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  • Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities
  • T. D. Barnes
Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities. By Edward J. Watts. [The Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 46.] (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. Pp. xvi, 290. $55.00. ISBN 978-0-520-26207-2.)

Edward Watts has written a wide-ranging, thoughtful, and stimulating exploration of what can be learned from a single episode that occurred in Alexandria in the late-fifth century (probably in spring 486). The illuminating episode in question is known only because Zacharias of Mitylene included it in his account of the career of Paralius of Aphrodisias in Caria, which forms approximately the first third of his Life of Severus (CPG 6995). Unfortunately, Zacharias’s Life of Severus has survived only in a Syriac translation—this was edited together with a French translation by Marc-Antoine Kugener in Patrologia orientalis, vol. 2 (Paris, 1903); was reprinted as the separate volume Sévère, patriarche d’Antioche, 512–518 (Turnhout, 1993); and was translated into English by Lena Ambjörn (Piscataway, NJ, 2008). Watts has used both Kugener’s text and Ambjörn’s translation critically, stating at the outset that “in places they have been amended for clarity” (p. 1n1). He rounds off his book with an appendix answering Alan Cameron’s argument that the Life of Severus is fundamentally unreliable. Watts observes, quite correctly, that from a literary point of view Zacharias’s account of Paralius should be considered as “a self-contained work that has rhetorical concerns and a thematic structure distinct from the Life of Severus” (pp. 265–68). But Cameron also argues that Zacharias includes invented material supplied to him by Paralius and that Paralius himself is a dubious witness. Hence, it is not clear whether Paralius’s story about his beating in Alexandria can justifiably be taken au pied de la lettre, as Watts appears to do. [End Page 86]

Watts begins with a twenty-page analysis of how Christian students in Alexandria transformed the beating of Paralius into “a religious persecution launched by a hostile pagan intellectual establishment” (p. 11). Paralius, whom Watts describes “an obnoxious teenager” (p. 11), had been beaten by other students whose revered teachers he had denounced in offensive and insulting language. The remainder of the book is divided into three parts: “Historical Discourse in Intellectual Communities,” “The Past Within and Outside Late Antique Monasteries,” and “Defining the Alexandrian Bishop.” For the most part, Watts is accurate in his reporting of ancient evidence and shows good sense when interpreting it. However, he sometimes downplays the political background of ecclesiastical events, thus unwittingly diminishing the impact of the emperor or agents of the imperial government on them. For example, Watts correctly notes that Cyril had been groomed to succeed Theophilus, his uncle, as bishop of Alexandria, but he states that “instead of assuming power peacefully, Cyril was forced to battle a rival for the patriarchal throne” (pp. 207–08). For this assertion he cites Christopher Haas, who alleges that Cyril’s appointment was opposed by the commander of imperial forces in Egypt. Haas relied on A. C. Zenos’s translation of a precritical text of Socrates. In the only critical edition of Socrates that uses all the relevant textual evidence, G. C. Hansen correctly follows the ancient Armenian translation, which names Cyril, not his rival, as the candidate supported by the military commander Abundantius. What Socrates says, therefore, is that when conflict broke out because there were two candidates, Abundantius supported Cyril. Again, although Watts notes that Proterius was in effect an imperial appointee when he replaced Dioscorus at the Council of Chalcedon in 451, his discussion of his murder in 457 makes no mention of the death of the emperor Marcian on January 27, 457, even though it was the news of his imperial patron’s decease that encouraged his enemies to consecrate Timothy Aelurus as a rival bishop of Alexandria in opposition to Proterius and thus set in motion a series of events that ended with his violent death.

Fortunately, however, Watts, on the whole, avoids the mistake...

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