From the Editor

The nine articles in this issue form an eclectic East-West blend and run the disciplinary gamut of historical, archaeological, literary, theological, and reception studies. The first two highlight the late antique reinvigoration of classical Latin poetics. Bélanger cogently argues that Avienus appropriates Vergilian themes in his Descriptio orbis terrae to undergird his own idiosyncratic vision of how Roman rule brings prosperity and culture to the world. Kirsch demonstrates how Prudentius subtly reinterprets traditional epic tropes in depicting the personified vices in his Psychomachia as monstrous entities. Wheaton focuses on another late Latin poet, Venantius Fortunatus, probing his two relatively neglected sermons for compelling evidence of their latent theological influences. Turning to the shifty world of ecclesiastical politics, Eisenberg critically re-examines the Council of Carthage of 525 as an organ that its convener Boniface of Carthage used to consolidate power over North Africa's Nicene bishops.

With the remaining five studies we move eastward. Marinis percipiently reads Asterius of Amaseia's Ekphrasis on the Holy Martyr Euphemia as a sophisticated statement on how the written word, when duly formed by Christian paideia, is able to surmount the visual arts as an epistemic medium. Leone and Sarantis offer a wealth of new and ground-breaking insight into the storied history of the fortified citadel of Dibsi Faraj on the Euphrates River during the late Roman and early Byzantine periods. Grasso, drawing from an impressive array of epigraphic and other evidence, makes the case that the fourth-century kings of Ḥimyar strategically steered their kingdom through a gradual conversion to monotheism (under the influence of South Arabian Jewish communities) to galvanize their political power in the name of a translocal deity. Rounding out this issue are two fascinating case studies in the legacy of Greek Christian authors in Syriac. Doerfler convincingly argues that a Syriac-language sermon, supposedly preached (originally in Greek) by Basil at the funeral of the emperor Valens's son, is in fact not a genuine Basilian work but came to be transmitted under his name, a nominal association that significantly increased its changes of survival. Salés revisits the debate about Maximus the Confessor's origins and compellingly proposes, after a scrutiny of the literary and linguistic features of his Syriac Life, that Maximus had African and perhaps Alexandrian origins.

The Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity XIV conference "Scale and the Study of Late Antiquity," organized and hosted by The Ohio State University, will take place virtually via Zoom on June 3–5, 2021. Here is the call for papers:

For the Fourteenth Meeting of the Society for Late Antiquity, we invite papers that investigate scale, which can be defined as a graduated range of values or measurements, whether, for example, of time, space, social organization, cosmology, or agency. Participants are encouraged to explore scale either as a methodological framework used by modern historians to interpret the past and/or as a type of late Roman analytic category, developed and employed by late ancient persons for their own heuristic purposes. Questions papers might ask include: To what extent does the world of Late Antiquity look different if we approach its events, institutions, and processes (whether political, economic, social, or religious) from a micro scale rather than a macro scale, and vice versa? How can we better understand the late Roman Empire through the examination of macro- and micro-scalar environmental phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions and mutating plague DNA, which were only partially (if at all) perceptible to the late Romans themselves? Alternatively, what graduated categories of measurement and values did late ancient thinkers deploy in their philosophical, scientific (including astrological), and religious works to make sense of metaphysical, ethical, or even physical quandaries? And what did scale mean to individuals on an everyday level, for agriculturalists or merchants whose livelihoods were embedded within multi-scalar economic, environmental, legal, social, and religious networks? Other papers might consider the fractal replication of structures and relationships across the Empire, for example in conciliar operations (Senate, local curia, church councils), patterns of deference across the social scale, or in the provincial extensions of imperial authority.Comparativists are encouraged to consider how...