Rome in the East <\/a> ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=leithartcom-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0415243572\")
is a treasure trove. Instead of telling the story of Rome from an occidental standpoint, he goes east and looks back. What does Roman history look like from Arabia, Syria, Edessa, India? One of his remarkable conclusions is that before the triumph of the west the west had itself been conquered by the east. <\/p>\n Commenting on Constantine\u2019s found of Constantinople, he observes: <\/p>\n
\u201cthe ultimate outcome of Virgil\u2019s great epic lay many hundreds of years after the death of Virgil himself, an outcome which neither Homer nor virgil could ever have conceived \u2013 but which both epic poets would have appreciated. For it was a latter-day Aeneas, the Emperor Constantine, who led the descendants of Virgil\u2019s Trojan heroes away from a crumbling ramshackle Rome back to the East to found the New Rome at Byzantium, on the opposite shores of the Sea of Marmara to Troy. Troy had achieved its greatest triumph. More than anything else, the story of Rome is a story of the East more than of the West: a triumph of the East.\u201d Through Christianity especially, \u201cthe East took over Rome: one of the many ironies of our story is that the city of Rome itself was to end up as Rome\u2019s own imperial outpost, a Roman backwater.\u201d <\/p>\n
Along the way to this conclusion, he describes many fascinating and unexpected connections between Rome and the East: A Roman trading colony on the south coast of India near Pondicherry; the Romano-Buddhist art style from the northwest Indian region of Gandhara, wiht its Buddhist substance but eerily classical style; the Arab emperors of Rome, including Philip the Arab, reputed by Eusebius to have been the first Christian emperor; the temple complex at ancient Heliopolis, Baalbek, where there is evidence for eight different cults, bridging the east-west divide \u2013 including Baal, the Sun, Jupiter (who was identified with Hadad), Venus (identified with Atargatis), Mercury, and the Muses. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Warwick Ball\u2019s Rome in the East is a treasure trove. Instead of telling the story of Rome from an occidental standpoint, he goes east and looks back. What does Roman history look like from Arabia, Syria, Edessa, India? One of his remarkable conclusions is that before the triumph of the west the west had itself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"yoast_head":"\n
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