Theophanes’s chronicle, he also writes that there was “a severe earthquake in Cyprus, the greater part of Salamis fell” (Theophanes, year 5834). Are these separate or related events? The fishy comparisons and contexts should give us pause. Was there a major earthquake at Antioch in 341 CE at all? Probably not.
Our most local if not contemporary source, the Antiochene John Malalas (c. 490–570), was mixed up on both his chronology and his geography: he does not mention any earthquake at Antioch in 341 CE, though he does give unusual detail concerning the dedication of the city cathedral by Constantius II in that year. Malalas erred and placed the 341 CE earthquake rather earlier in his chronicle, during the reign of Constantius I (r. 305–306), instead (Malalas 12.48).32 Antioch was the chief concern of Malalas, as a local, but the 341 CE earthquake– with significant and archaeologically-identifiable damage and reconstruction, besides textual sources– in fact occurred 150 miles to Antioch’s southwest, at Salamis on Cyprus’s very eastern shore. There, archaeologists have indeed identified significant reconstruction activities during the mid-fourth century, including renovation of the city’s largest baths and the erection of a massive seven-aisled Christian basilica.33 With this external support, Malalas’s account of an earthquake in 305–306 CE can now be safely placed in 341 CE instead; and descriptions of damage at Antioch by Socrates Scholasticus can be plausibly identified as an exaggeration in service of theological controversy. The compounding or conjoining of disasters, as part of the religious and apocalyptic imagination of late antiquity, is common: disasters in one place were thought to have surely been accompanied by disasters elsewhere. By the same token, sometimes events which should be conjoined are separated or rearranged by our sources, as here, requiring detective work to sort them out.
The next seismic event on record at Antioch comes c. 395 CE: this earthquake probably appears only in the homilies of John Chrysostom (In terrae motum, et in divitem et Lazarum PG 48.1027–1043 and Homilia post terrae motum, PG50.713–716), besides a brief unlocalized notice in Marcellinus Comes that has been thought to supply the correct date.34 Chrysostom delivered his second homily outside, he tells us, perhaps alluding to structural danger at churches shaken in the city. He spat fire, preaching the earthquake as an opportunity for “advancement” (τοῦ σεισμοῦ πρόοδος) of the city’s spirit toward Godliness. Chrysostom marvels at rapid social changes after the 395 CE earthquake, which (he says, at least temporarily):
... did away with the unevenness of life. Where, now, are those who wear silken robes? Where is the gold? All of those things have gone away. ... The earthquake [lasted] for two days, but let piety remain into all time. The earthquake sends forth a voice, more sonorous than a trumpet, saying this: “The Lord is compassionate and merciful, patient and rich in mercy. I was present, not in order to overwhelm you, but in order to strengthen you.” The earthquake says these things, and send forth a voice: ... “Pay exact attention to the sermon ... [!]” No one remembers interest, no one speaks about greediness, nor at the hands alone pure from sins, but the tongue too is freed from lawlessness and abuse. ... The houses are pure, the market place has been cleansed. ...[The singing of young men in the theater is quiet, but] it is possible to hear the singing of Psalms in the marketplace, and [to hear] those sitting at home, one singing psalms, another hymning. Night arrives, and all [run] to the church. (John Chrysostom, Homilia post terrae motum = PG 50.713–716, 713 and 714)35As Chrysostom yearns for an earthquake to demolish Antioch’s sinfulness, we see here too a recurring ancient and early Christian mentality for which disasters, while obviously catastrophic, could nevertheless contribute to positive changes in society.36 Large-scale destruction and renewal was not only urban and architectural, but psycho logical and spiritual, too. Other observers scoffed, like Agathias, and were more jaded.37
A series of earthquakes at Antioch in 458, c. 513–518, 526, 528, and 588 are richly evidenced by texts.38 Their archaeologies are complicated by their close chronological sequencing, however: distinguishing between damage from for example the 513–518, 526, and 528 earthquakes, or the violent siege and sack of the city by the Persians in 540, is difficult if not impossible. Such a challenge was recognized by Jesse Casana, for instance, in his exploration of landslide deposits potentially of seismic origin, though of unclear date– that destroyed late antique houses in Antioch’s northern suburbs, exposed by modern road construction in the early 2000s.39
The 458 event occurred early in the morning on a Sunday in November.40 Evagrius provides a comparatively detailed account of the neighborhoods and buildings destroyed, though Downey suspected that it was incomplete. Evagrius tallied damage to “almost all the build ings of the new city [on the island], which was very heavily populated and had no empty or totally neglected space” with the “palace’s first and second buildings [destroyed],” besides colonnades, the tetrapylon, and parts of the hippodrome.41 The Princeton excavations near the Hippodrome in the 1930s uncovered a small (public?) Bath E, which they thought was damaged and ultimately abandoned after the 458 event.42 Downey concluded that this earthquake was one step “culminating in [the island’s] definitive abandonment, as a part of the city ... in the reign of Justinian [r. 527–565].”43
In the old city, damage from the 458 CE earthquake was apparently more limited–“collapse did not affect the colonnades or buildings at all,” Evagrius says– besides the neighborhood of Ostrakine (unlocated) with its colonnades and a nymphaeum or public fountain. But a later Syriac source describes extensive fires following the earth quake, which were only extinguished by a welcome rain.44 Despite Evagrius’s silence, we might anticipate significant damage to the city’s housing stock, which relied more on timber construction than the city’s public buildings. Of these, the old city’s “baths of Trajan, Severus, and Hadrian were [also] shaken and collapsed [in part]”: but a bath complex near the palace survived unscathed, and though it had been “previously unused, because of the disaster [this complex] in fact bathed the city, because of what befell the other baths.” Social response to disaster shines through here, as we see how pressures for access to public amenities such as baths could beredirected, with shuttered facilities picking up slack following the catastrophic closure of others (Evagrius II.12).45 It is unclear if the bath described here is another larger public complex called Bath F by the Princeton excavators, near the Aleppo gate in the Old City, which was also (to judge from the evidence of new column capitals) repaired around 458.46 New column capitals were also found in repairs made to a villa at Daphne, thought to be a consequence of the 458 earthquake.47
The Syriac Life of St Symeon the Elder gives further insight onto the social dimension of the 458 earthquake’s aftermath.48 The narrator describes a communal procession or liturgy seeking God’s assistance via the saint, who died shortly after the earthquake: “the whole creation [was] there, thousands and tens of thousands, a countless throng” with “priests leading their flocks and using great diligence and care, with censers and incense and lighted tapers and crosses, and all the people running from every quarter shouting and with tears and bitter groans.”49This procession or assembly of Antioch’s residents was intent on taking the saint’s body from Aziz Simon manastır near Samandağ (18 miles away to the southwest) back to Antioch, so that his body might confer divine protection on the city from future disaster (Malalas 14.37).50
The state’s response was typical, with forgive ness of the city’s tax debts alongside direct financial relief for reconstruction: “a thousand talents [or one hundred thousand pounds] of gold were remitted to the city from the taxes by the emperor, while to the citizens [were remitted taxes on destroyed properties]; the emperor also attended to the public buildings.”51
Rather later, an earthquake in 513 is absent in the Chronicle of Malalas, though it was the subject of Syriac hymns by Antioch’s patriarch Severus (r. 513–518). Composed as a bricolage of Old and New Testament verses, these hymns conceived of earthquake as the “punishment that our sins deserve,” an opportunity for unrepentant consciences to “tremble and quake,” and an occasion for the Lord’s mercy on the city.52 As at Constantinople or Alexandria, where collective liturgies and civic processions were yearly celebrated on the anniversary of earthquakes, the hymns of Severus give notice for similar practices at Antioch, probably for commemoration of the 458 event.53
Where sources for the 458 and 513–518 earth quakes give insight into social response, accounts of the 526 and 528 events give especial clarity on state response and may be paired to more abundant archaeological evidence for urban change. Following closely on a year remembered for its uncontrolled fires (which may have begun in the roofs of some buildings before spreading) (Theophanes, year 6018),54 a tremendous earthquake struck Antioch on 29 May 526 (see Figure 27.3). Loss of life and the city’s fabric was significant; the event is recorded by most every historical source for the period, with Malalas providing a particularly detailed account.55 Features of Malalas’s account have been adduced to estimate the 526 earthquake’s magnitude at 7.0, or on the Modified Mercalli Intensity scale, a violent IX. Losses may have been compounded because the city was unusually busy when the earthquake struck: it was the day before the Feast of the Ascension, and “a great throng of visitors had come to town” (Malalas 17.16). Malalas, who was probably an eye-witness, suggested that 250,000 died; a few years later Procopius (who also had experience of the region on military campaigns) estimated 300,000 lives lost (Wars 2.14.6). Normal cautions as to numbers appearing in late antique histories – whether of military campaigns and battles or of environmental catastrophes – apply here, but the event clearly made an impression on contemporaries. Malalas reports that “no holy chapel nor monastery nor any other holy place remained [stand ing],” and that “houses which had not collapsed ... were destroyed ...by fire.” Some survivors fled the city for the countryside, where “peasants attacked them, stole their goods, and killed them” (17.16). Population displacements, linked to insecurity and violence, also recur in the aftermath of modern earthquakes.56
A by-now typical– if here unusually detailed pattern of Roman state efforts for disaster relief appears again after the 526 event. The emperor Justin reportedly refused to wear his crown, dressed in sack-cloth, and mourned publicly with Constantinople’s senators at Hagia Sophia. Search and rescue followed: Justin sent the eastern empire’s comes or governor, Carinus, with five centenaria of gold intended, as Theophanes tells, us “for excavation, in case anyone could be saved, and to preserve whathadbeenburiedfromrobbersand looters” (year 6019).57 Two further high-ranking officials were then sent to Antioch, to assist in reconstruction of aqueducts and bridges specific ally, both critical infrastructure.
Here we should note that one centenarion (also called a talent) was equivalent to 100 pounds of gold, or 7,200 solidus denomination gold coins at 4.5 grams each, with 72 solidi to the pound. By way of comparison, a cavalry man’s salary was nine solidi, while a general commanded roughly one quarter of a centenarion. Even one centenarion was a significant amount of money, no doubt, but it bears notice that several centenaria could occasionally be summoned by a single city as ransom in times of siege,58 or even by a single individual for purchase of high office.59 Remember too that Ptolemy III had given 300 talents or centenaria to Rhodes after the 228 BC earthquake. We might consider here, then, and in cases where we read of financial support following catastrophe, that several centenaria was an impressive sum but it was almost certainly insufficient for reconstruction of a sizable city in the aftermath of a major earthquake; provision of skilled labor and materials were certainly also important but harder to measure in our sources. Occasionally, personal connections or powers of persuasion could also be leveraged for greater financial assistance. The former comes orientis or provincial governor, Ephrem, was named patriarch at Antioch after 526. As governor he had been responsible for rebuilding activities, and his effective leadership may have led to his promotion (Evagrius IV.6). Ephrem’s replacement as governor, Zacharias, led a delegation to Constantinople that pled before the emperor and convinced him to provide an additional 40 centenaria for Antioch’s reconstruction: 4,000 pounds of gold (Malalas 17.22).
Another earthquake followed shortly thereafter in 528: this hit Antioch while reconstruction from the 526 event was still ongoing. Accounts of the 528 event are brief. We hear less of specific destruction this time, though Theophanes says that 5,000 died and the survivors fled to other cities or the countryside (year 6021). Antioch was renamed by the emperor as Theoupolis, “the city of God,” presumably in an (unsuccessful) effort to protect against future catastrophes (Theophanes, year 6021).60
Altogether, the Princeton excavators identified nine structures that they thought had been aban doned after the 526–528 earthquakes,61 and five structures that showed signs of repairs.62 Antioch’s suburban port, Seleucia Pieria, may have fallen out of use after the 526–528 earthquakes, with the Orontes delta port of al-Mina replacing it.63 On the other hand there is limited evidence for seventh century repairs to at least one church mosaic in Seleucia Pieria’s upper city; it is difficult to say precisely what happened to Antioch’s port as a whole during this period.64
Calamities compounded in the decades ahead: rapid climate change after the 536 Dust Veil Event,65 the Sassanid Persian sack of the city in 540,66 and the mortality of bubonic plague that spread across the empire after 541.67
These events together set the backdrop for Justinian’s reconstruction of the city during the 540s, which was described at length by Procopius in the Buildings (2.10).68 His account is occasion ally difficult to reconcile with the archaeology or other historical sources– details either cannot be confirmed or indeed are contradicted69 – but the city became 20 percent more compact within a new and shortened circuit of fortifications. There were pragmatic modifications to the city’s water infrastructure, including a diversion of the river Orontes that served both as a defensive moat and as protection from floods, the construction of cisterns, and a dam to impound seasonal rain set into the old Iron Gate’s aqueduct bridge, besides the customary attention to churches and streets.70 These changes– alongside the archaeologically attested disrepair of numerous structures following the 526/528 earthquakes, and Justinian’s abandonment of the palace island to leather workers and fullers, with demolition of the old imperial hippodrome for reuse of its stone in other projects– present a city fundamentally transformed after the vicissitudes of the sixth century.71
Two last seismic events follow in the sixth century, in 577 and 588, both recounted by Evagrius. In 577, we are told that Daphne “fell victim to the shaking” while in Antioch “public and private buildings were split apart right to the ground, but did not, however, bow their knee to the foundations” (Evagrius V.17). The 588 earthquake struck on Evagrius’s wedding day, and he serves as an eyewitness to significant damage for the Great Church, and for the neigh borhoods of Ostrakine, Psephium, and Bursia, and along the fortifications. Evagrius provides little information pertaining to the city’s reconstruction, however, apart from a generic statement of imperial financial support: “the emperor assuaged the city’s suffering with money” (VI.8).
30 s.v. “Great Church” in Mayer and Allen (2012, 68–80).
31 If not the church synod, then the accessiono f a new
Antiochene patriarch (Chronicon ad annum724, 130/
102), or the consecration of the octagonal church of
Constantine/Constantiusb y Arian bishops or the beginning of Constantine II’s wars with the Franks (r.337–340)
alongside Constantius II, r.337–361; as in the Chronicle of Jacob ofE dessa 292.
32 Ambraseys(2009, 142–143).
33 Zavagno(2014, 115–116).
34 Marcellinus 396 notes, without localization, that “There
was an earthquake for many days and the sky appeared
to glow.” SeeDowney (1961, 438) for discussion of
the date.
35 Available at: https://archive.org/details/
Chrysostom Homily After The Earthquake.
36 On positively connoted earthquakes and associations
with renewal and rebirth, see Chaniotis(1998).
37 Agathias5.4.
38 Further seismic events are briefly recorded by primary
sources as affecting Antioch, but without detail: for
example, for 551, 557, and 560/561 CE (see Downey,
1961, 558).
39 Casana(2004, 120).
40 Malalas 14.36 was the source for Evagrius 2.12, who adds
further details, and for the abbreviated account of
Theophanes,year5950.
41 Downey (1961,476).
42 Antioch II, 1 and 180.
43 Downey (1961,480).
44 See Chronicon miscellaneum ad annum Domini 724 pertinens = Chabot (1955, 109).
45 Pickett (2021).
46 Antioch III, 151.
47 AntiochI II, 155.
48 For textual traditions surrounding St Symeon the
Younger, see Boero and Kuper (2020).
49 For translation of the Syriac Life of St Symeon Stylites,
see Lent(1915, 187).
50 Downey (1961,476–477,n.5). For the shrine of Symeon
the Younger see Belgin-Henry (2018) and Mayer and
Allen (2012, 104–106).
51 Evagrius 2.12 here notes specifically that his and further
details come from “John the Rhetor,” who is probably to
be identified with Malalas and a longer version of his
chronicle that no longer survives.
52 Patrologia Orientalis 7.5,705–710 for hymns 256–261; see
also Allen and Neil (2013,77–79).
53 Patrologia Orientalis 7.5,710 for hymn2 61: “We keep the
commemoration of the ancient chastisement of the
earthquake, in order that we [may not fall into evil
deeds].” For Constantinople and Alexandria, see
Croke(1981).
54 DeGiorgi and Eger (2021,200).
55 Sources on the 526 earthquake: besides Malalas 17.16–22,
see Downey (1961, 521–525; Guidoboni et al. (1994,
314–321);Ambraseys (2009, 184–189).
56 Leaning and Guha-Sapir(2013).
57 Compare with Malalas 18.19.For centenaria in relation to
state salaries and expenditures, see Hendy (1985,
166–178,217–221).
58 For example, Edessa’s citizens paid five centenaria
ransom to Chosroes: Procopius, Wars2.27.46.
59 For example, Paulus paid Justinian seven centenaria to
become Patriarch of Alexandria: Procopius, Secret
History 27.21.
60 See Antioch IVP art 2, 153 for coin #2112, inscribed with
the city’s new name.
61 Abandoned after 526–528: a destruction deposit in 13-R
(Antioch IV Part 1, 56); 15-M large building destroyed
(Antioch III, 12); vaults over the Parmenius in 16-0
(Antioch III, 13); Bath A abandoned after 526( Antioch
I, 7); Bath C destroyed in 526 and thereafter outside
Justinian’s wall, not repaired but used as a quarry
(AntiochI, 31); hippodrome on the island destroyed in
526 and thereafter outside Justinian’s wall (Antioch I, 33);
Villa 14-S on Mt Staurin damaged and not repaired
(Antioch III,9); a villa at Daphne destroyed( Antioch II,
200);the Yakto villa damaged and not repaired (Antioch
II,98).
62 Repaired after 526–528: the House of thePhoenix with
coins as terminus post quem for new mosaic after 526
(Levi, 1947,352);thecolonnadedstreetin19-M(Antioch
V, 30–33); repairs toBathFafter 526/528 indicated by
inscription(Levi, 1947, 258, 366); coinsealed between
successive floors at House of the Bird Rinceau as
terminus post quem for repairs (Levi, 1947, 257, 366); the
Church of Kaoussie was either repaired (Levi, 1947, 284)
or abandoned for use as a quarry (Mayer and Allen, 2012,
48); reconstruction of the Martyrion at Seleucia Pieria
with more seismically resistant mortar (Antioch III,
37 and 47–48; Mayer and Allen, 2012, 60; Levi,
1947, 359).
63 See Mayer and Allen (2012, 60) and Hatice Pamir in
Yener (2005, 67–98); but for problems with interpretation of ceramics during this time-period, see
Vorderstrasse (2005, 68–69).
64 Mayer and Allen (2012, 65–66).
65 Büntgen et al. (2016).
66 DeGiorgi and Eger (2021, 205–208).
67 Compare Mordechai et al. (2019) with Meier (2020).
68 See Downey (1939).
69 Pickett (2017).
70 Downey (1961, 546–557); De Giorgi and Eger
(2021, 208–214).
71
Compare with Saradi (2006) for comparable changes in
other cities across the Eastern Mediterranean, with or
without earthquakes and catastrophes as stimuli.
Jordan Pickett in De Giorgi et al. (2024:433-434) provided an excerpt of an eye-witness account describing the effects
of the 1872 CE Amik Golu Quake in Antioch.
A severe shock of earthquake was felt here at Antioch ...Walls fell, the narrow streets (only about twelve or fifteen feet wide, and some less) being literally blocked up for long distances with the ruins of fallen houses, and a dense cloud of dust arose on all sides. Men, women, and children ran hither and thither, wailing their own hurts or the loss of relatives. I went down to the bridge ... and saw many dead persons brought out of the city and laid out for burial. ...Looking toward the town, ruins could be seen in all directions. Several aqueducts were broken ...The church, a strong stone arched structure, built only a few years ago, and capable of holding 500 or 600 persons, was utterly ruined– one side and the entire roof are gone. ...The number of killed and injured cannot be ascertained with any approach to accuracy, and of course, flying rumors are abundant, one man saying that he thought there must be 1,000 killed, while another said 500, and a third 250, which is, perhaps, within the truth. ...The old Roman bridge of four arches is rent in several places until the water can be seen through it from above; a part of the parapet wall has also been shaken off, and the arch above the city door at its east end has been hurled down and lies almost whole. Much damage has been done to houses in the lower part of town, and many of the inhabitants are now to be seen encamping around in the fields or plain. It is nearly fifty years since the last similar visitation occurred to this city ... when some thousands of lives were lost here. ...In several places large cracks are visible in the ground, two or three inches wide, and on the hillsides several feet deep. The narrow roadways or tracks between the hills are in places filled with boulders from the hill or mountainside, and in or near the villages, where there were walls of boulders between the gardens, the fallen walls now fill the roads.This Remarkable Description of an earthquake at Antioch could have come from John Malalas in the sixth century, but it does not. Rather, it can be found in a New York Times article of May 13, 1872, concerning an earthquake at Antioch on April 3 of that year. The article reproduces a letter by the English sailor, travel writer, and harbor chaplain Rev. W. Brown Keer, which he wrote a day after the earthquake, and sent to the London Times before it was widely reprinted throughout the United States.
| Effect | Location | Image(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Various | Various
A map of earthquake damage from the 115 CE earthquake at Antioch (by Stephen Batiuk).
De Giorgi et al. (2024) |
|
Ciggaar, Krijnie (2010) Antioche: les sources croisées et le plan de la ville, in:
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Jalabert, L. Mouterde, R. (1939) Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie Tome II - can be borrowed with a free account from archive.org
Jalabert, L. Mouterde, R. (1950) Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie Tome III - can be borrowed with a free account from archive.org
Jalabert, L. Mouterde, R. (1955) Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie Tome IV - can be borrowed with a free account from archive.org
Jalabert, L. Mouterde, R. (1959) Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie Tome V - can be borrowed with a free account from archive.org
Jalabert, L. Mouterde, R. (1967) Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie Tome VI - can be borrowed with a free account from archive.org
Jalabert, L. Mouterde, R. (1970) Inscriptions grecques et latines de la Syrie Tome VII - can be borrowed with a free account from archive.org
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(1934) Antioch on the Orontes I The Excavations of 1932
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(1941) Antioch on the Orontes III The Excavations, 1937-1939
(1948) Antioch on the Orontes IV Part 1 Ceramics and Islamic Coins
(1952) Antioch on the Orontes IV Part 2 Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Crusaders' Coins
(1970) Antioch on the Orontes V Les portiques d'Antioche