The asceticism of women was genuine during the period of late Antiquity. The few sources that are at our disposal reveal their energy, their character, their exceptional cultural creative power that differed from society, their ability to make innovative decisions on their own, and even their courage to embark on enormous economic operations that had an impact on society itself and that did not comply with then the current standards and content. Making use of prosopographical research we intend to demonstrate that female hermitage was a novelty and not a more radical kind of virginity and this in light of the fact that monasticism used to be based on virginity and widowhood.
The following paper proposes, for the fi rst time, an exhaustive overview over the situation of the late-Hellenistic local elites of the Syrian tetrapolis (Antiochia, Seleucia, Apamea, Laodicea), a fi rst part concerning the late-Seleucid situation from the death of Antiochus IV onwards, a second one the movemented decades of the Armenian, Parthian and Roman Republican era. Both parts fi rst analyse the general political situation of the Syrian elites on the basis of our literary and numismatical sources in order to sketch the interaction between the respective communal and the imperial level, then systematically discuss the prosopographical evidence.
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