Chapter 1 examines urban development in the predominately Judaean parts of Palestine. It demonstrates that urban development involved the gradual administrative, physical, and cultural transformation of Hellenistic settlements. Elite interests fueled urban development, but involved more than just consumption and exploitation. In Jerusalem, urban development stimulated trade and technological development, created jobs, and bolstered the pilgrimage economy centered on the Temple. The pace of urban development in the Galilee was slower than is usually presumed. Archaeological evidence shows that Tiberias witnessed considerable transformations in the first half of the first century CE, but Sepphoris did not become a proper city (polis) until the second half of that century. In order to complicate the assumptions about urban exploitation of rural producers, this chapter calls attention to the proliferation and relative stability of Galilean villages. It also highlights the diverse economic activities in semi-urban district centers like Magdala. Although most elites lived in cities, some resided in these district centers.

Chapter 3 addresses taxation in Early Roman Palestine. It divides taxes into direct taxes (tributes), which were levied by the imperial state, and indirect taxes (tolls, customs duties, sales taxes, etc.), which were more often organized at the provincial and municipal levels. The structure of direct taxation changed repeatedly in the different regions of Early Roman Palestine. In general, the rates of Roman direct taxes were relatively low compared to those of other fiscal regimes. Moreover, censuses brought some regulation to the collection of taxes and thus helped to prevent abuses by officials. While direct taxes were transmitted to Rome, their collection was supervised by councils of local elites. For many Judaeans, indirect taxes were much more exacting. These taxes were levied by local elites and collected, often with little regulation, by tax-farmers and their agents. In addition to their political and economic power over the institutions of taxation, local elites were also involved in market oversight.

Chapter 4 examines the Jerusalem Temple as an economic organization whose membership consisted of priestly elites. By appealing to other temples of the Roman East as comparanda, it demonstrates that elite temple functionaries simultaneously sustained their ancestral religious traditions and facilitated economic integration. As overseers of worship, Judaean elites had access to sacred land and sacred money and received other offerings. In particular, Judaean priestly elites were the beneficiaries of the Hasmonean institutions of tithes and temple taxes. Such exactions were authorized through scriptural interpretation, but were also typical at Graeco-Roman temples more broadly. To many Judaeans, however, they appeared distinctly exploitative once priestly elites became incomparably wealthy and powerful in the Early Roman period.

Material culture is the focus of the chapter 5. After a brief methodological discussion of the “archaeology of class,” where class is a subjective sociocultural category, this chapter examines material and literary evidence for class distinctions in tableware, oil lamps, dress, and burial customs. Each of these case studies shows that elites stimulated supraregional trade and local production by seeking out imported luxury items and new types of local products. At the same time that Judaean elites developed a distinctive class culture that incorporated Graeco-Roman influences, Judaean nonelites produced new forms of utilitarian items. The agency of nonelites in generating a distinctive class culture was generally inhibited, however, by their limited economic resources. These dramatic changes in the use of material culture, which began around 20 BCE and continued into the first century CE, were at least partially a function of Herod’s building projects and urban development.

Byzantium has been pushed around a lot. Most overtly, as told in Chapter 1 below, it has been the target of western vilification and polemic starting from medieval times, going strong through the Enlightenment, and reaching all the way down to the twentieth century. Recent efforts to rehabilitate it have tended more to push back against bias than develop grounds for positive appreciation and engagement. But prim protests against bad words (such as “decline”) will not spark interest among non-Byzantinists. More invidiously, as explained in Chapter 2, history has been carved up into periods in ways that often work to the disadvantage of Byzantium. For example, Byzantium has been artificially cut off from its Roman roots. Moreover, efforts by western medieval scholars to secure as western possessions the early Church Fathers (i.e., the Patristic period), the major Councils that defined the faith, and Justinian's codification of Roman law created another artificial scheme that left behind a rump Byz-antium, starting in the seventh century. This appropriation has been revived recently in the invention of “late antiquity” as an (alleged) period and field of study.

This book exposes the history and politics of these biases but it also aims to lay a foundation for the positive study of Byzantium by historians and classicists. In doing so it proposes a long view of Byzantium, which begins in the early Roman empire, encompasses all the creative forces of the centuries after the foundation of Constantinople, and extends to the modern period. This is a Byzantium unbound by the interests of other cultures and fields of study that would cut it down to size to suit themselves. The aim of this book is not to advocate that such a “long view” be enshrined in textbooks, courses, and our general periodization. It is, instead, a thought-experiment in seeing the ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions as flowing together, without great ruptures, to form this one particular civilization, and only this one. It presents Byzantium as an unparalleled vantage-point from which we can look back to ancient history and forward to modernity, as well as west to the origins of Europe and east to the Islamic world, without great obstructions in one's field of vision. It is only a start: much more can, should, and hopefully will be said.