Monsters in Mesopotamia: Edessa, Goths, and Roman Identity in Euphemia and the Goth and the Julian Romance

The late antique Mediterranean world was a time of great changes. The historiography of the time period is often divided geographically and linguistically, with the Latin West focusing on decline and rupture and the Greek East focusing on continuity and transformation. This paper examines Euphemia and the Goth and the Julian Romance, two Syriac texts from Edessa, a city in northern Mesopotamia on the Roman eastern frontier. Even though Edessa was situated on the borderlands of the Roman empire, these two texts engage in Roman imperial ideology and discourse in the late fifth and sixth centuries to critique Roman leadership and assert their own Roman identity as a “Rome” of the eastern empire. Using borderlands and “monster” theory, I argue that these texts portray Edessa as the exemplary model of Romanitas through their commitment to Roman law, justice, and pure Christianity and piety. This Roman identity is constructed against “barbarian” Goths, “monsters” of Syriac literature, who are represented as the antithesis of Roman values. In a time when Edessa’s Roman identity was in question by the imperial core, “Gothic” figures could serve as powerful rhetorical tools to critique the failures in the Roman West and the perceived “corruption” of Roman identity. I conclude that Edessa’s viewpoint shows the interconnectedness of the late antique world, too often broken by the historiographical divide.