Page 117 - Edessa, 'The Blessed City'-01, by J. B. Segal (Oxford, 1970). Chapters 1-3

io4 THE BLESSING OF JESUS AND THE TRIUMPH OF CHRISTIANITY
sympathies of Jews were held to be with the Persians during the wars of
that period. Theodore,1 brother of Emperor Heraclius, expelled the Persians
from Edessa. Our chronicler continues:
Then he ordered the Jews who were at Edessa to be killed, because they had helped the
Persians to do harm to the Christians. And when he began to kill them, one of them
arose and came to Heraclius [at Telia] and . . . asked him to spare them and treat them
kindly. And Heraclius wrote to [his brother] . . . and when the letter arrived he desisted
from them.2
Nevertheless, although their lives had been spared, the Jews of Edessa were
obliged to choose between baptism and exile to Persia.

The Jews appear only at intervals, and in a minor role in the histories of
this period; the pagans lurk in the shadows, vague and indeterminate. With
the death of Julian, the star of heathendom had set in the Byzantine empire.
Pagan cults survived sullenly at Rome and Athens. They had a following at
Beirut and Alexandria, largely with the connivance of local officials; and even
at Constantinople itself a few individuals contrived to perform their devotions
to the gods surreptitiously. In Mesopotamia the Beduins carried out sacrifices
—sometimes, the story went, human sacrifices—to the planet Balthi or 'Uzzai,
and their womenfolk poured out libations to the goddess on the roof-tops.3
The great centre of paganism in north-west Mesopotamia was Harran.
While Edessa vaunted its fame as the champion of the universalist creed of
Christianity, Harran clung the more obstinately to its local cults of Sin, the
moon, and the other planets. In 363 Julian came to pay his respects at its
shrines. The episode of the young philosopher-emperor, who cast himself in
the role of a latter-day Alexander, but met his death in battle against the
Persians, made a vivid impression on his contemporaries. It added fuel to the
conflict between Harran and Edessa. 'He delayed [at Harran]', Ammian tells
us, 'for necessary preparations and to offer sacrifices, according to the native
rites, to the Moon . . . before the altar with no witness present.' The story of
his visit was expanded with horrific but improbable detail by Theodoret,
some seventy years later. Certainly the Christian community of Harran
remained for long insignificant. We do not hear of a Bishop of Harran
before 361, when Barsai was transferred from Harran to Edessa—but Barsai
apparently had not ventured to reside at Harran. His successor as bishop of
that town, the abstemious Vitus, made little headway there. Egeria found it
wholly pagan, 'apart from a few clerics and holy monks'. In 449 this 'city of
pagans'4 required, we are told, a bishop of talent whose good works would
attract and win over the heathens. Instead, Hiba of Edessa appointed to the
see his nephew, Daniel, a young man of (it is alleged) loose morals. Daniel

1 His name is given as Theodoricus by some 2 Agapius (Mahbub) of Mabbog.
writers. a See p. 145 below. 4 Lit., 'Hellenes'.

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