Christ-Loving Antioch Became Desolate: Sculpture, Earthquakes, and Late Antique Urban Life

Earthquakes of cataclysmic proportions feature with notorious frequency in both scholarly and popular accounts of the late antique decline and fall of cities in the eastern Mediterranean, not least because of their widespread occurrence in the contemporary textual sources, as well as the region’s more recent history of seismic disasters.¹ The powerful image of earthquakes toppling temples and monuments has indeed proven to have a remarkably strong and enduring influence on scholars in their attempts to explain the processes of ruination and transformation that affected Classical cityscapes during Late Antiquity, even if texts and archaeological finds rarely match up in