Introduction

The Second Council of Ephesus and the Council of Chalcedon, called two years later, are inextricably linked, by their historical context, in their theological conclusions (in that the one was called with the deliberate intention of annulling measures taken at the other, and of having a new definition of faith adopted), and in the manuscript tradition through which the record of most of their proceedings is preserved. The Council of Ephesus, called by Theodosius II when, as it turned out by accident, his reign had little more than a year to run, represented an emphatic victory for the ‘miaphysite’ (one-nature) tendency in the Greek Church. The presidency was given to Dioscorus, bishop of Alexandria; Theodoret, as the most prominent remaining proponent of a ‘dyophysite’ (two-nature) Christology not in exile, was excluded; and the first session, held on 8 August 449, rehearsed in immense detail the record of proceedings against the extreme-miaphysite archimandrite Eutyches in the autumn of 448, and of hearings called to hear disputes over that record earlier in 449, before absolving Eutyches, and declaring the deposition of Flavian, bishop of Constantinople.

It is the quotation in the acts of the first session at Chalcedon, called by the new emperor Marcian, of this part of the proceedings, incorporating verbatim re-quotations of the records of the hearings held between autumn 448 and spring 449, that preserves for us the record in Greek of the first session at Ephesus, ending with the written affirmations (‘subscriptions’ – ὑπογραφαί) of 140 participants.

Few collections of papers could claim to represent more emphatically than this one does a whole series of changes of focus which mark the evolution of ancient history over the last few decades. First, it is based almost entirely on documents, whether preserved on perishable materials or on stone; the literary texts transmitted in manuscript, and printed since the early modern period, on which our conceptions of the ancient world were previously based, have receded into the background. Second, its focus is on the eastern Mediterranean, taking the ‘Near East’ in a relatively broad sense, including both Anatolia and Egypt. Th ird, while not exploring Hellenism in the sense of the period between Alexander and Actium, it takes as its starting point the dominant Greek culture of the eastern Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Fourth, its essential focus is on language – or co-existing or competing languages. That is to say both, on the one hand, that it explores the potential of original documents to represent for us the realities of the societies by and from which they were generated, and that, at the same time, it accepts always that a ‘document’ is, just like a literary text, a construct following rules and conventions – or obeying a ‘rhetoric’ of genre – and is not, and cannot be, a simple mirror of ‘how it really was’. But the focus on language also means something more complex still, namely the situations which evolve when more than one language is (in some sense) current within a particular society.