293. The Gaza Erotic Literature Festival: Byzantine Gaza (Part 3)

Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnim. And me, William Durrenport. So as our series on the history of Gaza progresses, we're now going to look at one of the great golden ages of the area, and that is late antiquity. Now that Actually, is a period when most of the Mediterranean world was experiencing a dark age of decline and disintegration.

But, conversely, in Gaza, this was a time of great prosperity and intellectual flourishing. For even as the Romans were abandoning Britain and the Western Empire bled under the assaults of the Goths and the Vandals and the Huns and all those sorts of peoples. Gaza improbably perhaps found a new role for itself as a centre of literary and intellectual achievement, as well as being a major port, famous for the export of frankincense, perfume, and sweet wine. This is going to be a very different episode from the succession of catastrophes which we went through as the Assyrians and the Babylonians and the Persians and the Greeks all came and smashed up Gaza, because this is going to be a period of stability, prosperity, and growth.

And here to tell us about it is another great friend of the show and one of my favourite historians, Peter Saris, professor of late antique, medieval, and Byzantine studies at the University of Cambridge, and author of Justinian, Emperor. Soldier and Saint. Peter, so good to have you back. I mean, you were brilliant talking about Helena and Theodora, and I love, you know, very strong women, as as anyone who listens to this podcast knows. We'd never ever heard that before, Alita.

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