Review: A State of Mixture. Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity, by Richard E. Payne

Richard E. Payne. A State of Mixture. Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian Political Culture in Late Antiquity . Transformation of the Classical Heritage, vol. 56. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. ISBN: 9780520286191. 301 pp. $95.00. A State of Mixture is a rich and complex study of the interweaving of Christian and Zoroastrian communities in late antique Iran. Payne draws on a wealth of sources, most notably East Syrian hagiography, providing a portrait of a “state of mixture” in place of older and misleading views of the two communities as discrete groups at perennial odds with each other. Payne shows how Christians constantly negotiated their position in the Sasanian state, repeatedly testing boundary lines and overlapping their communal identities with those of the Zoroastrian communities amongst whom they lived. State authorities used intercommunal boundaries to reinforce socioreligious and political norms and to foster the integration of Christians into their own, hierarchically organised cosmological project. Examining periods of apparently savage persecution and looking beyond the fervour and outrage of Christian martryological texts, Payne clearly demonstrates the fluidity of the Sasanian state and the deep integration of Christian nobles within its structures, providing a context for efforts by the last major Sasanian king, Khusrau II, to appropriate the traditional role of the Roman emperor as the touchstone for the world's Christians after Iran's victories at the turn of the seventh century. Payne organises his study into five self-contained chapters that lead the reader chronologically and geographically through the late antique Iranian landscape, from the persecutions of Shapur II …