The year of the four emperors in AD 193 shows the cosmopolitan interconnectedness of the Roman Empire, yet scholarship has long framed the Severan dynasty in a narrative of descent stressing their North African and in particular their Syrian origins. The contributions of this volume question this conventional approach and instead examine more closely actual Severan policy in the Near East to detect potential local connections that determined this policy as well as how local communities and elites reacted to it. The volume thus explores new beginnings and old connections in the Roman Near East.

Contributions by: Hadrien Bru, Giorgos Mitropoulos, Ann-Christine Sander, Udo Hartmann, Kostas Buraselis, Giusto Traina, Simon Lentzsch, Babett Edelmann-Singer, Ziad Sawaya, Werner Eck, Riccardo Bertolazzi, Frank Schleicher, Lucinda Dirven, Susana Lusnia