The Augustan Empire 43 BC

am much indebted to Dr S. Alcock (Reading) for many helpful comments and suggestions, and especially for directing my attention to a number of useful books and articles.

PI. Criti. 11 ib.

641

Map i j. Grccce and the Aegean.

southern extension into Lycia and Cilicia Tracheia, a more continental type of climate takes over, with long severe winters and summers no less dry than those of Greece and the islands. Grain and the vine could be grown, but not the olive; cattle and above all sheep were the staple product, with minerals a potential source of wealth; textiles of all kinds were among the most important products of the entire peninsula. The Greek language had been carried from the mainland and the islands to the west, north and south coasts of Asia Minor by waves of colonists in the tenth and then the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., and hellenization had continued in the wake of Alexander's conquests. In the Anatolian plateau its advance was slow; Lydian, Mysian, Celtic, above all Phrygian and Lycian survived in the villages and tribes of the hinterland, the last two appearing even on inscribed monuments; but the Attalid kings promoted and consolidated Greek art and culture in the west, in what was to become in 153 в.с. the Roman province of Asia, making their capital, Pergamum, an outstanding example of the hellenistic city. Even in central Asia Minor cities with names such as Apamea and Antioch attest the activity of Alexander's successors as creators of poleis. Deve­loped in mainland Greece as a natural product of divisive geography, they proved a means of self-government, a source of military security, a centre of exchange, a focus of religion, a fosterer of education and culture. The wealth, power and self-confidence of the city-dwellers made them people to emulate in Asia Minor. At the same time the strength of the way of life and the institutions that were giving way to urbanization there should not be underrated. A tribal or village organization, reinforced by a common cult, suited sparse populations isolated in hilly country or scattered over a homogeneous and inhospitable plateau and assembling only occasionally to exchange produce at religious centres like Hierapolis in Phrygia and Comana in Pontus or at other markets on the main routes through the peninsula. The differences between the three regions, mainland Greece and the islands, western Asia Minor, and the Anatolian plateau, remained clear and are only lightly masked by the Greek terminology and nomenclature that literacy and public life were imposing.

The manner and timing of the Roman acquisition of these regions was another important variable: mainland Greece fell first, in 146 B.C., after half a century of Roman protestations that it was to ensure Greek freedom that Roman troops had crossed the Adriatic, and after a bitter struggle that ended with many cities deprived of their freedom. In Asia Minor the first acquisition was the bequest of 133, the Attalid kingdom; Bithynia and Pontus were annexed, the first another bequest, the second after the wars with Mithridates the Great, seven decades later. Central Anatolia, as its geography made natural, was treated in the first century as a military problem under the name of Provincia Cilicia: a base for action against pirate strongholds in the mountains and a means of safeguarding the route from western Asia Minor to Syria. The islands of Crete and Cyprus were allowed to survive for longer outside direct control, Cyprus until P. Clodius Pulcher passed a bill for its annexation in 5 8 B.C., Crete in part at least until the end of the Republic.

The Romans were heirs of Alexander and his successors, and benefited from the urbanization achieved under them. In Greece proper there was little more to be done in that direction: it was more a question of preserving the poleis without which control of the empire, for a ruling power whose resources were stretched to the utmost, would be close to impossible in the absence of any alternative organization. Greece was in economic decline in relation to Asia Minor, with its superior fertility and resources. The lot ofRoman governors of Asia was easy, and tempting to the unscrupulous. Even in spite of their greed, urbanization and prosperity would have prevailed, if this area and Bithynia-Pontus had been left in peace. Instead, Greece and western Asia Minor were involved in foreign wars, directly between 88 and 84, indirectly from 74 to 63, and disastrously caught up in civil struggles from 49 to 31 B.C.

II. THE TRIUMVIRAL PERIOD³

The Greek East suffered more in the thirteen years of intermittent civil war that followed Caesar's death than in the swift campaigns that made him supreme. In Asia Minor devastation of the countryside, destruction of cities and their inhabitants, the imposition of fines and exceptional levies came successively at the hands of three parties. First the republi­cans: late in 43 Brutus forced Lycia to contribute to his war chest, stormed Xanthus, and, together with Cassius, robbed Rhodes (in spite of a plea from Cassius' old teacher Archelaus), Tarsus, and other cities. Client kings also suffered. Ariobarzanes II Eusebes Philoromaios of Cappadocia was executed, Deiotarus of Galatia brought to join the Liberators and send cavalry to Philippi under his secretary Amyntas. Even after the triumvirs' victories at Philippi and Naulochus, Sex. Pompeius' raiding of 35 damaged the area round the Propontis. A second factor was the Parthian invasion under Q. Labienus, 40—38: they advanced along the highway from Syria to Asia and, in spite of resistance from the brigand chief Cleon of Gordiucome, plundered the cities of Caria, notably Mylasa and Aphrodisias, where sanctuaries and private property alike were looted. Finally, Antony: on his arrival in Asia Minor in 40 his first demand was the same ten years' worth of taxes that had been produced for Brutus and Cassius. After Philippi there was the

³ For these events, see App. BCiv. i.57ff; Dio xlviii.26-54; xlvii.24-41; xlix.19-35.

disbandment of thirty legions to be paid for, and in 39—38 and 36—34 campaigns against the Parthians to be financed. The period ended with Antony's mobilization of the East against Octavian, when even the sacred grove of Asclepius on Cos was cut down to supply dmber for ships. The damage armies could do was limited and business carried on; but the effects of uncertainty on the availability of credit, cash loans and all long-term enterprise must be taken into account.

By the Treaty of Brundisium (40 в.с.) Greece from Scodra south­wards was under the control of Antony (although in 39 the Peloponnese was abortively assigned to Sex. Pompeius), and so was the whole of Anatolia. Antony exercised patronage in the area, but so did Octavian, granting citizenship to individuals such as Seleucus of Rhosus,⁴ who continued as his proteges, and extending the privileges of cities. Through a well-placed intermediary who became the city's favourite son, Octavian's freedman C. Iulius Zoilus, 'Caesarian' Aphrodisias secured a decree of the Senate and a law of the People guaranteeing freedom, immunity from taxation, and enhanced asylum rights; an attempt was also to be made to recover looted property.⁵

The area under discussion falls into three regions. Rulers confronted with the problem of controlling each would be guided by political, military and economic factors. Mainland Greece, Crete and the Cyclades in political terms were well able to govern themselves; economically the mainland at least was an area in decline and depopulation, unlikely to make much contribution to the cost of running it and very unlikely to present any threat to security. Next, western Asia Minor and the adjacent islands: the provinces of Asia and Bithynia were long habituated to obedience as the subjects of Lydian, Persian and hellenistic monarchs; they, like the more remote southern coast, Pamphylia and Cilicia Pedias, had enormous economic possibilities: two-thirds of the cities coining in Asia Minor under Augustus and Tiberius were in the province of Asia. Third, the Anatolian plateau, politically and economically underdeve­loped, in spite of Pompey's city foundations in Pontus, was daunting and as yet unprofitable. The three regions were accordingly handled differ­ently both by Antony and by his successors in power, the emperors.

It was for sound political, economic and military reasons, then, that only Asia, Bithynia and Cilicia Pedias were governed as Roman provinces between 42 and 31 в.с. The rest of Asia Minor was subject to skilfully chosen client princes⁶ (Lycia was an autonomous federation of

⁴ EJ² 301. ⁵ Reynolds 1982 (в 270) 7-12.

⁶ For the vicissitudes of dependent rulers, see Magie 1950 (e 855) 427-515; Bowersock 1965 (c 39) 42—61; Jones 1971 (d 96) 110-214; Sullivan 1978 (e 878) 732—98; 1980 (e 879) 913—30; 1980 (e 880); stemmata at Sullivan 1980 (e 879) 928 and 1980 (e 880) 1136; Braund 1984 (c 254) for individuals. For Strabo's insight into the value of client kingdoms, that their rulers, unlike Roman governors, were always on the spot and armed, see xiv.5-5-9 (671c).

twenty-three cities⁷). They, not Rome, had the burden of defending and administering it and the duty of supporting their patrons, who could give, take, or trim their kingdoms as he chose. On Deiotarus' death in 40 his son Castor received Galatia and the interior of Paphlagonia; Deiotarus' share of Pontus, the coastal area, went to Darius, son of Caesar's enemy Pharnaces and grandson of Mithridates the Great; Amyntas received northern Pisidia, and Polemon I, son of Zeno of Laodicea, who had resisted Labienus, took Lycaonia, Iconium and the adjacent parts of Cilicia Tracheia; Pedias, like Cyprus, passed into Cleopatra's hands, Olba, west of Pedias, was ruled by the priesdy house of the Teucrids and the kingdom of the Amanus in the east was left under its hereditary ruler Tarcondimotus.

Antony rewarded success. On Castor's death in 37, Galada, Lycaonia and the Pamphylian coast were added to Amyntas' domain; Castor's son Deiotarus Philadelphus received Paphlagonia. Polemon, having to surrender Lycaonia to Amyntas and his possessions in Tracheia to Cleopatra, was given in return Pontus beyond the Iris river, with Phazemonids, Armenia Minor and Colchis; while Archelaus, son of the hereditary priest-ruler of Comana, acquired Cappadocia on the depar­ture or death of its king, Ariobarzanes' brother Ariarathes X. Cleopatra was also given part of Crete, although Antony claimed to have found a Caesarian decree freeing it.⁸ The remaining cides were left to govern themselves and their territories.

III. THE AUGUSTAN RESTORATION⁹

Octavian's esdmate of the eastern regions that came under his sway after Acdum and the decisions he took about their future government were based in part on autopsy, as he passed through Asia Minor in 30 в.с. and wintered on Samos, while his further journey to Italy was broken at Corinth. Under the considered arrangements established in 27 only minor adjustments were made to the overall system devised by Antony, with two areas now brought under direct Roman control: Crete (only Lappa and Cydonia keeping their freedom) and Cyprus, which had no privileged cides.

There were further distinctions to be made: were any of the provincial areas to have Augustus as their governor, with his legate acting on the spot, or were they to be left to other senators selected on seniority and by the lot? Which of these latter, the 'public' provinces, were to have ex- consuls as their governors? The answers were determined by past tradition, present and especially military needs, and the princeps' own

⁷ Strab. xiv.).}~9 (66₅cf). ⁸ Dio xi.ix.;2.4f; Cic. Phil, n.97, with Sanders 1982 (e 871) 5.

⁹ See especially Strab. viii—xvn (552—840c), and Dio u-lvi.

security. All the areas were entrusted to governors selected by seniority and the lot except Cyprus. That was a place where a governor might see action, unruly perhaps after its second takeover by Rome; but the trouble it could cause was minor and in 23 or 22 it was returned to the lot, an unpromising assignment for its proconsuls; the copper-mines were to be handed over on lease to a client monarch, Herod of Judaea.¹⁰ Even Macedonia was normally to be a public province, although legati Augusti are also found there.¹¹ Greece was detached from Macedonia in 27 and became the separate senatorial province of Achaea, including Aetolia, Acarnania, part of Epirus, and the Cyclades, probably with Corinth as the main seat of government. In spite of cultural and economic ties with Athens, the islands and Asia Minor, Crete was united with Cyrene as another province for proconsuls of praetorian status. Not Cnossus, which had had land worth 12,000 sesterces a year assigned to Capua in compensation for territory lost to veterans in 36 and which now itself became a colony,¹² but pro-Roman Gortyn, in the south of the island and more convenient for commuting governors, was the administrative centre. In our second region, western Asia Minor, Bithynia likewise and the parts of Pontus that still belonged to the province were, assigned to another proconsul of praetorian status, but wealthy Asia was declared consular and in 27 became one of the two plum posts that the Senate could offer ex-consuls, the other being Africa, which had a legion but fewer amenities. The Lycian federation, whose prudent administration was admired by Strabo,¹³ had earned and retained nominal autonomy. The federation employed a sophisticated system of proportional rep­resentation on its administrative bodies, the electoral assembly and council.

How much was meant by the freedom accorded to leagues like the Lycian and that of the free Laconians (Eleutherolacones), to whole islands like Corcyra, to individual cides like Delphi, Athens and Nicopolis (some, like Mytilene,¹⁴ were in possession of treaties too), is a quesdon. Theoretically enclaves exempt from the governor's jurisdic­tion, they still had to reckon with the emperor. Augustus intervened in Athens and Sparta, where down to about 2 b.c. he had relied on a partisan, C. Iulius Eurycles, son of a privateer, to guide the state in his own and Rome's interests; he actually deprived Thessaly and Cyzicus of freedom altogether. Cyzicus lost its freedom for five years for executing Romans, though a proconsul of Asia declared Romans subject to local

Dio Liv.4.1; Joseph. AĴ xiv. 128.

Tarius Rufus, cos. 16 b.c.: EJ² 268; L. Piso, cos. 15 b.c.: EJ² 199 with R. Syme, Aktenits VI. Intern. Kong, fur gr. undlat. Epigr. Miincben tf?2, Vestigia xvii (Munich, 1973) 595f. Cf. ch. 10, n. 9, ch. 134, p. 567.

Dio хых.14.5; for date and interpretation, sec Rigsby 1976 (e 867) 322-30.

Strab. xiv.3.2 (664c). ¹⁴ EJ² 307.

law on Chios. Other free cities learnt the lesson: in 6 в.с. Cnidus recognized the princeps' jurisdiction in a local homicide case.¹⁵ The governors of unarmed provinces spent much time on jurisdiction, going on circuit round the assize centres (although no circuit is attested in Crete); in Asia the task was alleviated by having the conventus centres on the coast or on the highway that led from Ephesus over the plateau to Cilicia.

Considering the third region, Octavian no more than Antony took it to be ready for direct Roman rule. Already during the tour of 30—29 he had made it clear that the dispositions of 36 would not necessarily be changed, although there had to be adjustments and it took a decade to achieve stability. Loyalty to Rome and himself brought rewards, but loyalty to Antony was not an unforgivable offence; indeed, it promised well, if it could be transferred to the new master. Amyntas of Galatia, like Deiotarus Philadelphus of Paphlagonia and Cleon of Gordiucome, who was promoted to the priesthood of Comana Pondca, secured confirma­tion by changing sides before Actium, and received part of Cilicia Tracheia. But Archelaus of Cappadocia was not displaced and, despite internal efforts to unseat him, retained his underdeveloped but lucrative and strategically important kingdom until a.d. 17, taking over in Tracheia after Amyntas' death. Polemon I of Pontus lost Armenia Minor to Artavasdes, a displaced claimant to the Parthian throne, but was to remain the chief support of Rome in the north of Asia Minor. He kept the southern shore of the Black Sea (an area that had been strengthened with settlements official and unofficial at Heraclea Pondca — a Caesarian venture that had not survived - and Sinope, which became Colonia lulia Felix in 47), Colchis, and the mines behind Pharnacea. Polemon was less successful in his charge of keeping the Bosporan kingdom on the northern side of the sea under Roman control, and perished there in 8 B.C. He was succeeded in his Anatolian possessions by his widow, Pythodoris of Tralles (she died in a.d. 7-8). In one of the marriages that created for Augustus a nexus of dynastic families and a supply of potential client rulers who were born to the job, Roman citizens, and educated at Rome, Pythodoris' daughter Antonia Tryphaena was given to King Cotys of Thrace — whose sons were also to become rulers in Asia Minor; she herself went on to marry Archelaus of Cappadocia.

Only in minor principalities did Octavian assert a conqueror's rights. At Heraclea Pontica, where Antony's nominee Adiatorix had massacred Caesar's colonists, there had to be a change, but the tyrant's elder son Dyteutes was given a compensating position, the priesthood left vacant through the untimely death of Cleon. Nicias the tyrant of Cos had to pay for his patron's depredations; at 'free' Tarsus the Antonian dynast and

¹⁴ Dio Liv.7.6, 23.7 (Cyzicus); EJ² 317 (Chios); 312 (Cnidus).

poet Beithys was replaced by Augustus' old tutor Athenodorus; and the kingdom of Hierapolis Castabala was kept from its natural heir, the son of the late Tarcondimotus Philantonius, undl 20 B.C. The same year saw Augustus achieving a stable settlement of Commagene, probably at his third attempt. The regime of the new ruler and his son Antiochus III survived until a.d. 17, like that of Archelaus and Tarcondimotus Philopator. Archelaus' kingdom was enlarged in 20 в.с. by the addition of Armenia Minor on the death of its ruler, and the Teucrids of Olba, the Cilician city devoted to Zeus, now resumed the priestly and secular power that their forbear, Aba the protege of Antony, had lost.

The core of the system was the Galatian kingdom, for its size, and because the main route from Asia to Syria passed through it. Not far to the south of that route was the untamed mountain area of Pisidia, which disjoined the plateau from Pamphylia. Amyntas lost his life carrying out the duties of his position. The Homanadenses of Pisidia captured and killed him, and by the end of 25 в.с. Augustus had created a third province in the peninsula, Galatia, of which only a part was inhabited by the Gallic tribes of the Tectosages and Tolistobogii (west of the Halys) and Trocmi (east of the river). The unwieldy kingdom was incorporated wholesale, with the exception of central Tracheia. Galatia like all newly acquired provinces was under the charge of Augustus, who sent a legate to deal with his new responsibility. M. Lollius had not yet held the consulship, but some later governors under Augustus were to be of consular rank and until a.d. 6 the province probably had a garrison of one legion (VII Macedonica) or even two.[779]

The particularly dangerous area of Pisidia was put under guard in 25 B.C. by the foundation of six veteran colonies, the chief being Pisidian Antioch. In 6 B.C. a road was constructed, the Via Sebaste, to link them, and probably within the next two or three years (rather than beforehand) the forty-four castella of the Homanadenses were captured by the distinguished governor of Galatia P. Sulpicius Quirinius, and the tribe broken up. It was not a complete pacification of southern Asia Minor: a rising was put down in a.d. 6 but Quirinius had done the main work and it was not necessary to put the province under another consular governor, as far as is known, until Cn. Domitius Corbulo took command under Nero.[780]

When in 6 в.с. Deiotarus Philadelphus or his heir died, not only eastern Paphlagonia but Phazemonitis was joined to it. With the accession three years later of the region south of Phazemonitis and east of Galatia (including the city of Sebastopolis) another district hitherto under a dynast came into the province, making it the same size as Asia and twice that of Bithynia. The following year Amasia too passed from dynastic control into the province of Pontus, but eastern Pontus remained under the widow of Polemon I.

These were acute administrative decisions, taken some in the first months after the victory at Actium, others in response to sudden crises, others again after mature reflection. As the responsibility of one man and his advisers they may be considered as part of a policy, that of the gradual advance of direct Roman rule, when that was safe and profitable. But these decisions did not themselves solve the political, social and economic problems that Octavian inherited from the period of the revolution. Overall it is true to say that Roman rule was not popular in the Greek-speaking provinces and many communities (Athens is a single but the most distinguished example) had three times committed them­selves to the losing side in civil war. Economic problems stemmed in part from these wars and, in Greece especially, from the Actium campaign — Plutarch's great-grandfather used to tell how the entire male citizen population of Chaeronea was carrying grain down to the sea under the whips of Antony's agents when the news of the battle arrived and 'saved the city'[781] — but also from longer term causes. If they could be relieved, political problems might also diminish, but there was an irreducible dissonance between the realistic, power-orientated Roman view of the empire and the idea of Greek poleis as to their position in the world. In a work that can be dated nearly as late as a century after Augustus' death Plutarch had to warn his Greek readers to forget what their ancestors had achieved as sovereign peoples in the Persian Wars of the fifth century в.с.[782] The regime of Augustus did not succeed in putting an end to anti-Roman feeling and prophecies that foretold the end of Roman rule, but here again, although loyalty was rewarded (Hybreas, the rhetor of Mylasa who had resisted Labienus, won Roman citizenship and a high priesthood of Augustus, and the descendants of Zeno of Laodicea have been seen benefiting from his staunchness), Augustus did his best for reconciliation, and his first acts included distributing grain to the cities and remitting their debts.[783]

Greece and Asia Minor were to continue to receive personal attention from the princeps and his family. In 23 в.с. Agrippa was in the East, able to take authoritative decisions, while Augustus himself returned in 21, carrying out an inspection of Asia Minor and spending the winters of 21—20 on Aegina and 20-19 ^on Samos. The East fell once again to Agrippa's care between 18 and 13 and this time he saw more of it than the island of Lesbos. But for a last-minute refusal it would have been in Tiberius' charge from 6 to i в.с. (he already knew Asia Minor from his mission to Armenia in 20 b.c.). As it was, Gaius Caesar was there from 1 b.c. until his death in a.d. 4. Thirteen years later came another Caesar with imperium maius, Germanicus.

Whether close at hand or in Rome or the western provinces, Augustus and his successors were accessible to embassies (for the cities in their own estimation were conducting diplomacy) bearing letters and oral requests, as they were also to private individuals. Strabo tells how in 29 B.C. the tiny fishing community of Gyarus went to make representations to their new ruler about its tax burdens.²¹ Before he had been established as princeps for more than a period of months Augustus had been approached in Spain by parties from all three regions with which we are concerned: the Thessalian League and Archelaus were engaged in litigation, as was Tralles, a city of Asia which had also suffered earthquake damage, along with Thyatira, Chios, and Laodicea. A personal friend, the eques Vedius Pollio, was sent to supervise the restoration of the cities of Asia.²²

Besides pleas for help and tax remission, questions of status and privilege were frequently the subject of embassies, as they had been (and were to remain) of concern to Aphrodisias: freedom, immunity, grant of a treaty, asylum rights; even, when communities of humbler status were involved, the right to become a polis at all and to possess the institutions of a city, above all a city council. Petitions of this last kind must have been heard with sympathy, the emperors inherited from the hellenistic monarchs a wish to be immortalized as founders and restorers of cities. In the time of Augustus himself many towns came to be called Caesarea, like Tralles, or -caesarea, like Hierocaesarea, in Lydia, once Hiera Kome (the sacred village), Sebastopolis, Sebaste, or -sebaste. Not all belong to areas under direct rule: they were creations of, or were renamed by, client rulers, like Caesarea Mazaca, capital of Cappadocia, Kayseri to this day, or Caesarea Anazarbus, refounded in 9 в.с. probably by Tarcondimotus Philopator.

Greece in particular needed help. It had not suffered as parts of Asia Minor had done, but its natural resources were more meagre and the wealth that comes from empire had eluded Athens and Sparta three centuries previously. The prospect before it was one of economic compeddon with regions such as Italy and Spain which were better able to produce the same crops and manufactures. Strabo on Arcadia, Messenia and Laconia repeats a story of depopuladon already told in general terms by earlier writers; he says that except for Tanagra and

Strab. x.j.i (485c).

Suet. Tib. 6; Strab. xn. (579c); Agathias, 11.17; Sutherland and Kraay 1975 (в 359) 1363.

Thespiae the cities of Boeotia (which had suffered heavily from Sulla and where the flooding of Lake Copais had played its part: a warning not to expect uniform conditions even over a single province) had become litde more than villages or (in the case of Oropus and two other cities) fallen into ruin. Arcadia, Aetolia and Acarnania are given over to ranching like Thessaly, and the copper-mines of Euboea had given out like the silver of Laurion. Looking back a century and a half later Pausanias wrote that the fortunes of Greece reached their nadir between the fall of Corinth and the reign of Nero.²³

It is not surprising, then, that Roman intervention bordered on the invasive. A special effort had been made at Caesar's instance to restore Corinth by colonizing what remained of the city destroyed in 146 b.c. with civilian settlers from Rome under the name Laus lulia Corinthien- sium. The colonists, including freedmen as they did, were not well thought of, but by 7-3 B.C. Corinth was once more in charge of the biennial Isthmian games, as well as celebrating quadrennial Caesareia; and the colonists were to become thoroughly assimilated.²⁴ Another colony was founded on the Gulf at Dyme at about the same time, reinforcing Pompey's settlement of ex-pirates there. But nearly three decades later a new colony at Patrae acquired territory across the water and incorporated villages close to it, so that Dyme was completely eclipsed. Patrae was to be the centre of the manufacture and export of flax.²⁵

But Augustus' personal creation in Greece was an entirely new city, Nicopolis, which he established near the site of the battle of Actium through a synoecism of surrounding peoples: Ambracia, Amphilochian Argos and Alyzia became dependencies. It was an artificial entity in an undeveloped area, and must have uprooted some of the country populadon, but the festival it celebrated brought visitors to its two harbours, business and revenue; it began to grow rapidly, a precocious harbinger of the Greco—Roman culture of the second century.²⁶

New and redeveloped cities could not usurp Athens' artisdc and intellectual primacy. That depended on her past, as current archaism in art, architecture and epigraphy showed. A mecca for students, tourists and devotees of religion, she also exported works of art and derived a

²⁵ Strab. viii.7.5-8.5 (388c); ix.2.16-18 (406c); x.i.8-10 (447c); cf. Polyb. xxxv1.17.5- Wallace 1979 (e 886) 173-8, confirms; Dr S. Alcock draws attention to Bintliff and Snodgrass 1985 (e 816); see also Baladie 1980 (e 812) 51 jf. But Dr Alcock rightly warns against taking what may be a literary topos, a moralizing tone, or disregard for contemporary Greeks too much on trust: she draws attention (e.g.) to N.K. Petrochilos, Roman Attitudes to the Creeks (Athens, 1974) 63-7; Pausanias: vii.17.i, with Baladie 1980 (e 812) 323.

Strab. viii.6.20 (578c); (381c); hellenization: [Dio Chrys.] xxxvii. 26.

Strab. viii.7.5 (387c).

²⁴ Strab. vii.7.6-7 (325c); N. Purcell, 'The Nicopolitan synoecism and Roman urban policy', Proceedings of the First international Symposium on Nicopolis (1984).

notorious income, the more valuable now that her silver-mines were exhausted, from selling her citizenship: 'Ten sacks of charcoal imported and you too will be a citizen; if you bring a pig as well you're Triptolemus himself', wrote Automedon.²⁷

Connexions with Athens, as well as with other Greek cities, were sought after by rulers within the Roman sphere of influence and by literary men. Antony had shown respect for Athens in spite of her support for Pompey and the Liberators. He and Octavia had been hailed as Theoi Euergetae and the aristocrats he had put in power in 38 B.C. were grateful for that and for his return of Aegina and other islands, with the revenue they brought.

Augustus' treatment of Athens was paternalistic. He showed his displeasure with her by residing at Aegina for part of a winter (22-21) and by freeing that island, and Eretria, from paying tribute to Athens. He also forbade the citizenship sales. The Athenians made up for the loss of revenue by granting foreigners the right to have statues erected in the city, but the statues were not always freshly carved for the individual honorand. For exceptional benefactions there were choicer honours: C. Iulius Nicanor of Hierapolis in Syria, a poet who restored the island of Salamis to Athens at his own expense, earned the titles of New Homer and New Themistocles. Embarrassing or invidious, they were later expunged.²⁸

In spite of periods of estrangement, Athens benefited from Augustus' generosity. Tesserae found in the city²⁹ reveal that she had been included in the grain distributions of 31 and Augustus' reign saw the reinstitution of Athens' embassy to Delphi, on a more modest scale than before, as the Dodecas. There was also considerable building activity, the restoration of sanctuaries in Attica, perhaps also in the Piraeus. In the city itself Augustus personally, on appeal from an embassy led by Eucles of Marathon, had by 20 B.C. accepted responsibility for the completion of the Roman market; in the old Agora Agrippa built his Odeion, moving the temple of Ares from outside the city into juxtaposition with the new building, and a new set of baths was constructed outside the old Agora. The overall conception and detail of the complex alike showed the influence of Roman ideas, in particular echoing the Forum Augusti and the temple of Mars Ultor; the buildings left litde room for the vigorous public activity of the past.³⁰

Augustus was not insensitive to Athenian susceptibilities. He was

Dio liv.7.if, with G.W. Bowersock, CQ NS 14 (1964) i24f; Antb. Pal. xi.319.

Dio Chrys. xxxi.i.6; 1G n² 3786-9, etc., with Jones 1978 (e 1020) 226-8, reaffirming an Augustan date. ²⁹ See Rostovtzeff 1903 (e 870).

³⁰ Shear 1981 (e 873) 361; Thompson 1987 (f 593) 4-9, for imperial political interpretation of the reconstruction of Ares, see Bowersock 1984 (c 40) 173.

initiated at Eleusis in 31 and about four years later the city is found beginning to issue a coinage that does not bear his head on the obverses. This 'autonomous' coinage continued until the reign of Gallienus; the privilege was enjoyed also by Corcyra, Delphi, Sparta and Corinth. In return Athens did not stint honours to Augustus and his family. A round Ionic temple on the Acropolis which may have been influenced by the temple of Vesta at Rome, though its order is modelled on the Classical Erechtheum, belongs to the decade immediately following his accession to sole power; Augustus is Theos on a dedication made at Delphi, a decree of the Council of Six Hundred resolved in 27—26 to celebrate his birthday (a day already associated with the restoration of freedom), and the ephebes held a festival called the Augustan Contest. The moving of the temple of Ares may be connected with the imperial cult, for in a.d. 2 Gaius Caesar, then in the East, was honoured under that патё.[784]

Eucles was a member of the oligarchy that emerged in Augustan Athens. He succeeded his father as supervisor of the construction of the Roman market, held the positions of archon and strategos and five times acted as priest of Apollo in the Dodecas. The stability of the oligarchy is suggested by the fact that the same three men held the leading positions in that embassy on all five occasions of its dispatch under Augustus.

Discontent remained in Greece. In a.d. 6, according to Cassius Dio, it was prevalent in cities throughout the Roman world. At a date unknown, (Cassius) Petreius, son of a loyal Caesarian, was burned alive in Thessaly, and the district lost its freedom.[785] In the Peloponnese even Eurycles had to be exiled in about 2 B.C.: he certainly involved himself in eastern Mediterranean politics, visiting both Archelaus of Cappadocia and Herod of Judaea, perhaps also in imperial court intrigue, and it was claimed that he had disturbed the cities of Achaea.[786] At Athens the swivelling round of Athena's statue to face west and her spitting blood, which heralded a visit from Augustus (probably that of 21), were no good signs, and unrest is attested in a.d. 13, presumably on the part of the less well-off members of society; it was fatal to its leaders. Athens did not enjoy good repute under the Empire. When the whole province joined Macedonia two years later in complaining, not only about taxes, but about the cost of maintaining the proconsuls in their state, it must have been the upper classes who took the lead. The two episodes, which ended in the transfer of Achaea and Macedonia to the jurisdiction of the governor of Moesia, were connected, though it was probably not the unrest that induced Senate and emperor to make the transfer.[787] Econ­omic problems affecting all classes were probably only midgated with the establishment of peace in 30 B.C. They may be illustrated from an inscription of a.d. 1—2, which shows Lycosura in Arcadia unable to attract competitors for its games in an Olympic year, and in debt to the provincial fiscus because of crop failure.[788]

As Roman armies advanced north and east in the Balkans, necessitat­ing the creation of a new province, Moesia, Greece fell further behind the market constituted by legions and auxiliaries and became ever more a backwater. One of her most important exports, marble, which came from Euboea, Attica, Laconia and Paros, was in any case in the hands of the state; imperial marks begin in a.d. 17. Athens became more prosperous under Augustus, but her ceramics were giving way even at home to Arretine ware and her cheap lamps could hold only the domestic market.

That the provinces were able to appeal in concert shows that the leagues of the classical and hellenisdc periods, created to deal with problems and powers too great for individual cities, still had a role to play in the absence of a provincial koinon such as we shall find in Asia and Bithynia. The Achaean League, though much smaller that its earlier namesake, which had been dissolved after the catastrophe of 146 B.C., and representing only twelve towns in south-east Thessaly and on the north coast of the Peloponnese, including Elis and Sicyon, must have acted with the Panhellenic League of Free Laconians (Eleutherola- cones), containing twenty-four cities whose freedom from Spartan rule had been granted, or more probably confirmed, by Augustus. In Thessaly another league survived, centring on Larissa, its council representing towns in proportion to their size and exercising consider­able authority in local affairs; and under Augustus the constitution of the Delphic Amphictiony had Athens, Delphi and the emperor's own Nicopolis sending delegates to each session (respectively one, two and ten), while the remaining members were represented in rotation (Mace­donia and Thessaly by two each).³⁶ Nicopolis' dominance did not survive: by Pausanias' own time it was on a par with Macedonia and Thessaly with six votes. Other districts had minor leagues that survived: those of the Phocians, Boeotians, Magnetes and Arcadians. Crete too, land of a hundred cides in Homer's time,³⁷ had a koinon, of twenty cides only as a result of amalgamation and the absorption of one by another.

But it was the province-wide organization of western Asia Minor that scored the first and paradigm diplomatic success of the new age by establishing a firm relationship with the ruler when he was in the area in 29 в.с.³⁸ Octavian on Samos received delegations from both Asia and Bithynia, the first representing an organization of long standing, the peoples and tribes in Asia and those individuals judged friends of the Roman People, or in short the koinon of the Greeks. Already known from the nineties b.c., when they were doing honour to the proconsul Mucius Scaevola, they had a fully-fledged council by 48 at the latest and were addressed by Antony in a letter giving permission to the Association of Victorious Athletes to commemorate its privileges on a bronze tablet.³⁹

Octavian accepted the temples offered by these embassies on con­dition that Rome too received cult. Roman citizens in the provinces were to devote themselves to Rome and the Deified Iulius at Ephesus and Nicaea; the more modern Pergamum and Nicomedia were chosen for Octavian's temples. Partial acceptance of the honours showed the cities of Asia Minor that Octavian was well disposed, though not theirs outright. Prominent individuals benefited from the cult through the opportunities for self-advertisement that management offered them, and the city populations of Pergamum and Nicomedia and other large cities through the festivals laid on and the crowds that they attracted. Similar provincial koina came into existence as the benefits were perceived or as new provinces such as Galatia were created.

Homage to proconsuls of Asia did not long continue: the last known to have received it was C. Marcius Censorinus who died in office in a.d. 2. They were not even accorded the honorific titles of Saviour and Founder, which likewise became a prerogative of the princeps, the last to bear them again being Censorinus. Similarly, outstanding local dignitar­ies ceased to be offered cult; the last known was Artemidorus of Cnidus. The divine honours which had been accorded to Theophanes of Mytilene, Pompey's secretary and biographer, contributed to the down­fall of his descendants in a.d. 33.⁴⁰

For his part Octavian's first concern in the years after his victory must have been the restoration of prosperity, and so taxability. Recovery was promoted by the resumption at Ephesus and Pergamum between 28 and 18 of the issuing of coins, the cistophori, tetradrachms last struck by Antony in 39 B.C. The quantities now issued were not to be approached

⁵¹ Horn. 11.11.649. ³⁸ Dio li.20.6-8. « Reynolds 1982 (в 270) 5; EJ² )oo.

⁴⁰ Am. Greek Inter, in the British Mm. 787, with Price 1984 (f 199) 48 (Artemidorus); Tac. Ann. vi.i8.j-j (Theophanes' posterity).

again until Hadrian's time. Octavian was also attentive to the plaints of cities which he knew to have suffered as a result of the Parthian invasion, and his ready aid after the earthquake of 27 was again available to Cyprus when it was striken in 15 B.C., after which Paphos took the princeps' name and adopted a new calendar, and to Cos.[789] Not everyone gained: on his visit of 21—20 Augustus did indeed make gifts of money to some communities of Asia and Bithynia, but he imposed additional burdens on others.[790]

Imperial attentions were more easily secured if a community pos­sessed such an advocate at court as Tralles did when it sought help after the earthquake of 27;[791] Chaeremon may have been brother-in-law to Polemon I and he was certainly a member of a notable pro-Roman, although also previously pro-Pompeian and pro-Antonian, family. The practice, valuable to both sides, of granting favoured individuals and families privileged access to the ruling authority, was to continue. More generally, it was to ancestral connexions that Ilium owed the rebuilding of its temple to Athena.⁴⁴ Not surprisingly cities made every effort to bring themselves to the princeps' attention through embassies and patrons known to him, as they had to that of earlier statesmen and dynasts. By 9 b.c. Augustus' benefactions were such that the proconsul Fabius Maximus could tell the koinon that they would never be surpassed, and it agreed to make the princeps' birthday the start of the new year in Asia.⁴⁵

Homage from individual cities also went along with the benefactions, acknowledging or encouraging them. Some cities combined it with reconstruction: Ephesus had its upper square modified to incorporate imperial temples and a stoa basilike;⁴⁶ others, notably those of Lydia, adopted the year of the Battle of Actium as their new era. Twenty years after the institution of the provincial cult ten Roman assize centres had their own temples, and together thirty-four cities in the whole of Asia Minor are known to have celebrated Augustus' cult, including even such remote places as Gangra. In eleven of them, including Mylasa, he shared it with that of Rome, his cult an addition to hers. Here too prominent individuals benefited, as on Chios, where the descendants of the founder participated in the ceremonial.⁴⁷

Although the cult was the creation of organized communities, notably of poleis, and some uniformity may have resulted from guidance offered by governors, it was not confined to provinces or acquired only on provincialization. Lycian Xanthus had a temple of 'Caesar', Myra and

Tlos called Augustus Benefactor and Saviour (or Founder) of the whole universe.⁴⁸ Indeed, the foundation of a festival in the princeps' honour played its part in maintaining inter-city connexions and diplomacy. Mytilene announced the establishment of games in honour of Augustus, and copies of the decree were to be set up in Pergamum, Actium, Brundisium, Tarraco, Massilia, Antioch and elsewhere.⁴⁹

In Asia Minor as in Greece Augustus encouraged the development of city life, more by way of innovation here than in restoration; even in the province of Asia it was lacking in remoter, inland districts. The synoecism of Sebaste in Phrygia, attested in a verse inscription, may be paralleled at Caesarea Trocetta in Lydia.⁵⁰ This is not to be compared with Nicopolis. The princeps merely acceded to the wish of leading inhabitants of a district for organization and status as poleis. A more gradual development was one by which an existing capital of the koinon of a number of villages became a city within a territory: in Mysia the Abbaeitae crystallized into the cities of Julia Ancyra, Synaus and Tiberiopolis. The people who were coining under the name of 'Cilbiani about Nicaea' in Nero's reign became the 'Nicaeans Cilbiani' or 'in the Cilbian region' only under Septimius Severus.⁵¹ Changes of name could easily be made and did not necessarily involve changes of substance, physical or in organization: so at Caesarea Anazarbus in Cilicia Pedias, and Caesarea, later Germanice, in Bithynia, inhabited by former serfs of the Mygdonian tribe; Iuliopolis, the former Gordiucome, never amounted to much. What the princeps contributed is uncertain; what he spurred others on to do may have been almost as important.

Augustan intervention in Asia and Bithynia by official settlement and colonization was not conspicuous; the colony of Alexandria Troas was exceptional. But there were independent immigrants. After the Sullan setdement the numbers grew again, and in Cicero's province of Cilicia a generation later they were already numerous enough to be subject to a levy. There was also substantial immigration into mainland Greece, notably in the Peloponnese where they acquired landed property on a large scale and formed a persistent element in their communities. Romans formed a relatively wealthy stratum in the cities in which they settled, but they do not seem to have held aloof from their neighbours: Roman citizens collaborated with natives in the restoration of Messene; L. Vaccius Labeo of Cyme, who endowed the gymnasium under Augustus,⁵² is only one of many such Roman benefactors. Intermarriage between Romans and local aristocrats was soon to produce candidates

« IGRR hi 482 (Xanthus); 546 (Tlos) 719 (Myra). « IGRR iv 59.

⁵⁰ IGRR iv 682. ⁵¹ See Jones 1971 (d 96) 78.

⁵² Immigration: Wilson 1966 (a 106) 127-51; effect on Strabo: Baladie 1980 (e 812) 195; Messene: Bull, ip, 1966, 200; Labeo: IGRR iv 1502; land-owning: IG v 1. 1452.

Map 16. Asia Minor.

for the Senate and at a humbler level the elaborate and idiosyncratic funerary monuments of such a town as Aezani were to house the descendants of Italian immigrants alongside the bearers of Greek, Macedonian and Phrygian names.[792] When the death of Roman citizens at Cyzicus led to loss of freedom the victims were not necessarily immi­grants: they could equally have been enfranchised natives.

Business and immigrant landowners, part of whose extensive proper­ties were destined eventually to go to the substantial imperial holdings, are to be found further east in the peninsula, but there Augustus pursued a more active policy of urbanization, notably in the Galatian province and especially round the area in which Amyntas met his death and on important routes. Besides the six veteran colonies founded in 25 B.C., numismatic evidence reveals other colonies in the Galatian province founded as early as Augustus' reign: Germe in Galatia proper, Iconium on the border of Phrygia and Lycaonia, Ninica in Cilicia Tracheia, on the route south from Iconium via Lystra and Laranda over the Taurus to Seleucia on Calycadnus; at Ninica and Iconium the colonies seem to have been part of double communities of which the native components were to find advancement as Claudiconium and Claudiopolis.[793] Further, unofficial colonists thought to have been settled by Augustus on ager publicus at Attalia, where Roma Archegetis, the Foundress, was wor­shipped (unless the settlement there was a spontaneous development on public land sold off to them) and at Isaura would also have helped to strengthen the Roman presence in composite communities.[794] But there was voluntary change as well: Pliny writes of the 195 'peoples and tetrarchies in Galatia,[795] and he is borne out by the relatively small number of cities coining there, less than sixty. The Gauls themselves, once the scourge of Asia Minor, began to move into line. In token of loyalty they referred to themselves as Sebasteni, each tribe at first ignoring the township on which it centred. Then they are found as the Sebasteni Trocmi Taviani (Tolistobogii Pessinuntii) with the town's name incorporated. The development of Sebaste Ancyra of the Tecto- sages came quickest: Ancyra was the capital of the new province and the centre for the provincial cult of Rome and Augustus, with an Augustan or early Tiberian temple, gladiatorial shows and wild beast hunts. By Galba's time it was coining for itself. Finally the Gauls dropped the tribal name, first at the ancient temple city of Pessinus. Even in Paphlagonia early urbanization is attested by the name of Caesarea of the Proseilemmenitae.[796]

iv. consolidation under the julio-claudians

The stable conditions created by Augustus required his successors to be maintenance engineers in the provinces, adjusting his scheme rather than making radical alterations, and his immediate successor Tiberius firmly professed close adherence to Augustan precedent. But the accession of a new emperor, even one well known in the East as Tiberius was (he enjoyed divine honours at Nysa by 1 B.C.) and for ten years the designated heir, a period in which he was being courted even by relatively unimportant cities such as Aezani, inevitably caused a stir. The new man could have new friends and favourites; relationships have to be developed or entered into. So in the Peloponnese, where the Claudii had hereditary influence, the League of Free Laconians in 15 passed a sacred law establishing ceremonies in honour of Augustus, Tiberius, Livia, Germanicus and Drusus, as well as for T. Quinctius Flamininus and the two local dynasts Eurycles, now posthumously rehabilitated, and his son Laco, who may have been particular partisans of Tiberius; Laco continued in favour for another nineteen years. At Paphos on Cyprus the people were quick to take an oath of loyalty to Tiberius and his blood line. From the beginning of the next reign there survives another oath taken at Assos in the Troad, in which play is made with Gaius' childhood visit to the city nearly twenty years previously. At Cyzicus Gaius accepted the local magistracy, the hipparchy, and was designated the 'New Sun'. These were prudent measures: Gaius had his own ideas about his position in the empire, different again from Tiberius'.[797]

Ironically, in view of his publicly proclaimed adherence to the Augustan blueprint, it was Tiberius who in the earliest years of his reign made significant changes in two of the regions with which we are concerned. The answer that Tiberius and the Senate returned to the request from Macedonia and Achaea for transfer to imperial rule was favourable but unflattering. Instead, economy was served: the two provinces were to have no governor of their own, but were attached to the province of Moesia. (Already in a.d. 6, when the proconsul died in office, his province had been divided between his quaestor and his legate.)[798] But the change brought into the open the fact that Macedonia and Achaea were backwaters removed from the scene of action nearer the Danube.

The unification was followed by the amalgamation of the two main leagues. The enlarged koinott (called variously Panachaean, Hellenic and Panhellenic) went back at least to the end of Tiberius' reign and consisted of representatives of Achaea proper, which itself incorporated a koinon of the Argolis under Augustus or Tiberius, Boeotia, Locris, Phocis, Doris and Euboea;⁶⁰ a number of cities and lesser leagues, such as the Eleutherolacones and Thessalians, were not included. The Greek koina were not as alert as the organizations of Asia and Bithynia — areas that had been directly controlled by monarchs since the time of the Persian Empire - to the value of offering cult, but they eventually did so, electing a high priest as well as a political leader; the earliest signs are Neronian at latest, the official C. Iulius Spartiaticus, a descendant of Eurycles and, like all the high priests, a Roman citizen.⁶¹

The new arrangements lasted until 44, when Claudius returned Achaea to the jurisdiction of ex-praetors selected by lot.⁶² So it remained until Nero, claiming to be the only emperor who was a philhellene, conferred freedom on Greece on 28 November, probably 67 rather than 66, during his performing tour of the province.⁶³ It was a reiteration (not the first) of Flamininus' declaration of a quarter of a millennium previously, but the Greeks appreciated the gesture of recognition and the abolition of taxes that went with it. Even in Plutarch's view, that of an upper-class intellectual in full sympathy with senatorial opinion, freeing those who were 'noblest and dearest to the gods' earned Nero reincarnation as a singing frog rather than as a viper.⁶⁴

Nero's cultural philhellenism was genuine and strong. It too was appreciated. The tour he made (the four great festivals, Pythian, Olympic, Isthmian and Nemean, were rescheduled so that he might compete in all) was the first personal visit from a member of the imperial family since that of Germanicus and Agrippina, when Germanicus had a commission similar to those previously held by Agrippa, abortively by Tiberius, and by Gaius Caesar. The respect that Germanicus showed at Athens in 18, when he visited it after Nicopolis, was set off by the brutal assertion of Roman supremacy by his coadjutor Cn. Piso.⁶⁵ Tiberius himself was a cultured philhellene and Athens' benefactor before his adoption, although Livia apparendy attracted more attention than the emperor. Surprisingly enough Claudius won more dedications than Nero, more than any emperor between Augustus and Hadrian. A whole

⁴⁰ GCN 361, with Kahrstedt 1950 (e 846) 7of. « GCN 264.

⁶² Suet. Claud. 25; Dio lx.24.1.

^a GCN 64. For 67 as the year see Griffin 1984 (c 352) 280, n. 127. м [Plut.] Мог. 567f.

⁶⁵ Tac. Anп. II. 3 j.:.

series honours him as Saviour and Benefactor: probably he paid for stairs leading to the Propylaea, not only adorning the Acropolis but providing work for quarrymen and craftsmen.⁶⁶ Nero contributed a new skene for the Theatre of Dionysus, which was dedicated to Dionysus Eleutherius and to the emperor, whose priest and high priests were reserved front row seats.⁶⁷ But Nero could not free Athens along with the rest of Greece: freedom was a privilege she already enjoyed.

The reign of Tiberius, like the last decade of Augustus' Principate, had to be one of retrenchment in Italy and perhaps elsewhere. Areas self- sufficient and exporting would suffer less. Asia and Bithynia came into that category, as building activity during the reign suggests; Crete too. Parts of Achaea already in decline did not: at the end of the reign, Boeotia claimed not to be able to afford an envoy to congratulate Gaius on his accession.⁶⁸ Some insight into the collection of taxes - and into the difficulties that some cities encountered in meeting their obligations - is given by inscriptions from Messene and Lycosura.⁶⁹ And Achaea's capital, artistic and financial, was diminished when Nero's agents began to scour the provinces for works of art in a systematic effort quite different from the haphazard acquisitiveness of Verres or Antony. The centres of Greece and Asia known to have suffered were Athens, Delphi, Olympia, Thespiae and Pergamum. At Athens the imperial agent C. Carrinas Secundus was made eponymous archon, as if to blunt his zeal.⁷⁰ There was a certain irony in Nero's regret, expressed when he freed Greece, that he could not do it at a time when she was at her peak - though his generous act sprang from good will, not mere pity.

A recurrent, even chronic problem was shortage of grain, which had to be countered at any cost. Even in Asia Minor, where grain was a staple product, a severe winter could cause difficulties, especially in cities distant from the sea, where importing supplies would be particularly expensive. Aspendus in Pamphylia is not far from the sea, but vetch is said to have been on sale in place of grain there on one occasion under Tiberius. One of the titles accumulated by Agrippina on her travels with Germanicus was that of Divine Harvest-bringer, Aeolis, at Mytilene, like her daughter and namesake who took a place in the imperial pantheon on Cos as Demeter Harvest-bringer and was shown on city coinages with corn ears and poppies — similarly too on a panel from the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias. The divinities would hardly allow their votaries to go hungry.⁷¹

⁶⁶ IG ii² 5269, j27if, 3274. See Shear 1981 (e 873) 367, n. 52. « IG ii² 5034.

<* GCN 361. « ICv 1.1432; 2.516.

IG ii/iii² 4188, with Graindor 1931 (e 853) uf.

Aspendus: Philostr. VA 1.15; Mytilene: ILS 8788, IG xii 2.258, with L. Robert, REG 72 (i960) 286ff. Cos: A. Maiuri, Nuwasillogeepigr. (Florence, 195 2) 468; coins: BMCLjdia 146, nos. 5 3­5 (Magnesia by Sipylus); Aphrodisias: JRS 77 (1987) PI. VIII.

Greece was more accessible by sea than the interior of Anatolia, but there were still questions of procurement and distribution, and of the cost of the operations. Athens had been importing corn since the time of Pisistratus; there was no imperial revenue to pay for it under the Principate. A special treasury for the reception of grain was created there in the reign of Augustus, significantly perhaps under the supervision of no less an official than a hoplite general. Under Claudius the curator annonae appears at Corinth, and on one occasion there was a famine in Greece that took a modius of grain to a price of six didrachms, about eight times the normal price at Rome.[799]

The other natural calamity to which both Greece and Asia Minor are subject is earthquakes. The Roman government did its best to help wherever they struck. One night in a.d. 17 twelve distinguished communities of the Hermus basin in Asia fell victim. Sardes suffered worst and was granted five years' remission of all taxes as well as a gift of 10 million sesterces from the emperor; Magnesia by Sipylus was held to have suffered next worst and was compensated accordingly, while the rest were relieved of tribute for five years and a commissioner was sent to inspect the damage and help restore it. Six years later it was Aegium, centre of the Achaean League, and Cibyra, an assize centre of Asia, that were devastated and granted three years' remission of tribute on the initiative of the emperor.[800]

This generosity, and his pitiless atdtude towards officials who enriched themselves at the expense of provincials - a proceeding that the people of Asia must have come to regard as almost as inevitable as natural calamities — won Tiberius popularity; on both fronts he was following the example of Augustus. The coming of the Principate did not destroy the hereditary connexions that families such as the Messallae, Galbae and Pisones had with the East and their natural claim to serve there, any more than it eliminated the expectations of some senators that they could reimburse themselves for the cost of attaining office in the course of their pro-magistracies and even make a profit. The wealth of Asia was a particular temptation, especially when the fortunes of Italian senators were in decline. Fierce competition for the province is attested in the twenties and thirties, made fiercer by Tiberius' proneness to prolonging even strictly annual terms of office: P. Petronius held Asia for about six years, c. 29—35; a C. Galba, excluded in 36, killed himself.[801]Envoys even from Achaea had complained about their governors even under Augustus, but the series of known prosecutions for misconduct in Asia begins with a particularly outrageous case, that of Valerius Messalla Volesus, who during his proconsulship of about 10­11 had not only enriched himself but done so with open brutality, stalking amongst the corpses of 300 men he had executed and preening himself on a right royal deed. The case of Granius Marcellus, the proconsul of Bithynia prosecuted in a.d. 15, was unsensational, but Tiberius' handing over of his procurator in Asia, Lucilius Capito, for trial in the Senate in 2 3 made history and, like the relentless handling of C. Silanus on the precedent of Volesus the year before, won the emperor high opinions in Asia.[802]

These were the first attested prosecutions conducted at the instance of the koinon of Asia, which lost no time in securing permission to erect a temple to Tiberius, his mother and, Tiberius insisted, the Senate. It was not until three years later that Smyrna, which had celebrated the cult of Rome since 195 B.C., was selected from eleven contestants as the site. When it came to Gaius, Miletus was successful;[803] but by no means all emperors were honoured in this way: both Claudius and, more surpris­ingly, Nero were omitted. But a city of the first rank such as Ephesus might become 'warden' (neocorus) of no fewer than three imperial temples as well as that of its own patron deity. By at least eleven cities too Tiberius was honoured with cult, becoming 'the greatest of the gods' at Cyzicus.[804] After him emperors tended to be objects of cult from the koinon en bloc, but within this limitation cities went on doing what they could to attract favourable attention by demonstrating loyalty.[805] Their efforts were not always well judged: what was a community in Lydia doing with a public area commemorating Gaius' German campaign, and why should Amisus in Pontus be honouring Nero, Poppaea and Tiberius Claudius Britannicus on the same monument?[806] It was a different matter when a sophisticated polis with long-standing connex­ions with Rome, such as Aphrodisias, embarked on the construction of a Sebasteion with a processional way between porticoes leading to a raised temple and of proficient sculptures adorning the complex.⁸⁰

The princeps himself was a powerful neighbour to many ciues and individual landowners as he acquired estates, mines and quarries by purchase, inheritance, or confiscation, or controlling them in virtue of his role as governor. Patchy at first, especially the reladvely isolated quarries, his estates in Asia Minor were to form large tracts of territory in the second century. Lucilius Capito's encroachments on the prerogatives of a governor illustrate the growing importance of officials charged with administering the imperial property and the recognition they were being accorded. Under a governor of less than the highest seniority or calibre, such as the proconsul of Bithynia, the procurator's responsibilities and his prestige might eclipse those of the pro-magistrate. East-West communications and increasing wealth made Bithynia more important than it had seemed under Augustus: the princeps would not leave it all in the hands of the proconsul. Iunius Cilo, procurator at the end of Claudius' reign, managed imperial business there and escorted a deposed monarch to Rome in 49, winning consular decorations. His subjects brought charges of extortion against him but he was acquitted and apparently prorogued. The services of Publius Celer, procurator of Asia when the Principate changed hands in 5 4, were political, the murder of a potential rival of Nero; it was they that saved him from accusations levelled against him by the provincials, at least long enough for him to die a natural death. By contrast a determined citizen of Cibyra, which under Claudius was temporarily detached from Asia and assigned to Lycia, was able to have an oppressive procurator removed from his duties of collecting grain from the city.[807]

Political considerations were also important in the trials of senators charged with misconduct. Only the most strenuous efforts secured the conviction of Nero's man Cossutianus Capito in 5 7 for misconduct in Cilicia; the valuable prosecutor Eprius Marcellus, charged with repetun- dae in the same year, was acquitted, secured the exile of some of those who had accused him on behalf of the Lycian koinon,[808] and lived to return to Anatolia under Vespasian for a three-year term as governor of Asia.

When Germanicus travelled the coasts of Greece and Asia Minor in 18, he worked to restore places exhausted by internal disputes and mismanagement on the part of their own magistrates.[809] Having paid to secure the positions they held, members of the ruling class in the cities sought to recoup their expenditure. This was a failing that Aristotle remarked in timocracies such as the Romans favoured, and the venality of Greeks was already commonplace for Polybius and Cicero.⁸⁴ A Claudian proconsul of Asia, Paullus Fabius Persicus, issued a long and elaborate edict curtailing (he hoped) inefficiency, waste and dishonesty in the administration of the temple funds established by Vedius Pollio for the cult of Artemis at Ephesus.⁸⁵ One trick was to lend young slaves to the temple, where their upkeep would be paid; another to anticipate temple revenue and speculate with it.

Paullus was a friend of Claudius and knew what was expected of a governor. Others became involved with local malefactors, giving them protecdon and an opportunity for blackmail. Those who did not co­operate could be threatened with the prospect of being passed over when it came to votes of thanks for their administration. Augustus had already in a.d. 12 forbidden such votes to be passed within six months of a governor's departure (perhaps in the wake of the Volesus Messalla case). The abuse came to light most blatantly in Neronian Crete, where the leader of the koinon, Claudius Timarchus, boasted that it depended on him whether governors were given votes of thanks. The dispatch of embassies to express such thanks before the Senate was now banned altogether - for a time.⁸⁶

In Crete it seems that the koinon had acquired a particular ascendancy in relation to the individual cities, whose coinages ended under Gaius and were superseded by that of the koinon (in Cyprus too the currency became federal). In spite of the failings of city and koinon officials, which could not be cured and were to develop further (the history of Crete under the Julio-Claudians has been called a recital of earthquakes and trials for extortion; encroachment of magnates on city land is another failing detectable there),⁸⁷ the Romans had no alternative. Koina were a prime means of conveying instructions to the leading men of a province, of focusing their loyalty and satisfying their ambition. Private clubs were banned from the time of Caesar and Augustus onwards, as attracting the lower classes in the cities and otherwise likely to turn into radical political groups; exceptions were allowed only for those exclusively religious and social in character, and they had to be licensed. Associa­tions of boys (ephebes), young men (neoi), and elders {gerousiae), which were integral parts of the city, and professional associations of men of respectable standing were a different matter. In 41 the Guild of Hymnodoi of Asia - choruses who performed at the celebration of the imperial cult - had occasion to honour Claudius and the privileges of stage artists (the World-wide Guild of Crowned Victors in the Sacred Contests of Dionysus and their Fellow-competitors) had already been granted by Augustus before Claudius guaranteed them in 43 and 48-9. Athletes too, as Antony's letter to the koinon shows, had long been recognized as a group with legitimate interests and the Itinerant Athletic Association was careful to inform Claudius in 47 of the successful festival held in his honour by the kings of Commagene and Pontus.⁸⁸

As to the success of the provinces of western Asia Minor as a whole, the Romans can have felt no misgivings. They continued to encourage

" Tac. Ann. xv.20-2; for Augustus, see Dio lvi.2j.6.

" See Sanders 1982 (e 871) 132; encroachment: GCN 385; 388.

^и GCN 372 (bjmnodly, 375 (a) and (b) (Dionysiac artists); EJ² 300 (Antony's letter); GCN 374 (the Claudian festival).

communities who aspired to polis status. Besides restoring damaged cities Tiberius allowed two to take his name: one Tiberiopolis was in Phrygia Epictetus, the other (Pappa) in the Galatian province, on the borders of Phrygia and Pisidia: within the greater cities both Aphrodis­ias and Pisidian Antioch had squares named after him.

But it was in eastern Asia Minor, in the third of the regions with which we are concerned, that Tiberius made his most important changes in the Augustan political map. Germanicus' mission to the East in 17-19 had two main positive purposes: to deal with the Parthians and to establish a new Roman client on the throne of Armenia Maior. But the visit came at a time of change for long-standing client states: the deaths of Antiochus III of Commagene, of Philopator in the kingdom of the Amanus, and, at Rome where the princeps had summoned him to stand trial before the Senate (he had faced charges from his subjects on an earlier occasion), that of the aged Archelaus of Cappadocia.[810]

Tiberius made a clean sweep of the client kingdoms. The 8 5,000km² of Cappadocia, with its eleven eastern-style 'satrapies' — strategiae in Greek - — and its few cities concentrated in the most westerly of them, required direct rule. After the preliminary arrangements had been made by a legate of Germanicus, Q. Veranius, the new province was entrusted to an equestrian prefect. To make Roman rule more acceptable, taxes were reduced, but even so Tiberius was able to halve the 1 per cent inheritance duty on Roman citizens. Commagene was taken over by Q. Servaeus, another legate, and, like the kingdom of the Amanus, incorporated in the province of Syria. Only Pythodoris, undl her death,⁹⁰ Archelaus' son in part of Cilicia Tracheia, and the Teucrids of Olba were left in place, and Olba came to be overshadowed by a new foundation of uncertain date, Diocaesarea. As far as Cilicia was concerned, it was a wise decision: the younger Archelaus' subjects, the Citae, were sdll giving trouble in 36, when they refused a census and all its implications, and in 5 2.⁹¹ But some of Tiberius' arrangements were reversed by Gaius, a true great-grandson of Antony who had been brought up at court with eastern royalties. In 3 8 he returned Commagene to Antiochus (IV), with the addition of eastern Cilicia, and Pontus to Polemo (II) who also acquired the Teucrid kingdom when the dynasty died out in 41. Antiochus kept his kingdom, with one interruption, until 72, Polemo his until 64, when it was annexed as Pontus Polemoniacus. Gaius assigned Armenia Minor to another friend and grandson of Pythodoris, Cotys. Whatever his motives, it is usually agreed that the territories he assigned to clients were well suited to that form of government; how potendy his actions were felt in the Greek East, is attested by a decree of Cyzicus: 'Since the new Helios Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus wished also to illuminate with his own rays the kingdoms that are the bodyguard of the empire ... even though the kings, however hard they think, are unable to find appropri­ate ways of repaying the benefactions conferred on them to show their gratitude to so great a god, he has restored the sons of Cotys (VIII of Thrace), Rhoemetalces (III of Thrace), Polemon and Cotys, who were brought up with him and were his companions, to the kingdoms that were due to them from their forefathers and ancestors. Reaping the abundance of his immortal grace, they are greater than their predecessors in this respect, that they inherited from their fathers, while these men, as a result of the grace of Gaius Caesar, have become kings to share in the government of these great gods.' Small wonder to find Tryphaena, mother of the kings, in the same document celebrating the cult of Drusilla the New Aphrodite, and Polemon jointly celebrating the games with Andochus IV.⁹²

But Gaius' donations went against the trend. In 43 direct Roman rule spread to the south-west corner of Asia Minor when mountainous Lycia, with its thirty-six cities — the earlier number considerably advanced since the assessment of Strabo - was annexed, Rhodes also losing its freedom in the following year. Claudius' pretext was disorder in the cities and the killing of Roman citizens, but he allowed an appeal from Rhodes, backed by the young Nero, in 5 3,⁹³ As far as Lycia's external independence went the change was a nominal one; cult had been offered since 188 B.C. to Roma Thea Epiphanes and to powerful Romans such as Agrippa; Tiberius' cult survived until the third century alongside the federal cult of the Augusti.⁹⁴ But the federated cities now had to pay tribute and the first praetorian legate, Q. Veranius, doing for Claudius what his father had done for Germanicus in Cappadocia, seems to have met resistance.⁹⁵ To loyal subjects Veranius was able to offer the reward of citizenship, and the new province settled down with Pamphylia, the district joined to it under the new arrangement, its upper class crystallizing into a nobility of Lyciarchs and (at least from Vespasian onwards) high priests, who often served as secretaries of the League, with archiphylax and hierophylax to guarantee order and collect the tribute. If we are to trust Suetonius, Lycia regained its freedom some dme before Vespasian's reorganization of the eastern provinces, either from Nero, after the freeing of Achaea, or under Galba; but epigraphic evidence suggests that Lycia had a gover­nor who survived from Nero to Vespasian.⁹⁶

Dio Lix.8.2; lx.8.i (Antiochus). Braund (c 254) 42, on lx.8.2 (Polemo); Suet. Ner. 18, with Magie 1950 (e 855) 1417 n. 62 (annexation of Pontus Polemoniacus). GCN 401, with Price 1984 (f 199) 244f (restoration of the three monarchs).

Dio Lx.17.}; 24.4; Tac. Ann. xn.58.2. Pliny, HN v.ioi (number of Lycian cities).

Rome: SEG xviii 570; Agrippa: IGRR in 719; Tiberius: 474; high priests: 487.

⁹³ GCN 2} i (c).

⁹⁶ Suet. Vesp. 8.4, but see W. Eck, Senatoren von Vespasian bis Hadrian (Vestigia ij) (Munich, 1970) 4.

It was under Nero that the main structural change in eastern Asia Minor came. Made in 5 4 for military purposes, it provided Cn. Domidus Corbulo with freedom of action against the Parthians and a wider recruiting ground amongst the warlike Gauls, and it became the model for Vespasian's permanent scheme. Cappadocia and Galada were united under the consular legate Corbulo, and his routine work in remoter areas was performed by a separate legate.⁹⁷ The strategic importance of eastern Asia Minor was being realized; if its wealth was also increasing, that was a process that would be speeded up under the Flavians.

The client monarchs prepared for their own supersession by follow­ing the tradition of their kind and founding cities. M. Antonius Polemon of Olba may be the founder of Claudiopolis on the Calycadnus; Antiochus IV founded Germanicopolis, Andochia ad Cragum, Iotape and Neronias, later the city on the main road to Caesarea from the west that Archelaus made from the typical 'village-town' or 'fortlet' Gar- saoura, administrative centre of the strategia named after it; it became a colony under Claudius. Urban development is suggested elsewhere in the south-eastern sector of Asia Minor by the appearance of city names compounded, as before, with those of the emperors, but how substantial any accompanying changes may have been is not clear. Certainly the reigns of Claudius and Nero saw road construction and repair in Anatolia: in Asia (the road from Smyrna to Ephesus and Tralles in a.d. 51), Pamphylia (under the imperial procurator in 50), Bithynia (the Apamea-Nicaea route in 57-8) and Paphlagonia (c. a.d. 45 near Amastris).⁹⁸

v. conclusion: first fruits

The century between Octavian's accession to sole power and the death of Nero was one of almost unbroken peace in the areas under discussion, a condition ideal for political and economic development for regions capable of it. Western Asia Minor was in the van, in part because of its proximity to the new Danubian provinces of Moesia and Pannonia, in part as encasing the routes that led from Ephesus and Byzantium through the Cilician Gates into Syria or by more northerly branches to the Euphrates crossing at Tomisa. From this last factor, proximity to main lines of communication, central and eastern Asia Minor also benefited, especially communides that lay on the highways, such as Ancyra, Iconium and Caesarea Mazaca.

From the Roman point of view increased prosperity meant an increase in the amount of tax that the regions would yield and, almost equally

« GCN 244.

" Asia: CIL hi 476, 720; Pamphylia: GCN 347; Bithynia: CIL 111 346; Paphlagonia: ILS 3883.

important, their contribution to manpower at all levels. It is significant that in spite of the obstacles in the way of easterners (language difficulties, prejudice against new men) a beginning was made during this century in recruiting men to the imperial service which culminates, in the Neronian period, in the admission of a considerable number of easterners into the Senate.

Grants of citizenship were the prerequisite, and the rate of progress varied from city to city and province to province. From actual or, at a pinch, potential citizens, legionaries might be recruited, but even non- citizen areas could contribute soldiers to the auxiliary forces. For these the places of origin are significant: no units bear names that show them originally levied in Achaea, Bithynia, or Asia. Levying a troop of horse or auxiliary infantry from freshly provincialized territory would be removing potentially dangerous manpower from its home area, and some units at least (notably numeri and those with specialized weaponry) continued to be drawn from their original recruidng grounds even after they had moved; this was not a motive that would apply in the two western regions, Greece and the proconsular provinces of Asia Minor. But mountainous Crete provided a cohort, Galatia apparently an ala (VII Phrjgum), and Cyprus four cohorts."

Achaea equally fails to turn up any legionaries in this period, an indication of impoverishment: recruiting officers perhaps did not think it worth visidng. Asia and Bithynia have seven to show, eastern Asia Minor eight times as many (with the three Gallic capitals contribudng over half), and Roman colonies such as Troas, Antioch towards Pisidia, and Ninica seven. Potential fighting quality and a stake in the land were desiderata fulfilled above all by men from military colonies and appar­ently by the Gauls.[811]

At a higher social level the picture changes. Equestrian procurators had to satisfy a census requirement (400,000 sesterces) and high qualities of character were expected.¹⁰¹ These were conditions not different in kind from those applied to legionaries, but for equestrian posts patron­age and recommendation played a vital part and men from out of the way places did not stand a good chance. Pompeius Macer of Mytilene, procurator of Asia and librarian at Rome already in the time of Augustus, came of a family that had been close to the Roman dynasts since the middle of the first century в.с. С. Iulius Spartiaticus, son of the disgraced Laco and grandson of Eurycles, became a procurator of Claudius and Agrippina; not surprisingly he claims to be 'first of the

Achaeans'. From Asia too came the later Julio-Claudian prefects of Egypt Cn. Vergilius Capito and Ti. Claudius Balbillus, and C. Stertinius Xenophon, military tribune and ad responsa graeca, from Lycia M. Arrundus Aquila, the procurator whose name appears on Pamphylian milestones of 50. Balbillus came from a family close to Tiberius. Stertinius was son of a tutor to the imperial house and the famous physician of Claudius Caesar at whose request his native Cos was granted perpetual immunity from tribute in 53. Amastris provided another procurator, C. Iulius Aquila, who had been in charge of detachments in the Bosporan kingdom with Cotys in 49 and had performed dis­tinguished service there, receiving praetorian insignia; it may be that the Augustan prefect of Egypt of the same name was his father. Pisidian Antioch has already figured as a source of legionary recruits. At the equestrian level it offers the Neronian iuridicus in Egypt and procurator of Cappadocia and Cilicia Iulius Proculus, who was connected by marriage with a family from another place of Roman settlement, Attalia in Pamphylia.[812]

The same criteria apply to senators as to knights, only the financial requirements and the barriers of prejudice were higher and more effective.[813] Q. Pompeius Macer, son of the procurator, is not surpris­ingly the first known; he rose to the praetorship in a.d. 15. But Italian descent (from veteran or civilian settler) is important, and that is why M. Calpurnius Rufus of Attalia, whose mother held the priesthood of Livia and Rome, is the next known entering under Tiberius and serving as legate in Lycia-Pamphylia, his province of origin. T. Iunius Montanus, who reached the suffect consulship in 81, the first easterner to rise so high, represents the military colony proper, that of Alexandria Troas. Rufus would soon be followed by M. Plancius Varus from neighbouring Perge, a Neronian entrant. L. Servenius Cornutus belongs to Acmonia, but has a comparable ancestry in the Italians there, although his mother was descended from client dynasts, making her a representative of a group that was to come into great prominence in the Flavian period. Cornutus was quaestor in Cyprus under Nero and early in Vespasian's reign also served in his own province as legate to the proconsul. Another man who must have entered the Senate under Nero is the unknown citizen of Miletus who boasted of being the first senator from his city and the fifth from Asia.[814] These men are harbingers of a swarm, versed as they were in the administration of cities and eager for metropolitan political life,¹⁰⁵ familiar with Greek language and ways, and loyal subjects of Rome and the princeps. The absence of any representadve of Achaea is due to the want of wealth and influence there outside the (still possibly suspect) family of the descendants of Eurycles; those of his rival Brasidas did not attain even the citizenship until the reign of Claudius.¹⁰⁶ The lands east of Asia lacked connexions and culture, and still in some areas the city life that made these things possible. Uninterrupted peace would bring them more firmly into the fold of hellenism and carry the cides of the west to unparalleled levels of prosperity and brilliance.

P]_ut. Df tranq. anim. 10 (Мог. 470c).

Plut. Apopbtb. Aug. 14 (mot. 207f), with PIR² с 818.

CHAPTER Ub EGYPT¹

ALAN K. BOWMAN

I. THE ROMAN CONQUEST

'Aegyptum imperio populi Romani adieci.'² Augustus' stark factual statement, published almost half a century after the event it records, spotlights the final act of the drama of Rome's absorption of the hellenistic kingdoms. In August of 30 B.C., some ten months after the Battle of Actium, Octavian had pursued Cleopatra and Mark Antony to Egypt; both had perished by their own hand in the city founded by Alexander the Great. The conqueror perhaps flirted with the notion of formally inaugurating his 'dominion' (kratesis) from the date of the capture of Alexandria but he finally settled on the first day of the new Egyptian year (1 Thoth = 29 August), bridging the gap with a nominal eighteen-day 'reign' of the children of Antony and Cleopatra. Octavian was in Egypt for the first and last dme. He saw and touched the corpse of Alexander the Great, causing a piece of the nose to fall off; but he scorned to view the remains of the Ptolemies, remarking that he wished to see a king, not corpses, and he affected insensitivity to local religious susceptibilities by his attitude to the venerated Apis bull, observing that he was accustomed to worship gods, not cattle.³ Egypt was now under the sway of a non-resident monarch; as a Roman province the country was effectively depolidcized and a good proportion of its resources was

¹ Recent general surveys of material relevant to the early Roman period may be found in Bowman 1976(8 367) and 1990 (e 901), Geraci 1983 (e 924) and Lewis 1983 (e 946) and Montevecchi 1988 (e 932). Still immensely valuable are Mitteis and Wilcken 1911—12 (в 379) and (especially for taxation) Wilcken 1899 (в 388). For a good selection of private and public documentary texts see the Loeb Select Papyri 1—11, ed. A.S. Hunt, C.C. Edgar (1932-4). The spread of evidence for Roman Egypt is uneven, the first century a.d. being much less well documented than the subsequent two centuries. This chapter therefore necessarily draws upon second-century evidence, whilst trying to avoid giving the impression that what is known to be true for that period must therefore also be true for the earlier era. This is also partly intended to compensate for the fact that Volume xi of САН (2nd edition) will not contain a separate treatment of Egypt.

The most frequently cited publications of papyri are included in the List of Abbreviations (p. 1006). Others will be found in E.G. Turner, Greek Papyri, art Introduction (2nd edn, Oxford, 1980) 134-79 ^and J^F- Oates, R.S. Bagnall, W.H. Willis, K.A. Worp, Checklist of Editions of Greek Papyri andOstraka (4th edn, Atlanta, 1992). ² RG 27. ³ Dio li.16.5.

676

677

ROMAN CONQUEST

henceforth oriented towards the consuming nucleus of the empire, Rome itself.

The governmental system whose foundations were reshaped in the Augustan period was to last, in its essential features, for more than 300 years. During that period there were certainly important modifications of detail but it was not until the late third century that Egypt saw fundamental change. The effective division of the empire into East and West and the foundation of Constantinople were events which knitted Egypt more uniformly into the structure of the eastern empire and gave it again an important political role in what was in many ways a more natural context. Hence it is legitimate to suggest that a treatment of Egypt under Augustus and the Julio-Claudians might, with due atten­tion to changes and developments between the accession of Vespasian and the death of Commodus, stand as valid for the 'high' imperial period. Its history in the difficult years of the third century can then form a suitable prelude to a discussion of the important changes under Diocle­tian and Constantine which shaped its role in the Byzantine Empire.

The transformation of a nominally independent kingdom into a Roman province may have been the act of a moment but Egypt had long been prepared for the coming of Rome. Her history in the dozen years before Actium shows a powerful and intelligent client monarch attempt­ing to use the capacity of a Roman military dynast to aggrandize a friend and ally of the Senate and People of Rome. The story of the political struggle is told elsewhere.[815] As for the internal state of the country in the triumviral period, there are only scraps of evidence. The latest of the Ptolemaic royal decrees to have survived, issued in the names of Cleopatra and Caesarion in 42/41 B.C., offers protection to Alexandrians who owned land in the delta against depredations of Crown officials which will have been exacerbated by the need to purchase Roman goodwill.[816] The fabled wealth of the Ptolemies (Auletes' annual revenue was still 12,500 talents according to Cicero⁶) had been plundered to good purpose in recent years.

It is difficult to be sure that Cleopatra's reign as a whole was marked by declining prosperity. Some have postulated an upturn after the depar­ture of Caesar and the recovery of Cyprus.⁷ In any event, Cleopatra found popularity with her Egyptian subjects. She spoke the Egyptian language, she personally attended the installation of the sacred Buchis bull at Hermonthis, she continued the tradition, albeit perhaps spar­ingly, of temple building and embellishment (construction is attested at

Map 17. Egypt.

Athribis, Coptos, Hermonthis and Tentyra).⁸ By 36/35 B.C. she had added a new element to the royal titulature, 'Philopatris'. Her Roman consort might receive a Greek vodve dedication and the appellation of 'god' (theos), but on the Egyptian temple reliefs Cleopatra's consort is her son Ptolemy XVI Caesarion ⁹ Antony may have made little impression in Egypt outside Alexandria.

Obviously, Cleopatra's contribution to Antony's war effort was of paramount importance; the Ptolemaic army and navy were still consider­able; the latter, or what was left of it after Actium, went to provide the nucleus of the Alexandrian arm of the Roman imperial fleet. Signs of the Roman military presence are noticeable in 5 5 B.C. after the intrusion of the Gabiniani, and with Caesar's installation of troops in the aftermath of the Alexandrian War.¹⁰ The Greek translation of cohors occurs in a papyrus of the period from Heracleopolis; a Roman praefectus named C. Iulius Papius makes a dedication in the temple of Isis at Philae in the twentieth year of Cleopatra's reign.¹¹ After Actium greater care was taken at a higher level. Senators and illustrious equites were forbidden entry to Egypt without permission of the princeps. One of the few people put to death in the aftermath of the royal suicide had been a Roman senator named Q. Ovinius who had disgraced his senatorial stripe by undertaking supervision of the Queen's textile factories and perhaps provided an admonitory example of the economic power-base available in Egypt.¹²

Pollio).¹⁵ The first prefect was the poet Cornelius Gallus who had led Octavian's army into Egypt from the west in the war against Antony and Cleopatra. His first responsibility, to ensure internal security, was met by prompt reduction of rebellious towns in the region of Coptos in the Thebaid but he boasted, perhaps too vaingloriously, of that and of his feat in carrying Roman arms further south than they had hitherto gone.¹⁶ Within a couple of years he was removed from office, banned from entering the princeps' provinces and finally driven to suicide.

For the first decade of Roman rule, we have more evidence for the preoccupation with military security than for the development of the civil administration. The history of Egypt in the decade after Actium well illustrates the major features of the Augustan frontier strategy. Cornelius Gallus' inauspicious foray to the south of the First Cataract was perhaps the first attempt to test the viability of further annexation of territory. In the Arabian expedition of his successor, Aelius Gallus, the security of the Indian trade routes will certainly have been an important consideration, but that need not have been the primary motivation for expansion. In effect, with the Nabataean kingdom to the east left independent until a.d. 106, the trading links maintained with India through the ports of the Red Sea coast and the developing road network of the eastern desert funcdoned perfectly satisfactorily.¹⁷ The expedi­tions of the next prefect, P. Petronius,¹⁸ to the south between 2 5 /4 and 22 в.с. brought a short-lived Roman occupation of the region beyond the Dodecaschoenus and a Roman garrison to Primis (Qasr Ibrim), a site which has yielded the earliest Latin literary manuscript, fragments of elegiacs, most probably by Cornelius Gallus.¹⁹ Augustus soon decided, however, to remit tribute, perhaps calculating that the cost of occupa­tion was not justified, and within a few years the formal limit of the province had been set at Hierasykaminos, some 80km to the south of the First Cataract. But the impact of the Roman presence further south, in an area accessible to Rome and to Meroe, was still by no means negligible and served as a reminder of the latent interest and power of Rome. In the southernmost part of the province the most obvious signs of Roman dominion are the great temples, largely constructed in the Augustan period, at Dendur and at Kalabsha (Talmis) where there seem to be two disdnct temples of the Augustan period on a site which also shows signs of building in the late Ptolemaic period.²⁰

Military sensitivity and the importance of the grain supply help to

¹⁵ Dio Lviii.19.6; Philo, In Flaec. 1.2. ¹⁶ IPbi/ и 128; see above, ch. 4.

¹⁷ See below, pp. 732-6. ¹⁸ For thepraenomen see Bagnall 1985 (e 889).

" Anderson, Parsons and Nisbet 1979 (в 4).

²⁰ Strab. xvii. 1.34(820-10); Porter and Moss 1951 (e958)vii 10-20, 27-33; de Meulenaere, CH 36 (1961) 98—105; for an exploratory expedition to East Africa in the Neronian period see Pliny, HN VI. 184.

explain the direct imperial appointment of the prefect and are perhaps sufficient to account for Tacitus' insistence that the princeps controlled Egypt especially closely.[817] The Senate was thus effectively excluded from any direct responsibility, although even regulations for the administ­ration of the emperor's Special Account (Idios Lagos) might still be modified or affected by senatorial acts.[818] One factor of obvious import­ance is that the conquest brought a great deal of land into imperial possession (the patrimonium). There is evidence under Augustus for possession of estates (whether through purchase or gift) by the emper­or's relatives and friends (Livia, Antonia the Younger, Germanicus, Maecenas), though none for direct personal ownership by Augustus. Later emperors did, however, own estates and continued to bestow them on friends and favourites such as Seneca, Narcissus, Pallas, Doryphorus; these latter properties would naturally revert, whether de iure or merely de facto is unclear, to the patrimonium on the death of the individual.[819] The presence of imperial property, if nothing else, emphasizes that it is very misleading to characterize the whole province as in some sense the 'personal property' of the emperor. But Egypt was nevertheless a province with important differences.

The office of prefect of Egypt was to develop, as might have been foreseen, into one of immense latent power, as Tiberius Iulius Alexander was to demonstrate in a.d. 69 with his support of Vespasian's bid for the imperial throne; Avidius Cassius, the son of a former prefect, was to claim the support of Egypt and its prefect in his unsuccessful attempt at usurpation in a.d. 17 5.[820] The authority of the prefecture was spelled out in a law, presumably enacted in or very soon after 30 B.C., which gave the incumbent's acts and decrees the same validity as those of any Roman magistrate.²⁵ The list of prefects appointed by Augustus and the Julio- Claudian emperors shows some illustrious (and notorious) names: C. Turranius, Seius Strabo, father of Sejanus, Avillius Flaccus, Sutorius Macro. Prefects held office for three years, on average, and in the absence of any specialist Egyptian training relied on their general knowledge of the principles of military and civil administration and law, backed up by readily available local expertise, to cope with the diverse and intricate bureaucratic demands of the job.²⁶ Promotion from Egypt to the praetorian prefecture is regularly attested in the period a.d. 70—235. Tiberius Iulius Alexander, nephew of Philo and member of a prominent Alexandrian Jewish family, is important as the earliest example of an official who held an equestrian post in Egypt (that of epistrategos) and advanced to the prefecture, proceeding later in all probability to the praetorian command; Caecina Tuscus and Claudius Balbillus both held equestrian posts slightly later than Alexander and reached the prefecture earlier. Before them, three examples are known of men who proceeded from the praetorian prefecture to Egypt, namely Seius Strabo, Sutorius Macro and Lusius Geta, all perhaps in circumstances of political sensitivity.²⁷

Like any Roman provincial governor the prefect exercised control, subject only to the emperor's overriding power, over all aspects of the administration of his province. Innovatory regulations could be intro­duced either by the application of imperial pronouncements or senatus consult a, or by prefectural edicts. The degree of independence which a prefect enjoyed was presumably a matter of fine tuning and sensitivity to the limits of his emperor's tolerance, indifference or ignorance. The transgressions of Cornelius Gallus were not administrative but military and political. Tiberius, however, castigated a prefect for stripping the provincials rather than shearing them. By contrast, Tiberius Iulius Alexander showed the required sensitivity to the need to link a general statement of benevolence to the inauguration of a new reign.²⁸

The functioning of the administration depended upon a complex bureaucratic structure which certainly owed a great deal to Ptolemaic precedents, although it should be firmly emphasized that the changes introduced by the Romans were at least as important as the continuities. In direct subordination to the prefect stood a variety of officials of equestrian rank: one in charge of the emperor's Special Account, the iuridicus supervising the judicial administration, various procurators with specific responsibilities, the higher-ranking military officers. We cannot be sure quite how clearly defined the roles of the civil officials were in the early years. Much of the evidence is from the second century and it suggests that status and function tended to become more clearly defined in the course of time. In the Flavian period the estates account (ousiakos logos) was created to supervise patrimonial properties; at least two new officials were probably instituted in Hadrian's reign — the dioiketes, a financial officer with responsibility for the land economy, and the high-priest (archiereus) of Alexandria and all Egypt, in charge of religious institutions. Slightly different in character, although also of equestrian procuratorial status, were the epistrategoi, three or four in number, assigned to territorial divisions comprising groups of districts called nomes (one in the Thebaid, one in the Arsinoite Nome and the Heptanomia, one or two in the delta).²⁹ The evidence shows that the epistrategoi, rather than being miniature prefects in their regions, had

For this view see Hanson 1982 (e 950).

Dio Lvn.10.5; Chalon 1964 (e 909) lines 3-10. и Thomas 1982 (e 975) и ch. 5.

specific and limited functions (relating most importantly to the liturgical system and the judicial administration); again, much of the evidence comes from the second century, by which time the office might have developed wider powers than it had earlier enjoyed. An important general feature of this innovation was that it constituted an injection of paid officials of high rank virtually all of whom, at least in the early years, will have been outsiders who might be expected to perform their duties with a greater degree of impartiality than natives. This is one feature which emphasizes the fundamental division between officials at this level and the native administrators occupying positions at the nome level or below.

It is difficult to provide a tidy description of the upper levels of the administrative structure by which the Roman government organized the affairs of Egypt, largely, no doubt, because the activities of officials at the procuratorial levels, even in the later period, were less apt to be compartmentalized than in modern government. Obviously the auth­ority of the prefect was supreme within the province in all areas. The administrative activities of the head of the Special Account entailed judicial functions in matters affecting the account he administered; how independent his judicial role was depends on the strictness with which the matter of prefectural delegation is viewed. Equestrian military officers are found performing non-military functions — acting in judicial capacities and conducting admission (epikrisis) procedures for Roman citizens (many of whom will have been veterans).³⁰

A more detailed consideration of the administration of the emperor's Special Account, a Ptolemaic survival whose character was radically altered under Roman rule, provides a good example of the complexities and developments in the system. Under the Ptolemies this account had managed land which fell into Crown possession but under the Romans it seems to have supervised only ownerless property (adespota) and land 'in deduction' {ge en bypologot) which was to be sold off; supervision of imperial land and estates belonging to the fiscus (ousiai tamiakai) was, at least in the later period, separately administered. But it was given new responsibilities such as supervision of the sale of temple offices and the admission to Egyptian priesthoods (eiskritikon). Our best single piece of evidence for its sphere and mode of operation comes in the form of a copy of its Gnomon (Code of Regulations); this gives us the form in which it existed in the Antonine period but it is explicitly tralatician and goes back to the reign of Augustus.³¹ In the Gnomon we see the account exercising wide-ranging powers which affected escheatable and owner­less property (bona caduca and bona vacantia), matters of status, testamen-

³⁰ BGU 258; FIRA hi 171; MCbr 84-5; for a list of epikritis documents (all post-a.d. 10}) see Nelson 1979 (e 9jj) 40-2. BGU 1210pratf.

tation, manumission, the activities of priests, the rights of soldiers to own land and so on; its administrative functions are thus intimately bound up with legal powers. Whether it possessed the latter from the first or whether they are a gradual later accretion is difficult to see; but a fragment of the Gnomon which is thought to date to the middle of the first century suggests that, despite variations in detail, the text was relatively stable.[821] This would tend to emphasize the public nature of those interests of the fiscus which it dealt with in the earlier period and the Special Account may, indeed, have provided a model for the establish­ment and growth of the public role of the fiscus elsewhere.

Beneath this administrative superstructure, the traditional nome divisions, which numbered between forty and fifty in the Roman period, remained the basic territorial units for administrative purposes. In the second century natives drawn from the Greco-Egyptian populace were appointed to paid posts in these districts. They did not normally serve in their native nomes nor were they permitted to acquire unproductive or auctioned land in the nomes where they did serve. But in the first century there is evidence to suggest that they were recruited from Alexandrians with Roman citizenship and from the ranks of the magistrates in the nome-capitals (metropoleis).³³ The most important of these nome officials were the strategoi and the royal scribes (basilikoi grammateis), and the former, in particular, had a crucial role (much greater than that of the officials with the corresponding title in the Ptolemaic period) in the system of tax-collection with direct responsibility to the prefect; they are, in many respects, the key to understanding the way in which the Roman government ensured the co-operation or compliance of the local authorities in the towns and villages. A eulogizing inscription of the reign of Tiberius describes the virtues of a strategos in dispensing justice without corruption in accordance with the will of the prefect, managing the upkeep of the dykes and the irrigation system, and farming out public positions.³⁴

Although there were also officials whose functions were exercised in regional divisions of the nome (toparchies), it is the officials of the towns and villages who form the keystone of administration at its most basic level. The role which the metropoleis developed as administrative centres for their nomes had always been inherent in the Ptolemaic system but the evidence suggests that it was much enhanced under the Romans. The villages in the nome tended to form their own hierarchical groupings but they were oriented towards the metropoleis as the main administrative centres of operations which directly served central government interests, principally record-keeping, taxation and the administration of justice. In this respect there is some analogy with the development of poleis or civitates with their dependent territoria in other provinces. It is also very important to note that the Romans did make innovations in introducing magisterial offices (archai) in the metropoleis (gymnasiarchs, exegetai, kosmetai) which were the means of affording a degree of self-government in internal administration — public buildings, games, markets and so on.³⁵ This is completely different from anything in the Ptolemaic period and allows comparison, to some degree, with the character of local administration in other Roman provinces. It is true, however, that in the first two centuries of Roman rule the metropoleis conspicuously lacked the distinguishing feature of the autonomous polis or civitas elsewhere, namely a council (boule). The absence of a corporate organ of administration meant that there was no locus of communal responsibility and that the nome officials had, in effect, to supervise and organize the local authorities in the performance of their obligations to the government. As for the villages, their boards of presbjteroi (elders) enjoyed enlarged authority under Roman rule, but less independence than their metropolitan counterparts and their appointment was prob­ably made or vetted by the village scribe (,komogrammateus).³⁶ Their main functions lay in the areas of supervision of leases of land on behalf of the community, collection of taxes and provision of guards (phylakes).

Government supervision of these local authorities was particularly noticeable in the area of appointment to liturgical services, the nature and scale of which was to become so radically different from anything that had existed in the Ptolemaic period as to make it, in effect, another Roman innovation of the utmost importance. There is no doubt that the range and complexity of the liturgical system developed greatly in the course of the second century but its origins must certainly be put in the Julio-Claudian period.³⁷ In due course distinctions became apparent between the various types of liturgies, all of which were dependent upon the property qualification [poros) of the individual: administrative tasks performed by metropolitans of the gymnasial class, by other metropoli­tans and by relatively well-off villagers, then, at the lowest level, tasks performed by poorer individuals as liturgies requiring personal service (leitourgiai somatikai). These liturgists performed a wide variety of tasks, some internal to the functioning of the town or village, others in areas of

³⁵ Despite Tac. Hist. 1.11, 'ignaram magistratuum', which must be taken as a general comment on the lack of municipal institutions. For holders of arcbai in the Julio-Claudian period see, for example, POxy 146, WChr 176 {kosmetai), PMert 62, SB 9109, PLond 1166 (gymnasiarchs); note that corporate responsibilities of the koimm ton arcbonton (corporation of magistrates) are not attested until the late second century (the term occurs in WCbr 34, of a.d. 201 and it may be inferred that this is the body whose proceedings are recorded in PRj/ 77, of a.d. 192). See now Bowman and Rathbone 1992 (e

9°3)-

³⁴ PPbih

.11.37ff (a.d. 103—7); note the early evidence for an official called begpumenos tts ksmes (headman of the village) in PTeb 401, 484.

³⁷ PMicb J82; SB 9224; Hŭbner, ZPE 24 (1977) 45-53, cf. Thomas 1983 (e 974); contra, Lewis, ZPE 31 (1978) 141-2.

more direct interest to the central government such as tax-collection or the dyke-corvee. In the absence of local councils it was natural that the nome officials, the strategoi in particular, should play an important role in vetting the nomination of suitably qualified persons and supervising the performance of liturgists who performed tasks of direct interest to the government. For the first two centuries a.d. it is important to make a distinction, in principle, between these compulsory services and the voluntary metropolitan magistracies (archat), confined to 'Greeks' of the gymnasial class. This distinction was later to become meaningless as the magistracies became so burdensome as to be regarded in the same light as liturgies and to necessitate compulsion, even though they theoretically retained their prestige and exclusiveness.

Only a handful of communities stood outside this system - the so- called 'Greek cities'; three had existed in the Ptolemaic period, Alexan­dria, Naucratis and Ptolemais and a fourth, Antinoopolis, was to be added in the reign of Hadrian. As far as internal administration was concerned these were distinguished by having a greater degree of autonomy and independence from government officials. They were the only communities which possessed councils (though Alexandria is a famous exception) and their magistracies and civic institutions (such as tribes, demes and some local courts and protected laws) were much closer to the traditional institutions of the Greek polis than anything elsewhere in Egypt.³⁸ But the Roman introduction, early in the period, of archai in the metropoleis nevertheless seems to mark an important and deliberate, albeit gradual, attempt at development along these lines and, as such, it must be seen as the foundation of the Egyptian version of the type of civic or municipal government which the Romans encouraged or introduced in other provinces; and, as elsewhere, it has important repercussions on the physical development of the administrative centres.

In describing the details of the business handled by means of these bureaucratic structures, it is convenient to make a conventional division between the military, financial and judicial administration but it should be emphasized that there are in practice very few rigid lines of demarcation; the application of law and the administration of justice, in particular, pervades every area of bureaucratic activity in a way which modern notions of administration and jurisdiction tend to obfuscate.

i. Military organisation

The introduction of a standing army marked a sharp break from Ptolemaic practice. The monarchs had relied upon soldier-cleruchs (Greek immigrants at first, latterly native Egyptians as well), supple-

³⁸ WCbr 27; SB 9016, 760}; set Bowman and Rathbone 1992 (e 905); for Alexandria see below, pp. 700-1.

mented by the use of mercenaries.[822] In the reign of Augustus Egypt was garrisoned by a force of three Roman legions, nine auxiliary cohorts and three cavalry units (alae)\ there was also the classis Alexandrine whose strength cannot be gauged and the river-patrol which was separately organized. At first the legions were stadoned at Alexandria, Babylon and Thebes; by a.d. 23, with increasing internal security they were reduced to two and stationed in the Roman camp at Nicopolis near Alexandria, sending detachments upriver as and when necessary. Three auxiliary cohorts (and perhaps one aid) had been based there from the first, with another three at Syene near the southern border. The other units cannot be securely located but will have been distributed in Middle and Upper Egypt, sending small detachments for service away from their perma­nent bases, to towns in the valley or to crucial strategic points in the deserts. The overall strength of the Egyptian garrison fluctuated somewhat in the course of time. The legionary establishment was maintained at two until the reign of Hadrian, then reduced to one; in a.d. 105 there were still three alae but only seven cohorts and in the middle of the second century four alae and twelve cohorts.

The command structure in the Egyptian units differed from the norm only in one important respect. Since senatorial legionary legates were excluded, the legions were commanded by the prefect of the camp (praefectus castrorum). One such has been identified as having held this post in the 60s and then to have pursued a career of distinction — namely Minicius Iustus, an old friend of Pliny the Younger, who rose to the primipilate (senior centurionate) and eventually married into a consular family; another, Aeternius Fronto, advanced to the prefecture of Egypt early in the Flavian period.[823] The officers of the early period will have predominandy hailed from Italy and the West. Rankers from Gaul and other western provinces are attested too, but recruitment for the ranks concentrated mainly on the eastern provinces outside Egypt. This will be one thing which distinguished them from the surrounding civilian populace but, even so, there is early evidence of a few native Egyptians in auxiliary units, a trend which certainly became more marked with the passage of time. A unique early example of an Egyptian legionary soldier in the middle of the first century is an Oxyrhynchite named Lucius Pompeius Niger, a veteran of legio XXII Deiotariana, whose father was called Syros, son of Apion.[824]

After the first decade of Roman rule when attempts to expand the province were abandoned, the role of the army in ensuring external security was effectively confined to keeping an eye on the Dodecaschoe- nus and the borders with Meroe, not entirely a sinecure in this period (and even less so in the later empire); a papyrus of the later first century appears to describe an engagement between Roman troops and com­bined forces of Ethiopians and Trogodytes who inhabited areas of the Red Sea coast to the south of Berenice.⁴² Matters of internal security bulk larger in our evidence. Alexandria was always potentially volatile and trouble between Greeks and Jews in a.d. 66 necessitated action by the two legions and extra drafts of troops from Africa.⁴³ The much more serious Jewish revolt of a.d. 115—17 was by no means confined to Alexandria - there was exceptionally fierce fighting in the chora too and, once again troops had to be brought in from abroad (as well as a dis­tinguished commander, Marcius Turbo); there is some surprising evi­dence, too, for the involvement of a civil official, Apollonius the strategos of Apollonopolis-Heptakomias, in military action near Memphis.⁴⁴

Such disturbances interrupted the routine duties of the army only infrequently. Of surpassing importance is the evidence for its centrality in the economic and social development of the province. Supervision of the exploitation of the mines and quarries of the eastern desert was particularly important, as was the construction and guarding of the roads which brought goods from the ports of the Red Sea coast to Coptos; a well-known inscription of the reign of Tiberius records the activities of a working party from the Egyptian legions, cohorts and alae which constructed watering-stations (hydreumata) in the eastern desert and a camp at Coptos; ostraca of a later period provide more vivid personal evidence for the duties of individual soldiers in detachments assigned to such posts.⁴⁵ Greater general participation in the civilian life of the province is attested by first-century papyri which show that soldiers provided virtually the only form of effective policing, did duty in a jail, supplied guards for river-transport, supervisors for the mint, were assigned to the manufacture of papyrus or to the supervision of weights in a market.⁴⁶ All of this presupposes a high degree of integration in the life of the province and such links between civilians and the military will have been strengthened by the increase in local recruitment, the tendency for sons to follow fathers into service and the generally greater visibility and importance of veterans, highlighted in an incident of the Neronian period when veterans of legions, auxiliary cohorts and alae and the fleet petitioned the prefect about the fact that their privileged status was being ignored.⁴⁷ By contrast, illustration of

« Turner, JRS 40 (1950) 57-9. ⁴³ Joseph. B/11.487-93. ⁴⁴ CP/ 439.

⁴⁵ ILS 2483; OFbrida, OWadiFavakbir ( = CPL 303-9, SB 9017). « RMR 10, 51.

« FIRA in 171.

the price which the provincials paid for all this comes in the form of evidence for the burdens of billeting and requisidons which the military presence imposed on the civil population. Alleviation of these burdens was a preoccupation of Germanicus during his visit of a.d. 19 and an edict of the Claudian prefect Vergilius Capito inveighs against fraudu­lent requisitions and orders local officials to send accounts of such expenditures to an imperial freedman.⁴⁸

2. Finance and taxation

Fundamental to an appraisal of the financial administration in Egypt is the nature of the monetary system and the organization of taxation. Whilst the Romans inherited from their Ptolemaic predecessors a province which was already extensively monetized and exploited through a wide variety of taxes and rents in cash and kind, fundamental changes were made under Augustus and the Julio-Claudians which determined the basic shape of the financial administration for the next three centuries.

For half a century after Actium the Alexandrian mint produced only bronze coinage, the notional value of the old tetradrachma being artificially supplemented to equate it to the new universal denarius standard. Minting of the silver tetradrachma was re-established by Tiberius in a.d. 19/20, though with a smaller percentage of silver than its Ptolemaic predecessor, and it remained the basic unit until a.d. 296 when the Alexandrian mint ceased to operate in isolation from the rest of the empire. The fixed equivalence of the tetradrachma to the denarius seems to have been established in the Julio-Claudian period, probably in the reign of Claudius, but the fact that it was more overvalued than the denarius had two important effects; first that the imperial government profited directly from this overvaluation and second that the Egyptian currency became 'closed', de facto if not de iure, because the purchasing power of the tetradrachma outside Egypt was bound to be weaker than that of the denarius. This isolation did not mean that Egypt was immune from the economic effects of a deteriorating currency but there was stability for over a century after the Neronian reform (see p. 2 5 2) and the ill-effects do not begin to be evident until the later part of the second century. There is now no reason to accept the once widely held view that coinage did not circulate extensively in the villages as well as the towns of the delta and the valley or that the government lacked any apprecia­tion of the need to maintain and regulate the volume of currency available. It is, however, impossible to document either of these

« EJ² 320; H. Evelyn White, J.H. Oliver, The TcmpU ofHibii in Et-KJbargeb Oasis n (New York, 1938) 1-19.

690

14Ь. EGYPT

phenomena in detail nor can we reconstruct the processes whereby the credits earned from overseas trade were internalized and contributed to payments of tribute made to Rome. There is some later evidence which implies that such operations were managed by Alexandrian financiers working under government contract.[825]

The extraordinary amount of evidence which the papyri provide for the details of the taxation system, in particular, means that Egypt is by far the best known of all provinces in this respect, even though there are many important features about which we are uninformed. The tribute which the Roman government drew from Egypt was extracted in the form of land-tax (tributum soli) and a wide variety of personal taxes (tributum capitis), as well as ad valorem impositions. Some of this tribute will have left the province in the form of cash and of the annona which fed the city of Rome, a great deal will have remained in the province to pay troops and other government costs (e.g. salaries for officials). The tax burden was divided among the nome-capitals and the villages in their nomes but, beneath this level, there must have been a complex series of mechanisms according to which the communities determined how they apportioned their liability among individuals and collected the revenues. One radical change brought by the Romans was the provincial census, established in the reign of Augustus; the earliest certain incidence is that of a.d. 19/20 but it seems very unlikely that this was the first.⁵⁰ The fourteen-year census cycle, with intermittent updating, required the submission of house-by-house returns (kafoikian apographai) by indivi­dual heads of households and these provided the basis for determining liability to capitation taxes and to taxes on domestic property. Taxes paid on land were determined according to the records of the annually revised land survey. A second important feature is the system of direct collection of taxes. Local people were appointed to compulsory service as collec­tors {praktores or sitologoi), for example, and supervised by officials. Tax- farming on a large scale had probably never been common in Egypt (at least for land taxes), so it is unlikely that there was any significant change in this respect. But there is nevertheless considerable evidence through­out the period for the farming, occasionally under duress, of a variety of cash taxes in particular towns or small areas.

The great variety of taxes attested in the papyri can only be indicated in a summary form. Much of the revenue from the land was raised in grain, levied as tax on private property and as rent on imperially owned and public land; vineyards and garden-land were subject to cash assessments. A straight poll-tax was the basic personal imposition, imposed at different rates according to status and even varying fromplace to place and exempting Roman citizens, Alexandrians and women altogether. There were numerous small imposidons (merismoi) — trade taxes, bath-tax, dyke-tax, for example — sometimes supplemented to compensate for defaulters; taxes on domestic property, on animals, charges on sales and transfers of property, on specified products (salt and oil); taxes paid by Roman citizens (manumission, inheritance); customs dues and tolls; requisitions for military purposes; taxes on temples. Finally, the great burden of compulsory public services imposed on all strata of the populace was also a form of taxation.

These general characteristics of the taxation system apply to the province as a whole but there is great variation in detail from place to place. Local and temporal variations in rates and methods of collection are bewildering but clearly attested. This makes it impossible to assess how great the burden of taxation was for individuals beyond the simple observation that the basic rates of tax on privately owned land during the Principate seem to have been quite low (little more than perhaps 10 per cent of yield). Assessments could, of course, be varied from year to year to take account of the level of the flood and consequent fertility or peculiar local conditions. Difficulties in collection are often apparent. During the reigns of Claudius and Nero substantial numbers of tax­payers from Philadelphia in the Fayum fled from their obligations. The edict of Tiberius Iulius Alexander of a.d. 68 presents a vivid picture of widespread abuses in the tax-system; impressment of people into tax- collection, the imposition of new and unauthorized levies and so on. Some have seen the edict as an attempt to cope with a general economic crisis in Egypt in the Neronian period but the evidence for universal difficulties is very slender. Abuses and complaints of the kind described in Alexander's edict are by no means confined to this era. The difficulties in tax-collection attested at Philadelphia are likely to be chronic and the situation was perhaps exacerbated during the forties by low fertility as a result of a run of unusual levels of inundation.[826]

j. Justice

The judicial competence of the prefect within the province was supreme, subject to the possibility of appeal to the emperor. The exercise of personal jurisdiction by the prefect was carried out by the introduction of an assize-circuit (conventus) organized in three districts of which the centres were Alexandria (western delta), Pelusium (eastern delta) and Memphis (Middle and Upper Egypt). A certain amount of choice and flexibility existed, however, and judicial sessions are known to have been held in other towns in the districts such as Arsinoe or Coptos and, after a.d. 130, Antinoopolis.[827] In these sessions the prefect would deal with cases, applications and petitions presented to him, assisted by his advisers (consiliarii) who might include the iuridicus, the head of the Idios Logos, military officers, local officials and lawyers (nomikot) who were familiar with the Egyptian institutions and laws.[828] One clear indication that the use of the term 'jurisdiction' can be misleadingly restrictive is the fact that the proper and full title by which this exercise was known was dialogismos kai dikaiodosia (review of accounts and dispensation of justice).[829] It is doubtful whether the prefect of Egypt was ever con­strained or guided by the institution of a provincial edict (edictum provinciate) and, certainly in the area of criminal cases which fell under Roman law, he was able, as a second-century papyrus shows, to decide what specific categories of cases he would handle personally.[830] Thus described, the oudines of the superstructure are consonant with the way in which we should expect a provincial governor to exercise his judicial powers. It is, however, much more difficult definitively to identify and describe the major features of the system at the lower levels because it involves an analysis of the relationship between the 'Roman' officials (down to and including the epistrategos) and the local (from the strategos downwards) and their areas of competence and power and of that between Roman criminal and private law strictly defined, on the one hand, and Egyptian laws and institutions on the other.

The exercise of 'judicial' functions by officials lower down the hierarchy is commonly described by modern scholars in terms of 'delegation' by the prefect. Thus, particular matters might be dealt with by a procurator, an epistrategos, a strategos or even a centurion according to, perhaps even sometimes outside, their particular area of administra­tive function. Or the prefect could appoint judges (iudices) to handle particular cases. And, in principle, any matter might be thrown back into the prefect's court if the issue at stake, the incompetence of a lower official or the status of the persons involved necessitated it. Officials at the nome or local level would necessarily handle matters within their administrative role which might involve decisions which had to have legal validity. Thus a prefect can state that his personal appearance in the Thebaid is unnecessary because the local strategoi have dealt with the business;⁵⁶ an archidikastes (chief judge), in charge of the operation of civic courts in Alexandria, handles matters pertaining to the status or ownership of land of Alexandrian citizens and, when these necessitate further investigation in the chora, he is able to require it from local officials.⁵⁷ It is perhaps better, however, not to represent this as a hierarchy of 'delegated jurisdiction', the competence of officials at each level of the hierarchy being strictly inferior to that of the level above. Rather there is a range of officials and institutions applying administra­tive and necessarily often legal decisions in accordance with the rules and laws appropriate to the matter in hand and the status of the persons involved; but it was in principle always possible for the persons involved to seek satisfaction from a higher authority. This is surely how the so- called 'judicial' functions of the strategos, the validity of Egyptian laws (nomoi), the independent local courts of the Greek cities, the legal privileges of the Jewish politeuma are to be explained and the explanation rests firmly on the notion that it is fundamentally misleading to draw a sharp dividing line between 'administration' and 'jurisdiction'.

There remains the difficult issue of the precise status of this hetero­geneous mass of institutions vis-a-vis the Roman law. Here no certainty is possible, especially for the early period of Roman rule. But it seems likely that, in practice, Roman law will have been applied as a natural and appropriate privilege to those of the highest status in the province; others further down the social order might benefit according to the choice of those officials applying it. The continued existence and validity of peregrine laws and institutions is natural and convenient; Roman law and legal institutions are superimposed and become more pervasive as time goes on. These would not necessarily displace or invalidate local laws automatically; the latter would retain their applicability as 'the laws of the Egyptians' unless removed or modified for some specific reason and the notion that their status was merely that of'customs' rather than 'law', stricto sensu, seems to be based on a rather austere view of what, in practice, constituted law.⁵⁸ The practical proposition is thus that we are dealing with a continuum of institutions, whose legal or judicial operations correspond roughly to the administrative pattern in the country and the range of social status and legal privilege in the various groups of the population.

III. ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

An attempt at a brief description of Egyptian economic and social institutions and practices under the early Roman Empire has to proceed from a somewhat conjectural base. The population of the province may have reached 7.5 million by the Flavian period, with Alexandria accounting for perhaps another half a million, though it has recently

" BGU 136; PMilVogl 229.

^и For differing views see Brunt 1975 (e 906) 132—6 and Modrzejewski 1970 (e 951) esp. 331-4- been argued that this esdmate is far too high.[831] The ability of the agricultural base to feed this population can only be reckoned by approximation. Thus, if a figure of 9 million arourai {c. 2.5 million hectares) under cultivation is plausible; if the fertility of the land ensured an average ten-fold yield; if the subsistence requirement of the popula­tion in wheat equivalent were about 60 million artabs, that is about 3.3 billion litres (disregard of peripheral sources of food and other revenue- generating activities compensates for the fact that all land did not produce food of as high calorific value as wheat), the surplus would still be considerable.[832] It will be correspondingly greater if our estimate of the population is lower or if we regard as an overestimate the statement of a fourth-century source which suggests that Egypt shipped 20 million modii of grain a year to Rome - surely enough to pay for government expenditure in the province even without any guess at the volume of cash revenue raised from other economic activities.[833] However we may rationalize or dismiss these estimates, the fact is that Egypt was indisputably a very wealthy province.

Management of the agricultural base was the foundation of this wealth. A very significant feature of the Roman period is the great increase in private ownership of land, perhaps as much as 50 per cent in some areas, though proportions clearly varied greatly.[834] Private land, directly managed or farmed through lease and tenancy, stood cheek by jowl with public land, rented to public tenants (demosioigeorgoi) and with imperial land farmed by tenants or sometimes let in larger parcels to chief lessees(misthotai)-, an individual farmer might cultivate land in more than one of these categories and the unit of cultivation was probably in general small rather than large: even the holdings of wealthy landowners often tended to be fragmented.[835] A holding of 5 or 6 arourai of land might be a reasonable estimate of what an average family would need for bare subsistence.[836]

Productivity depended on the annual inundation and management of the irrigation system was therefore crucial. Private owners shouldered the responsibility for this on their own land, whilst the public dykes and canals were maintained by the introduction of the regular dyke-corvee as a compulsory service for the peasantry. As well as the staple cereals, a great variety of fodder crops, legumes, vines, olives and other garden produce was grown. Much labour came in the form of tenants and their families but there is substantial evidence for wage-labour, some of which was surely provided by these same tenants; only a small proportion of the required labour was supplied by the limited number of slaves employed on the land.[837] This suggests a picture which is rather different from the traditional notion of a peasant society supporting itself by subsistence farming and the evidence of the papyri makes it clear that even modest landholders, who might produce little or no overall surplus in a year would have to trade off surpluses in some crops or commodides to make good deficits in others. Exchange of goods and agricultural produce was thus universal and warns us against an oversimplified economic model which relegates trade and commerce to a purely 'secondary' role in comparison with 'primary' agricultural activity. Transportation and commercial services were essential to move goods from village to town, or village to village and the widespread use of coin, even in villages, suggests that barter was by no means a dominant feature in economic transactions.[838]

In fact, in Egypt the relationship between town and countryside was very close indeed and any distinction between the agricultural economy on the one hand and trade, industry and commerce on the other is likely to be very misleading. The ubiquitous taxes on trades and the variety of goods and services available not only in the metropoleis but also in the larger villages of the Fayum like Tebtunis, Karanis and Philadelphia attest to a great range of small-scale activity in trade and manufacture with the concomitant existence of transport, banking and commercial services. These facilitated both the movement of goods to market centres accessible to the people who earned their livelihood from the land, and the payment and delivery of taxes. At the same time, however, there are manufacturing enterprises like linen-weaving and pottery- making which are much more intimately linked to the agricultural economy and these are often found in villages or even on sizeable individual estates. It is worth emphasizing that an agricultural economy of the kind described could not have existed at all without these services. The evidence from the Roman period may be misleading but it does suggest an increase in this kind of economic activity, as also in trade over greater distances, especially in the luxury items of the eastern trade which entered Egypt via the ports of the Red Sea coast to be routed thence across the desert to Coptos and downriver to Alexandria.[839] With the relaxation of the rigid state control imposed by the Ptolemaic monarchs in the form of so-called monopolies, there was certainly greater scope for private enterprise.

By contrast, it might plausibly be maintained that there was a greater degree of social control in the Roman period. The tendency to classify the population according to status, privilege and obligation becomes much more clearly marked, as the Gnomon of the Idios Logos shows.⁶⁸ In one important respect this was essential to the structure of government because it was intimately bound up with the spread of Roman law and the introduction of institutions like the provincial census, the metropoli­tan magistracies and the liturgical system. Whilst most of the Greco- Egyptian populace were designated simply as Aigyptioi (though not necessarily prevented from improving their status), the higher status of metropolites was reflected, for instance, in lower rates of poll-tax. Within the metropolis, the Romans created a higher order, the gymnasial class which was part of the development which saw the gymnasia become public instead of private institutions, and the creation of magisterial archai. This order was based on the drawing up of a list of such privileged metropolites in a.d. 4/5, henceforth to be perpetuated by admission procedures (epikrisis) which required prospective entrants to document their pedigree (though the degree of intermarriage between Greeks and Egyptians in the Ptolemaic period must have ensured that the 'purity' of this Greek class was to a considerable extent notional).

All the citizens of the 'Greek cities' enjoyed such status because of the very nature of their communities. Other Egyptians could obtain citizenship of Alexandria, which possessed an additional unique feature in being, for Aigyptioi, a necessary prerequisite to Roman citizenship (except for veteran soldiers); this presumably served to ensure a sufficient degree of 'hellenization'.⁶⁹ Thus there must have existed the possibility of qualification by residence and status and there is evidence, lower down the social scale, for a good deal of population movement between villages and towns which shows that people were by no means immutably tied to their origo. Nevertheless, the number of people who attained Roman citizenship was presumably quite small in the early period and perhaps predominantly composed of veteran soldiers, at least in the chora where their high status and relative wealth must have made them, as in many other provinces, an important element in the scenario of town and village life.

There were, of course, other status categories apart from these. The groups of Jews in the towns of the chora enjoyed religious privileges and

M BGU I2IO.

⁶⁹ Pliny, Ep. x.6; on the difficult questions of Alexandrian status see Sherwin-White, ad. loc., el- Abbadi 1962 (e 888) (not commanding universal agreement), Fraser 1972 (e 921) 91, 796.

the large and important Jewish community of Alexandria was organized in a separate politeuma with quasi-public institutions. There were freedmen, some indigenous, others perhaps immigrants who settled in Egypt after employment in the emperor's service, and attainment of the status of Roman freedman (not available to freed slaves of Greco- Egyptians) will have placed a person high in the social order. The slave class, from which they rose, was never very large in Egypt and in this respect there appears to have been little change by comparison with the Ptolemaic period. For what it is worth the evidence suggests that their presence was more marked in the domestic context than the agricultural. Women constituted the other main underprivileged sector of the populadon. The privileges which were extended to them in Roman law will have applied to only a few at first and they are not radically different from what may be observed elsewhere. One significant factor, which is both local and pre-Roman, is the effect of Egyptian or Greco-Egyptian inheritance practices which concentrated more property in the hands of women than elsewhere (perhaps about 30 per cent) but the effects of this should not be overestimated; women perhaps more commonly inherited domestic goods and movables if they had brothers and their participa­tion in economic transactions in general has been seen as an indicator of economic hardship in the family or community.[840] More significant, perhaps, in this context is the closeness of family structure and the phenomenon of consanguineous marriage, a practice whose importance in preserving the integrity of family property must have outweighed any natural revulsion against it.

The Roman presence made relatively little impact on the cultural and religious patterns in the chora. Use of Latin is apparent in military documents and spread on a minor scale amongst veterans. Some legal documents required Latin, there are a few private letters and even the odd literary text.[841] But the major feature continues to be the interaction between native Egyptian and Greek cultural patterns. Literacy in Greek was perhaps quite widely pervasive (even though it will never have been possessed by more than a small percentage of the population as a whole), and Greek literary texts dominate the papyrological legacy with relati­vely little evidence of direct influence in either direction. But the use of hieroglyphic and demotic is still noticeable in the early period. The interaction between demotic and Greek can be seen in Greek translations of demotic literature made in the Roman period and the bilingual business texts, though now less numerous than in the Ptolemaic period, show that there was an important area of overlap within which both language groups could function.[842]

As for religion, the major distinction had always been that between Greek and Egypdan cult and this the Romans preserved. The native temples submitted to more stringent state control, losing economic power, but the innumerable Egyptian cults and the traditional caste-like character of the priestly and other temple offices survived well into the Christian period.[843] The Greek cults which proliferated under the Ptolemies also remained strong, especially in the villages of the Fayum, but they were, as is characteristic, much more closely linked to civic institutions than the Egyptian, their priests more analogous to local magistrates and drawn from the upper strata of the Greco-Egyptian populace. The difference is strikingly illustrated by the fact that civil administrators might participate in libations in a gymnasium or a Caesareum, or make sacrifices to the Greco-Egyptian river-god Neilos but could only be passive spectators at Egyptian rites or processions.[844]

Roman cults and temples of Roman divinities, notably Jupiter Capitolinus, did eventually make some perceptible mark, but hardly at all before the third century; a veteran soldier is even found celebrating the Saturnalia in about a.d. 100,[845] but these novelties surely did little to disrupt existing patterns. Some adaptation was required in a more general way. The Roman prefect would make sacrifices to the Nile, as the Pharaohs had done, and avoid sailing on the river when it was rising. The emperor had to be accommodated, as Pharaoh, in the traditional institutions, whether on a temple relief or a stela recording the instal­lation of a sacred bull (and the emperor Titus (a.d. 79-81), indeed, did attend such a ceremony in person).⁷⁶ Above all, there was cult of the Roman emperor, visible at Alexandria in the great Caesareum (begun by Cleopatra for Antony) and the existence of a group of freedmen Caesariani, and in the acclamation of Germanicus or Vespasian as a god (the latter as son of Amon and Sarapis incarnate).⁷⁷ Caesarea were established in the towns of the delta and valley too, the emperor became a god and his name a natural element in the swearing of an oath. Outside those insdtutions which were specific to imperial cult, it is a matter of intrusion and supervenience as local Greek and (to a much lesser extent) Egyptian cults accommodated to the new order.

iv. alexandria

The fact that official terminology marked out the great city of Alexandria as separate from the Egyptian cbora indicates the justification for giving it special attention. The city certainly reached its apogee in the Roman period. Strabo, who visited it early in the reign of Augustus in the company of the prefect Aelius Gallus, pays resounding tribute to its physical splendours, makes special mention of the suburb of Nicopolis, added under the Romans, and notes the volume of waterborne trade, particularly that carried upriver to the towns of the delta and the valley. The Alexandrian Oration of Dio of Prusa, delivered early in the Flavian period, emphasizes its economic importance and pays less than flattering attention to the vibrancy of public entertainment and the volatility of the mob.[846] Since Alexandria remained the administrative capital under the Romans, that volatility could have an important impact. The prefect Petronius was almost stoned to death by the mob; Germanicus accepted extravagant acclamations in a.d. 19 but was concerned to control public demonstrations of his divinity; the Tiberian prefect Galerius took his wife to Egypt with him but she never set foot outside the official residence or admitted a provincial into it.[847] After Augustus, who alleged that after Actium he had only spared the city as a favour to his Alexandrian friend Areius, emperors (or pretenders) were liable to take some trouble to appear beneficent and conciliatory.⁸⁰

The main motives for this were doubtless political but emperors cannot have been unaware of Alexandria's immense economic import­ance throughout the early imperial period. Its role in the shipment of Rome's corn supply was only one aspect of this. Its central importance for the papyrus industry, the manufacture of glassware, mosaics and works of art and the transport of grain is badly documented but cannot be doubted and emphasizes its contribution to the profitable exploitation of indigenous resources. Goods of Alexandrian manufacture found their way to all parts of the Roman world as well as to areas beyond the southern frontier of Egypt. The perfume and jewellery industries and the spice trade point to its significance as the main entrepot of the Mediterranean littoral for the great volume of luxury goods imported from the East.

The cultural climate was to change somewhat by comparison with the Ptolemaic period for the days of open-handed royal patronage had long gone. But the Museum remained important, albeit swelled by an admixture of members distinguished for administrative rather than intellectual pursuits. The Royal Library and the 'daughter' library in the Serapeum survived too, the losses of books incurred in the Alexandrian War partly compensated by Antony's gift to Cleopatra of the collection of the royal library of Pergamum. In the Roman period the practitioners of literature were not to attain the same eminence as their predecessors of the Ptolemaic era. The literary pursuits were to yield pride of place to the philosophical for Alexandrian philosophy was greatly enriched by the influx of immigrants after the sack of Athens by Sulla. In the Julio- Claudian period the most distinguished philosopher was Philo, member of a prominent Jewish family and uncle of Tiberius Iulius Alexander; his works, along with those of the other Middle Platonists, point forward to the second century when the foundations of Christian theology and philosophy were to be laid in the interaction of Christian doctrine with the Platonic tradition, with gnosticism and with the legacy of Jewish thought.

At the same time, Alexandria retained her established pre-eminence in the traditional areas of scientific endeavour, among which the develop­ment and practice of medicine stands out. In the second century Galen of Pergamum studied there and Alexandria's reputation in this field was still paramount in Ammianus Marcellinus' day. The same is true of the applied scientific disciplines, particularly engineering. In the middle of the second century, the dominant figure was Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose writings reveal an astonishing range of expertise — in mathemat­ics, astronomy, music, optics, geography and cartography. His Alma­gest, the most comprehensive ancient astronomical work, is heavily influenced by Aristotelian doctrines and attempts to account for the movements of the moon and planets within the concept of geocentric system. In his treatise on optics he describes extensive experimentation with the phenomena of reflection and refraction of light. In his geographical work he amassed a mine of invaluable physical and topographical information, as well as discussing the principles of cartography and projection.

In the early imperial period, however, the peaceful arts were over­shadowed by uglier events. At the root of the disturbances were the issues arising from the state of Alexandria's civic institutions, the privileges and aspirations of the large and important Jewish community and the relations between the Greeks and the Jews. Alexandria had almost certainly possessed a council (boule) under the early Ptolemies; when this privilege was removed is a matter of dispute (the reign of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes Physcon and the Augustan period are the most likely candidates), but it was presumably intended to neutralize the political power of the citizen body. Certainly it did not have a boule in the early imperial period and the 'Boule Papyrus', probably to be dated to the reign of Augustus, shows Alexandrian ambassadors petitioning for its reinstatement on the grounds that it would safeguard imperial revenues and enable the local magistrates to ensure the purity of the Alexandrian citizen body by protecting it against infiltration by 'the uncultured and uneducated', probably a veiled reference to the Jews, or that part of the Jewish community which showed overt tendencies to hellenize. A reiterated request to Claudius, which provoked the famous 'Letter to the Alexandrians' shows that Augustus had not yielded; neither did Claudius and Alexandria was not to recover its boule until the reign of Septimius Severus when the privilege was considerably diluted by the fact that the metropoleis of the nomes received boulai as well.⁸¹

In the mean time, there had been serious trouble between Jews and Greeks in the late 30s and early 40s, vividly described, no doubt with some partiality, by Philo. The Greeks were organized in guilds and cult associadons; attempts were made to put statues of the emperor in synagogues, Jewish houses were overrun and looted, vicdms were dragged out and burned, torn limb from limb in the market-place or scourged and executed in the theatre. Rival delegations went to Rome to plead their respective cases. Philo, who was himself a member of the Jewish embassy describes how his party pursued the deranged emperor Gaius from Rome to the Bay of Naples and waited for a hearing whilst the emperor enjoyed himself in his seaside villas.⁸² Reports of the opposing case take a much stranger form than the Legatio ad Gaium — the so-called Acts of the Alexandrian Martyrs, semi-fictional accounts, based, in form at least, on genuine documentary reports of ambassadorial proceedings, which purport to give verbatim reports of the audience of the Alexandrian Greek notables before the emperor and their revilement of the Alexandrian Jews. There is certainly a factual foundation in these martyr-acts, as the names of the dramatis personae show, but it is perhaps of equal significance that the historical contexts in which they are set run down to the reign of Commodus and that in the later examples the anti- Jewish element is absent or subordinate to the expression of anti-Roman feeling. This, together with the fact that all the copies of such acts which have survived were written in the late second or early third centuries a.d., probably tells us more about Alexandrian nationalistic attitudes at that time than about the historical events.⁸³ But we cannot doubt that the unrest of the Jewish community was a significant factor, still felt a quarter of a century after Claudius' letter when they rebelled in sympathy with the outbreak of revolt in Judaea and even more so fifty years later in the great revolt of a.d. i 16-17 which saw the virtual annihilation of the Jews in Alexandria and the choral

⁸¹ CPJ 150, 15 J, cf. ch. 14/ ⁸² Philo, Leg. 120-31, 184-5.

⁸³ Musurillo 1954 (в 381). ⁸⁴ Barnes 1989 (e 1087).

V. CONCLUSION

The Roman annexation of Egypt in 30 B.C. was an event of the greatest historical significance, marking as it did, the conclusion of the struggle for supremacy between Octavian and Antony and the elimination of the last of the powerful hellenistic kingdoms. Egypt's role as a province in Rome's empire was of immediate importance, largely because of the enormous wealth which it generated. This, together with the fact that it is uniquely well documented, has induced modern scholars to go too far in according it a special status and, in doing so, they have tended to emphasize the perseverance of the peculiar administrative and economic features of Ptolemaic Egypt, allowed by the characteristic laissez-faire attitude of the Roman government.

In fact, the opportunity to examine in some detail the process of creation of a Roman province provides a corrective to this view. The terminology of the Ptolemaic period survives in many areas, but there are fundamental changes of such importance that it is seriously mislead­ing to posit a vague and general condnuity from Ptolemaic to Roman Egypt. The institutions and structures of central and local government were radically altered. The creation of a 'Greek' magisterial class in the nome-capitals introduced a type of local civic government previously unknown. With it came the introduction of a new and wide-ranging liturgical system. These features, in turn, rest upon the creation of a wholly different kind of propertied class from that of the Ptolemaic period, one which is based largely on the Roman introduction of genuine and widespread private ownership of land (ge idiotike). With that we may link fundamental changes in the taxation system, to which the introduc­tion of the Roman census was a necessary adjunct. The combined importance of census, property and social status will inevitably focus attention on that feature of Romanization which encapsulates all aspects of the Roman social and economic system, the spread of Roman law.

These changes can all clearly be traced to the Augustan period. Emphasis on their importance need not blind us to the continuities - in the character of the agricultural economy, in religion, in Egyptian culture. A balanced account will give due emphasis both to the continuities and the changes. During the Augustan era the role of Egypt in the empire for the next three centuries was determined. That role was again to change radically only with the coming of Christianity and in response to the very different political and economic conditions of the late third century.

CHAPTER 14f SYRIA

DAVID KENNEDY

I. INTRODUCTION

i. Prologue

Pompey's annexation in 64 в.с. of what remained of Seleucid Syria after the fratricidal struggles of the preceding century, introduced into the Semitic Near East a Roman rule which was to endure for seven centuries. Moreover, as a development and extension of a long period of hellenistic rule, it represented the greater part of almost a millennium of Greco- Roman political dominance and cultural influence. Throughout this long period, however, underlying the Greco-Roman veneer, local indigenous language and culture retained their vitality, to be released in the seventh century by the renewed political dominance of a Semitic people. The point is neatly illustrated by the re-appearance under Islam of many place-names, for centuries overlain by oflficial Greek or Roman ones, but which had apparendy remained in oral use amongst the native population.¹

Yet Roman rule did make an impact in many ways which helped determine the distinctive character of this part of the Near East for several centuries. The creation of conditions of peace and political stability, the unification of the region, the reconciliation of its population to Roman rule and the subsequent participation and influence of many Syrians - most strikingly the Emesene ruling family (below, p. 731) - in and on the developing government and civilization of the Roman Empire, are all the work of the first three centuries.

ТЪе history of Syria in the two and half centuries after Pompey's setdement is dominated by three major themes. First, the establishment and development of a Roman province, and the influence and conse­quences of its role as the major military province of the East. Second, the character and role of the client states, their evolution, then disappear­ance. And third, the gradual emergence and flowering under the influence of the pax romana of a prosperous, more unified culture,

¹ Bcroea, once Harabu is again Halab; Epiphania, once Hamath is now Hama; and Philadelphia, once Rabbatamana is again Amman: cf. Jones 1971 (d 96) zji. Cf. Joseph. A] 1.121, 1 j8.

703

essentially Semitic in character but with a Greco-Roman influence clear to some extent in each of its many facets.

None of this, however, occurred in a vacuum. Geography and previous historical development all played a part. Moreover, what may be said about any one of them is not just a matter of its relative importance in the Julio-Claudian or Flavian-Antonine period, but is constrained by the nature and distribution of the evidence.²

2. Physical and human geography

The geographical unit known in antiquity as Syria, was bounded on two sides by the Mediterranean and the Taurus Mountains; in the south and east there lay the Sinai and North Arabian and Syrian Deserts into whose fringes it merged; and finally, in the north east, though often limited politically by the bend of the Euphrates, north-western Mesopotamia as far as the river Khabur should be included. It is an immense area of some half million square kilometres (Map 18).

It is not possible to detect any fundamental changes in the appearance of the landscape or in the climate since Classical Antiquity. There have, however, been some notable alterations. Thus, deforestation - already far advanced in the pre-classical period - has been taken still further and erosion has destroyed once arable hill terraces; a wetter period in Late Antiquity washed soils away, creating in the lower reaches of water courses what is today called the Younger Fill, overlying ancient remains or making their current location hard to understand.³

The foremost literary source for the period treated in this volume is Josephus (Jewish War and Antiquities (xrv onwards)), although his focus is primarily on Judaea and matters relating to Jewish communities in Syria. Tacitus and Cassius Dio have several long passages, though mainly concerned with military matters. Strabo (Geog. xvi (737-850)) provides an important description of Syria and some commentary and the Elder Pliny has valuable — though at times anachronistic - information (HN v. 13-22). Brief but useful references are also to be found in numerous other sources, most notably Appian, Caesar, Cicero, Malalas (see now the new English translation by Jeffreys et al. 1986 (в 92)), Nicolaus of Damascus, Philo, Plutarch (Vitae), Suetonius and Velleius Paterculus.

For corpora of Latin (several hundred) and Greek (several thousand) texts, the bedrock continues to be the relevant parts of CIL 111 and IGRR in. However, many of these as well as newer texts are to be found in the volumes of IGLS and IJord. Many others are published in AE. Cf. the survey by van Rengen 1978 (в 268). Inscriptions in Semitic languages may be traced in the volumes of CIS; additionally, Palmyrene texts (some 1,000) are being collected in Inventaire its Inscriptions de Palmyre, and Nabataean (several thousand) and Safaitic (c. 15,000 published of an estimated 100,000) collections are also in progress.

For coins, Wrack 1931 (в 363) continues to be useful, as are the Arabia, Sjria, Palestine and Phoenicia volumes of the BMC, to which may now be added volumes of SNG. Valuable recent corpora are those of Kindler 1983 (в 331), Meshorer 1975 (в 343), and Spijkerman 1978 (в 353).

Note also the publications of the American (AAES) and Princeton (PAES) expeditions to Syria and R.E. Briinnow and A. von Domaszewski, Die Provincia Arabia (Strassburg, 1904—9). The results of some major excavations are summarized and discussed in Ward-Perkins 1981 (f 615). Field surveys are of increasing importance, not least those of Saudi Arabia reported in the journal Atlal.

Vita-Finzi 1969 (e 1068); Bintliff 1982 (e 989); Raikes 1985 (e. 1053).

The typical Mediterranean climate of the coastal belt - hot dry summers and mild wet winters, gives way to the harsher extremes of great heat and little rainfall in the deserts to the east and south. The land varies from the fertile plain of eastern Cilicia and the narrow coastal belt of the Levant, across the mountain ranges of the Amanus, Bargylus and Lebanon, which parallel the coast, to the broad belt of first pre-desert, then desert, which stretch beyond. In the west and north, rainfall, supplemented by snow-melt and rivers, is sufficient for dry farming. Some small rivers flow down from the coastal ranges but the major rivers of the region all rise beyond them. The Orontes flows through a broad ferdle valley with major cities along its course, before passing through to the coast between Amanus and Bargylus; the Leontes, far less attractive to urban development, also eventually flowed west into the Mediterra­nean. The Jordan, however, runs south through the Sea of Galilee, dropping below sea level before flowing into the Dead Sea, the rift valley continuing as the broad waterless trough of the Wadi Araba then the Gulf of Aqaba.

The whole broadening curve of land from the Sinai north-eastwards to the mountains of Armenia, is desert, largely devoid of any perennial water source. The major exception is the valley of the Euphrates which, together with its tributaries on the north, the Balikh and Khabur, offered a ribbon of rich well-watered land on either bank. A major problem, however, was that after flowing south parallel with the coast opposite Andoch, the river turned first east then south east, away from the Mediterranean, to flow eventually into the Persian Gulf, leaving a huge unwatered expanse of land, on both sides, but principally that stretching off to the south. There, with the exception of Palmyra, the few springs could offer only modest settlement attractions.

There are rich agricultural lands in northern Syria, in the Hauran, in Galilee and in the land immediately east of the Jordan. Even the pre- desert and parts of the desert can be farmed, though there the principal determinant is the availability of water. In practice that means a reliable minimum annual 200mm of rainfall; when traced on the map, this isohyet helps to explain a great deal about the shape and development of the directly administered Roman province which emerged, and the location of client states.[848] The line, of course, has never been stadc and farming did not necessarily everywhere stop at it nor even reach it; land in this 'border' area has gone in and out of use with periodic climadc fluctuations, the level of political security and population pressures, while, given suitable soil, rainfall could be and was 'harvested' in areas with far less than 200mm.⁵

Hill slopes, and poorly watered regions of steppe and desert provided attractive grazing for animals but these supported a less setded and thinner populadon. Settlement pattern was influenced too by the presence of natural resources other than soil and fresh water: thus the fisheries on the Mediterranean coast and Sea of Galilee, the dmber of the Lebanon, and the salt and bitumen of the Dead Sea.⁶ Trade too: Syria was sandwiched between the great centres of early civilization in Egypt and Anatolia-Mesopotamia; its own geography determined that the coast of the Levant, and routes across northern Mesopotamia, along the Euphrates, across the desert through such oases as Palmyra and Jauf, and up the eastern shore of the Red Sea, would all remain obvious lines of communicadon between Iran and the Mediterranean, Egypt and Anatolia.⁷

The populadon was overwhelmingly Semitic. Within this group, four major elements can be identified by the criteria of language and, in one case, religion. In the south west lay the Jews of Judaea and the semi- Judaized Arabs of Idumaea and Ituraea;⁸ other Jewish communities, some extensive, were to be found in every city of Syria (below, p. 708 and 724). North of Judaea lay the Phoenicians, notably in the great coastal trading cities from Arados to Tyre. The Arabs were located on the eastern fringes of the province, the outcome of over two millennia of migration from the Arabian Peninsula into not just Syria but across Mesopotamia and as far as the Taurus and Zagros mountains. Between and to some extent intermingled with the others, lay the earlier Aramaic population. People of Greek stock were the major intrusive element — many by now of mixed blood - and largely to be found in the cities, especially those of North Syria.

Linguistically, Aramaic was dominant - the 'Syrian language', employed even in Judaea where Hebrew was used only for liturgical purposes. The peoples of Edessa, Palmyra and Arabia Petraea all had written versions of their spoken languages, Aramaic dialects which seem to have been a proto-Arabic. Likewise the Safaitic and Thamudic graffiti of the nomadic tribes of central and southern Syria are probably a primitive Arabic. As elsewhere in the East, Greek was common - though far from universal - amongst the urban populations.

For more recent and better documented periods see Hŭtteroth and Abdulfattah 1977 (e ioi j); Lewis 1987 (e 1054).

Heichelheim 1938 (e ioiz); cf. the handbooks of the Naval Intelligence Division, Syria (1943) and Palestine and Transjordan (1943). ⁷ Teixidor 1984 (e 1066) 19-45.

* Both groups had probably become mixed with the pre-existing Aramaic population: Schŭrer 1973 (e 1207) 1562; Dussaud 1955 (e 1007); 1636; in general, Millar 1987 (e 1039).

At no time do we know the size of the populadon. Locally we know that Apamea (and its territory) had 117,000 'dozens' (probably only males and females of tax-paying age) at the dme of Aemilius Secundus' census in a.d. 6;⁹ and Antioch, said by Strabo to be litde smaller than Alexandria or Seleucia on the Tigris, probably had a populadon, in city and country, of several hundred thousand.¹⁰ A rough guide to the size of some city populations may be drawn from Josephus' references to the size of their Jewish minorities, e.g. the 10,500 slaughtered in Damascus in a.d. 66.¹¹ Precise figures are given for the military contribution of various kings (cf. below, p. 730 and 732), e.g. 5,000 Commagenians sent to join Cestius Gallus in a.d. 66.¹² Likewise, we can estimate quite confidently the overall size of the Roman forces (40—5 0,000 in the Julio- Claudian period). From all of these one can roughly infer a probable population for Syria inclusive of the allied states in the first century a.d. of at least two or three million.¹³

ii. establishment and development of the province

i. Introduction

The terms of Pompey's settlement of the East had created a provincia of Syria the government of which embraced both a narrow territorial province and, in practice, supervision of the conduct of a number of allied rulers in the region (Map 19). The province was a modest part of geographical Syria: essentially those cities of the region to which a wide range of functions could be delegated under the Roman system of provincial administration. Thus, the 'Greek' cities of the Syrian Tetra- polis in the north¹⁴ and of the Decapolis in the south,¹⁵ and the city-states of the Phoenician coast.¹⁶ Few were more than 100km from the coast. The allied rulers were widely spread, extending in an arc from the

' ILS 2683. The meaning of the term bomin. civium is discussed by Cumont 1934 (e 996).

¹⁰ Strab. xvi.2.; (750c); the implications of various references to population at Antioch are discussed by Downey 1958 (e 1005).

" Joseph. BJ II. j 59-61; cf. 461-5 and 477-80 for the numbers massacred in other cities.

Joseph. BJ n.5oof. A crude estimate of population size may be drawn from the proportion of population in a pre-industrial society which could be supported as a professional army. The ĥgure has been given as not more than 5 per cent, although the German Constitution of 1871 prescribed 1 per cent. For Commagene this would suggest a total population of between 100,000 and 500,000.

Census figures for the French Mandated Territories of Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s gave a total of almost 4 million inclusive of nomads: Naval Intelligence Handbook, Syria, 191.

Antioch, Apameia, Seleucia and Laodicea: Strab. xvi.2.4 (749c); cf. xvi.2.8-10 (752-3C).

Canatha, Damascus, Dion, Gadara, Gerasa, Hippos, Pella, Philadelphia, Raphanaea and Scythopolis, are listed by the Elder Pliny (HN v. 16); the additional names which seem to be provided by Ptolemy (Georg. v.ij.22-3) should probably not be included: Schŭrer 1979 (e 1207) 11 125-7.

Principally Aradus, Tripolis, Byblus, Berytus, Sidon and Tyre: Strab. xvi.2.13-24 (754-8C).

Nabataean kingdom on the Red Sea to the Commagenian in the foothills of the central Taurus Mts. But because Rome failed to provide adequately for the security of eastern Anatolia, the Syrian governor also exercised some supervision over states there as distant as Iberia and Albania in the Caucasus.

Pompey's setdement brought a new regime but no lasting peace or stability during the succeeding generation. Within a decade, the disas­trous campaign of Crassus (55-53 B.C.) had exposed the province to invasion by Parthia. The renewed civil wars which followed in 49 в.с. initiated a long period of insecurity, instability and exploitadon for the province. The great civil war battles were fought far to the west, but their ripples were felt. For Syria that meant the rebellion of the Pompeian Caecilius Bassus (47—44 в.с.)¹⁷ and the opportunism of various Arab phylarchs and Parthian mercenaries who had become involved;¹⁸ Cas­sius' struggle with Dolabeila for control of the province (44-42 B.C.);¹⁹ the denuding of the province of its troops and the consequent military adventurism of at least one of Cassius' appointees;²⁰ Parthian occupadon and subsequent campaigns to drive them out (40—39);²¹ and the succes­sion of campaigns of pacification - against the Jews, Commagene and Arados.²² Above all, these years saw the systematic and unprincipled extraction by a succession of Romans of much of the movable wealth of the province, as advance taxation, 'gifts', indemnities and undisguised robbery. Thus Laodicea, devastated by the siege of Cassius and its subsequent sack (44-42), was then required to pay huge sums to his war chest;²³ the agents of Antony were killed at Arados which was then subjected to a two-year siege (40—38);²⁴ and the Nabataeans were fined for their sympathy for the invading Parthians.²⁵

The final turmoil came with Antony's gifts to Cleopatra: all of Phoenicia except Tyre and Sidon, the kingdom of Chalcis, and parts of the kingdoms of Herod and the Nabataeans. Later, by the 'Donations of Alexandria', these regions, as well as the overlordship of all of the client kings of Syria, were transferred to their son, Ptolemy Philadelphus.²⁶

The victory of Octavian opened the way for restoring stability and at least creating the conditions which would allow a naturally wealthy region to regain its prosperity. Antony's gifts were of course nullified,

¹⁷ App. BCiv. 111.77, iv. j 8f; Cic. Fam. xii. 11 f, 17ff; Att. xiv.9. 3; Dio xlvii.26.3-27.5; Joseph. AJ xiv.268-72; BJ i.2i6f; Strab. xvi.2.10 (752c). ¹⁸ Dio xlvii.27.3; Strab. xvi.2.10 (753c).

" App. BCiv. iv.60ff, 64, v.4; Dio xLvn.29.1-30.5; Strab. xvi.2.9 (752c).

App. BCiv. iv.63; Joseph. AJ xiv.i^yf.

Dio xLv1n.26.1f; xlix.19.1-20.3; Joseph. AJ xiv.330-64; BJ 1.248-70.

Jews: Dio XLix.22.3f; Joseph. AJ xiv.394-412; xiv.447; xiv.468-86; BJ 1.290-302, 345-57. Arados: Dio XLVin.41.6, XLIX.22.3. Commagene: Dio XLIX.20.4-22.2

Dio xlvii.30.2-7; App. BCiv. rv.6if; Cic. Fam. xn. 132.4.

Eus. Cbron. it.! 39.i (ed. Schoenc); Dio xlvin.24.3, 41.4-6, xlix.22.3.

Dio xlviii.41.5. ²⁶ Dio xlix.41; l. 1.5; Plut. Ant. liv. 3-6.

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but there was no change in the fundamental arrangements of the previous generation which provided for a modest province under direct government and a network of alliances with petty rulers in the rest of Syria. However, within that basic formula much important reform and re-organization was required; that was to be largely the contribution of Augustus.

Relative to the preceding century, the Julio-Claudian period was one of general peace. After Herod's death in, probably, 4 B.C.,²⁷ creation of the new province of Judaea removed a major segment of Syria from day to day supervision, though direct administration was soon extended to eastern Cilicia, Commagene and, intermittently, parts of Ituraea and the Hauran. Internally, although banditry seems to have been endemic in the Herodian or former Herodian realms at least, security and order had been enormously improved by the provision of a much enlarged and permanent army (below, p. 715). With the important exception of intervention in Judaea to calm passions or put down revolt, governors had little worry over internal insurrection. Even the campaign of Vitellius in 37 to punish the Nabataeans for their short 'war' with Herod Antipas, and Petronius' punitive expedition against the Jews, were halted by the deaths of Tiberius and Gaius respectively.

But the large army of Syria was a recognition too of the external threats - or opportunities - in the region. The expeditions of Aelius Gallus deep into the Arabian Peninsula in 26/5 в.с.,²⁸ and the obscure expeditio Arabica of Gaius Caesar in a.d. i,²⁹ expanded direct Roman familiarity with remote regions in the south and emphasized their inclusion in her sphere of interest. The role of the governors of Syria in very high level international diplomacy and in immediate dealings with the Parthian Empire, cannot be underestimated. The defeat of Crassus and the subsequent invasions of Syria, had inflicted a blow on Roman prestige - and confidence - which were never to be expunged. However, bullying and diplomatic successes enormously improved the local perception of restored Roman power. The colourful pageantry of Gaius Caesar's meeting on the Euphrates with Phraates V in a.d. i described by Velleius Paterculus, was only the first of three such high level meetings in the period.³⁰ The province would have been scarcely less impressed by the passage of Parthian hostages and royal refugees, and by the periodic

On the probable date of Herod's death see Schŭrer 1973 (e 1207)1 326ffn. 165.

Principally Strab. xvi-4.22f (78ocf); cf. RG v.26; Pliny, HN v1.32.160f; Joseph. AJ xv.317; Dio li11.29.3-8.

Pliny, HN 11.168; vi.141, 160, xii.j5f, xxxii. 10; FGrH 111 л 273, f 1-3. It has now been suggested that this expedition resulted in the annexation, temporarily, of the Nabataean kingdom: Bowersock 1983 (f 990) 54ff (cf. below, p. 732Q.

Veil. Pat. 11. 10.1; Joseph. A J xviii.ioi—3 and Suet. Vit. 2 (Vitellius' meeting with Artabanus in 37); Joseph. BJ vn.ioj (Titus' meeting with envoys of Vologases in 70); cf. Tac. Ann. i.6o (Germanicus in 18).

introduction by Rome of claimants to the Arsacid throne. Despite the interventions in Armenia, the Parthian menace was controlled; there was no direct conflict with Parthian troops until the reign of Nero, and no threat to Syria's borders materialized until the time of Marcus Aurelius. The everyday management of relations with most of the nomad tribes was in the hands of various allied rulers (below, p. 715).

2. Government у administration and security

In 27 b.c. the status of Syria was enhanced and fixed. As the most vital and sensitive of the provinces assigned to Augustus in the East, it was endowed with the largest army. The legateship, invariably to be held henceforth by a person of consular standing, was the most powerful and prestigious in Rome's Asiatic provinces.

Syria's very importance demanded the careful selection as governor of men who were politically reliable. Novi homines like C. Sentius Saturninus, P. Sulpicius Quirinius (characterized by Syme as one of the 'safe men and time-servers'), or great aristocrats like P. Quinctilius Varus and, perhaps, L. Calpurnius Piso, probably selected because related, however tenuously, to the dynasty. Moreover, the power of any governor was qualified by the presence and character of the imperial procurator. Only two are known in the early Principate, but both appear as powerful and influential men, willing to demonstrate their independence of their superior. Indeed, in the case of Sentius Saturninus and the procurator Volumnius, they are paired several times by Josephus as 'governors' of Syria.³¹

There were other imperial appointees in the region. Quintus Servaeus was given charge of Commagene after its annexation in a.d. 18,³² and that may have been a common practice with many newly annexed territories. The administration of some discrete regions of the province, distant from Antioch, may likewise have been delegated. Thus, the prefecture of the Decapolis found in the time of Domitian, may have had its origins in the early Principate,³³ and there is a suggestion that the boule and magistrates at Palmyra may have been largely directed in their actions by a Roman Resident.³⁴ Finally, there were the men who administered the imperial estates: Herennius Capito, the procurator of Jamnia,³⁵ must have had colleagues administering the other imperial properties in the region.

e.g. Joseph. A J xvi. j44: tous tu Surtas begemonas. Syme 1974 (c 229) = (л 94) 915.

Tac. Ann. 11.J6.5.

bch 4(1880): jo6ff; the suggestion is made by Isaac 1981 (p 1016).

Teixidor 1984 (e 1066) 6jf.

Joseph. AJ xviii. 158 (cf. Philo, Leg. 199-202; AE 1941, ioj). The career is discussed by Pflaum 1960 (d 5 9) no. 9. The inscription describes him as procurator of the successive owners of the property: Livia, Tiberius and Gaius; under this last, according to Philo, he was also tax-collector for Judaea.

The remoteness of Syria which could delay decision-making in Rome by months, combined with an unwillingness to allow too great an initiative to its governors, helps explain the employment and role in the East of members of the imperial house and close associates. Agrippa (and Augustus himself) in the early years of the Principate overhauled the arrangements with client states (below, p. 728f). Later, first Varus then Gaius Caesar were sent at a time of rising tension and internal upheavals following the deaths of Herod and the Nabataean Obodas, and Germani­cus was instrumental in supervising the annexation of Cappadocia and Commagene, dealing with Arabia Petraea, the closer assimilation if not annexation of Palmyra,[849] and for diplomatic exchanges with Parthia. His diplomatic contact with Mesene at the head of the Persian Gulf must be associated with stimulation of trade with the Far East; it cannot be coincidence that the first attested Palmyrene caravans are of 19 and 24.[850]

With the exception of Corbulo's appointment to the governorship (a.d. 60-3), the actual ability and experience as administrators or soldiers of most governors, was not of course a criterion in their selection. Some, probably most, were corrupt and venal: we are told this explicitly of Sentius Saturninus and Varus, though neither these nor any others are known to have been prosecuted for misgovernment.[851] Whether the procurators were more experienced and able we cannot tell. The better evidence for the prefects and procurators who governed Judaea does not encourage optimism.[852]

From the pages of Josephus we get a detailed picture of these men at work. The administration of justice and keeping the peace were high on the agenda of all governors. Some at least of the assize-centres outside Antioch can be inferred: Berytus, Tyre, Damascus, Lydda and Jerusa­lem; and we may suppose too Apamea, Laodicea, Tripolis and Sidon. The complaints of the Jews against their procurator Cumanus,⁴⁰ the intercession of Herod Agrippa I on behalf of the Jews of the city of Dora, persecuted by their Gentile neighbours,[853] and the boundary dispute between Damascus and Sidon,[854] all provide interesting glimpses of some of the preoccupations of the governor. Keeping the peace was, however, more than just a matter of arbitrating in such disputes. Turbulent cities like Antioch had to be policed,[855] religious festivals brought large numbers together in potentially unruly circumstances,[856] and banditry had to be controlled.

An aspect of the governor's activities which receives little attendon in the ancient literature is that of relations with the cides. The intervention in the affairs of Dora (above) and the order to its leading men to hand over the offenders to a military officer is instructive; more useful is the series of references in the Tax Law at Palmyra revealing intervention in the internal economic affairs of that city not just by Germanicus, but by the governors Corbulo and Mucianus.[857]

Both governor and imperial procurator were resident at Antioch. The city was no longer a royal capital, but henceforth, because of the status and wide jurisdiction of the governor, it was effectively capital of the Asiatic East; in the Greek East as a whole, second only to Alexandria in size. Appropriately, Tiberius was to emphasize the status of the city by his contribution of that quintessential symbol of Roman sovereignty, a statue of the she-wolf and twins atop the new East Gate.[858] The city housed the provincial bureaucracy and at least the governor's guards. For much of the year, however, the governor was absent on tour and some of the paraphernalia of government will have been established in successive provincial cities.

More than for any other province, it was a major function of the Syrian governors to deal with and watch over the activities of kings and princes. The meetings and correspondence Herod had with governors of Syria cannot have been unusual except perhaps in their frequency. Relations were not always easy for any governor ... or king. M. Titius was at odds with Archelaus of Cappadocia until reconciled by Herod,⁴⁷ and Vibius Marsus earned the enmity of Herod Agrippa I for his interferences in that king's bolder activities.⁴⁸ The heart of the problem was, as Tacitus observed in another context,⁴⁹ that kings do not like to be treated like other men, and occasionally those in the East forgot the true nature of their position; conversely, a governor in office for only a few years at most needed to exercise considerable tact when dealing with men whose positions were 'permanent' and some of whom enjoyed very close relations with the emperor.

The governor disposed now of a large army. In place of the two legions of the late Republic and the wildly fluctuating numbers of the civil war period, Augustus allocated Syria four. We may roughly estimate the auxilia in the early Julio-Claudian period at about 20,000; by the time of Nero, risen to some 30,000. The armies of the client rulers could reach perhaps 15-20,000 (cf. below, p. 730; 732).

The Roman forces performed two principal functions: the mainten­ance of internal security and the confrontation of potential external threat. The very presence of a powerful army in Syria would have had a deterrent effect and in practice the Parthians never renewed their invasions of Syria of 51/50 B.C. and of 40—38. The major external wars involving the army of Syria were those fought out far away in Armenia by the generals of Augustus (Tiberius in 20 b.c. and Gaius Caesar in a.d. 2: see above ch. 4) and Nero, but Syrian troops were involved too, internally, in the Homonadensian War of c. 5/3 B.C. and in the suppression of the Cietae in western Cilicia in a.d. 36 and 52.⁵⁰ Internal security was a matter of policing the potentially turbulent city popula­tions, suppressing banditry and controlling the nomads. The last of these does not appear as a problem for imperial governors after the interven­tions of the Arab sheikh Alchaudonius in the civil wars of the late Republic (see n. 18); most will now have been the direct responsibility of various allied kings and princes, as was certainly the case with the Herodian rulers in the Hauran at a later date.⁵¹ Most action against bandits would likewise have been the responsibility of petty rulers; certainly most of that known to us concerns Judaea. Nevertheless, imperial troops were also involved in what was probably a common enough task in any province. The governor Varro himself suppressed widespread banditry in the Trachonitis c. 23 b.c. after Damascus complained of their depredations,⁵² and later imperial troops were employed c. a.d. 6 against the Ituraeans on Mt Lebanon.⁵³ Although Antioch with its large population represented the greatest potential threat of urban unrest, in practice it was almost always Jerusalem which called for the involvement of Roman troops, just as it was Judaea as a whole in which time and again Roman troops intervened to restore order.⁵⁴ Imperial forces seldom had to intervene in allied states. In the early years of his reign, Herod had needed assistance to secure his kingdom (see n. 21) and troops would certainly have been involved in the annexation of client states. However, only once do we hear of troops intervening to coerce an allied ruler.⁵⁵

⁵⁰ Tac. Ann. vi.41, ХИ.5 5­⁵¹ The evidence, largely epigraphic, is collected and discussed by Sartre 1982 (e ioj6) 121-32, esp. i22f with texts referring to strategoi Nomadon. ⁵² Joseph. BJ 1.399. ⁵³ IIS 2683.

e.g. Varus in a.d. 6 (Joseph. A J xvii.2jf; BJ u. 1); Petronius in 59/40 (Joseph A J xvin.274); and Quadratus in 52 (Tac. Ann. xn.54).

In 3 7 Vitellius was ordered by Tiberius to invade the N'abataean kingdom and send its king or his head to Rome. Tiberius' death gave him the pretext to halt the attack before it can have got much beyond the Jordan (Joseph. AJ xvm.iijf).

The legions were all in the north; only the occasional intervention in Judaea brought one south of the river Eleutherus to be stationed in Jerusalem. At various times, legions are located at Cyrrhus and Rapha- neaea, and - we can infer or guess - Antioch, Apamea, Chalcis, Samosata and Zeugma as other bases for long or short periods.[859] The evidence is slight but the impression — derived partly from the evidence of their locations in the later first and in the second centuries — is of already in the Julio-Claudian period, a gradual movement of the legions eastwards to the Euphrates. The auxilia were more widely scattered. Like the legions, many seem to have been stationed in or near cities and towns; others were in strategic locadons from the Euphrates bend (Tell el-Hajj) to Judaea (Masada).[860] Only with prior imperial permission could royal forces operate outside their own borders. Cavalry and archers are prominent amongst the auxiliary units, but it is not till the second century that a camel corps appears. A further, indirect, element of security was provided by the three veteran colonies at Berytus, Heliopo- lis and Ptolemais (cf. below p. 717).

Already in the late Republic, Rome had begun to recruit locally - not just the auxiliary Ituraean archers employed by Caesar and Antony, but even into the legions. With a limited pool of Roman citizens in the East as a whole, inevitably the practice continued under the Principate, relying on the hellenized population of the cities. Likewise the formation of locally recruited alae and cohortes was soon under way — albeit more slowly than elsewhere — with units from Cyrrhus, Apamea, Damascus, Antioch and Ituraea; some were drawn from the native Semitic popula­tion. The annexation of allied states led to the incorporation of royal armies from Commagene and Judaea. Although royal armies seem to have mimicked some at least of the ranks and organization of the Roman army (below, p. 717 and 732), their continued existence for so long prevented the direct Romanization of a large part of the military manpower of Syria, with consequences for the Romanization of parts of the region. Some of these units were dispatched for service in other provinces; some remained in Syria. For all the units in garrison in Syria from the outset local recruitment was probably the commonest method of replacement for most vacancies.[861]

j. Urbanisation and urban development

The numbers and locations of the cities of hellenistic Syria are well known (above, p. 708). Much less can be said of their condition at the outset of Roman rule. The capital, Antioch, was of course already a major city by any contemporary standard, embellished over two and a half centuries by the building activities of successive kings and, under the last of these, even by a palace and circus donated by a Roman magistrate, Q. Marcius Rex in 67 в.с.⁵⁹ Apamaea likewise had benefited from being the Seleucid military centre. In contrast to the irregular layout of the Phoenician and Jewish cities, these and the other hellenistic foundations had been laid out on a regular grid pattern which remained the basis of planning and development throughout the succeeding centuries. We may plausibly infer decline in the hellenistic cities during the final chaotic years of the Seleucid dynasty and the period of Armenian occupation (83-64 B.C.). The Roman civil wars and Parthian invasions took their toll: Apamaea, Laodicea, Arados, Tyre, Samosata and Jerusalem were all besieged at one time or another, and all cities suffered from the demands of successive dynasts seeking to fill their war chests. For the cities of Syria as for those of other provinces, Octavian's victory would have brought welcome relief.