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Arietta Papaconstantinou, Religion, Language and Community in the Roman Near East: Constantine to Muhammad, by Fergus Millar, The English Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 547, December 2015, Pages 1517–1518, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cev274
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The outcome of Fergus Millar’s Schweich Lectures in Biblical Archaeology, delivered in 2010 at the British Academy, this book offers an amazingly wide-ranging image of the groups inhabiting ‘the Roman Near East’ in late antiquity, with particular attention given not only to the Syriac sources, but also to Jewish and Samaritan history and texts.
Woven into this compendium is a restatement of Millar’s long-held and still controversial argument regarding the role of Greek language and culture in the Near East. Following a series of articles, as well as sections of his A Greek Roman Empire (2006), this book tackles the largely rhetorical question, ‘Was it the case that … the Greek culture, which was expressed both in public language and in architecture, should be seen as a façade, masking the continued presence of a population speaking a Semitic language inherited from the period before Alexander’s conquests?’ (pp. 14–15). The question is rhetorical because we already know Millar’s answer, which is here systematically set out in three long chapters and a short epilogue.
