page_title: Berytus
section_title: Early Byzantine rule
hierarchical_section_title: Berytus / History / Early Byzantine rule
caption_attribution_description: English: the roman baths garden in beirut
context_page_description: Berytus, briefly known as Laodicea in Phoenicia or Laodicea in Canaan from the 2nd century to 64 BCE, was the ancient city of Beirut from the Hellenistic period through the Roman and Early Byzantine period/late antiquity. The city had been rebuilt by the Seleucids in the 2nd century BCE over the ruins of an older settlement centred on a Phoenician port dating back to Iron Age III and Persian periods. Berytus became a Roman colonia that would be the center of Roman presence in the eastern Mediterranean shores south of Anatolia. The veterans of two Roman legions under Augustus were established in the city, that afterward quickly became Romanized and was the only fully Latin-speaking city in the Syria-Phoenicia region until the fourth century. Although Berytus was an important city, Tyre was made the capital of the Roman province of Phoenicia. "Of the great law schools of Rome, Constantinople, and Berytus", the law school of Berytus stood "pre-eminent". The Code of Justinian was mostly created in this school.
context_section_description: Under the Eastern Roman Empire, some intellectual and economic activities in Berytus continued to flourish for more than a century, even if the Latin language started to be replaced by the Greek language.
  However, in the sixth century a series of earthquakes demolished most of the temples of Heliopolis (actual Baalbek) and destroyed the city of Berytus, leveling its famous law school and killing nearly 30,000 inhabitants. Furthermore, the ecumenical Christian councils of the fifth and sixth centuries AD were unsuccessful in settling religious disagreements within the surviving community.
  Berytus became a "Christian See" at an early date, and was a suffragan of Tyre in "Phoenicia Prima", a province of the "Patriarchate of Antioch". In antiquity its most famous bishop was Eusebius, afterwards Bishop of Nicomedia, the courtier-prelate and strong supporter of Arianism in the fourth century....In 450 AD Berytus obtained from Theodosius II the title of metropolis, with jurisdiction over six sees taken from Tyre; but in 451 AD the "Council of Chalcedon" restored these to Tyre, leaving, however, to Berytus its rank of metropolis (Mansi, VII, 85–98). Thus, from 451 AD Berytus was an exempt metropolis depending directly on the Patriarch of Antioch.
  This turbulent Byzantine period weakened the Romanized (and fully Christian) population and made it easy prey to the newly converted Muslim Arabs of the Arabian Peninsula. Roman Berytus -reduced to the size of a village- fell to the Arabs in 635 AD.
caption: Roman Ruins in the "Roman Baths Garden"
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