Читать книгу A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East онлайн

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It is, in any case, only in the early Roman period that the density in the spread of the available evidence truly became a factor, and that the impact of what we call “classical culture” on the local and indigenous cultures of the region came to the fore and gained in visibility. The multifaceted processes of interaction between the cultures of Greece and Rome and those of the non-classical world have been vigorously debated over the years. Making the case against the old, oversimplified paradigm of a linear process by which Greek features gradually replaced non-Greek ones, Glen Bowersock proposed to drop “Hellenization” from our investigations and to focus instead on “Hellenism,” as a concept known already in antiquity itself (Hellēnismos, meaning “Greek culture”). He argued that the classical culture in the Near East in the late Hellenistic and Roman period functioned as a channel through which local indigenous cultures could be manifested: “In language, myth, and image it provided the means for a more articulate and a more universally comprehensible expression of local traditions” (Bowersock 1990: 9). As such, Bowersock emphasized “the remarkable role of Hellenism in strengthening and even transforming local worship without eradicating its local character” (ibid.: 21). In a later study, Bowersock argued that “Hellenism in the Roman Near East was … by no means what it was to become later in the Byzantine Near East” and that the “dominance of Greek form and design in a unified world of Aramaic culture seems … a quite different kind of Hellenism from what comes later” (Bowersock 2008: 22). Or rather: “When Greek became the unifying culture of the region, it was no longer the Roman Near East” (ibid.: 23). In his own study of “the nature of Syrian Hellenism,” Maurice Sartre made the astute observation that “there are extremely varied modes of appropriation of Hellenism, according to the individual and the region” (Sartre 2008: 37). He further stated that “Syrian Hellenism carried with it, via the multicultural, multireligious, and polyethnic framework in which it developed, an obligation of openness” which, however, “does not authorize us to imagine a society of universal tolerance and harmony” (ibid.: 48), concluding that Greek culture throughout the Roman Near East “remains a criterion of social differentiation whose prestige seems virtually untarnished” (ibid.: 49). Nathanael Andrade, in what is now widely acknowledged as the single most important contribution to the scholarly debate on how to analyse the multifarious expressions of what he called “Greekness” in the Near East, warned how this concept “cannot be attached to a stable, unchanging set of materials, idioms, and practices … cannot be framed by universally applicable definitions [and] cannot be reckoned as simply a manifestation of culture, for what constituted Greek or Syrian culture was shaped and reshaped by civic affiliations and networks” (Andrade 2013: 343). Our subject therefore seems to change as quickly and easily as a kaleidoscope: cultural elements that entered a local society at the beginning of the Hellenistic or Roman period may not necessarily have been considered similarly “new” hundreds of years later. Over time, manifestations of “Hellenism,” or reflections of different degrees of “Greekness,” underwent continuous renegotiation and could themselves come to be considered part of the package of local traditions. Admittedly, this is not easily caught in the often conservative source material (Kaizer 2000a).