From Trophy Towns to City-States: Urban Civilization and Cultural Identities in Roman Pontus 0812252373, 9780812252378

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From Trophy Towns to City-States

EMPIRE AND AFTER Series Editor: Clifford Ando A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

From Trophy Towns to City-States Urban Civilization and Cultural Identities in Roman Pontus

Jesper Majbom Madsen

U n i v e r s i t y of Pe n ns y lva n i a Pr e s s P h i l a de l p h i a

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-0-8122-5237-8

Contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. The Eternal Hunt for Glory

15

Chapter 2. Building Cities from the Ground

48

Chapter 3. Introducing Civic Life

96

Chapter 4. Eager to Be Both Greek and Roman

152

Conclusion

199

Notes

209

Bibliography

227

Index

239

Acknowledgments

245

Introduction

In 66 bce, in the woods of Armenia Minor, Pompey the Great defeated Mithridates VI Eupator, making Pompey one of the most successful Roman generals of all time. At the same time, this presented him with the enormous challenge of organizing not only Mithridates’ kingdom but also large parts of Anatolia and the Near East that were now placed under direct Roman rule. His answer was to expand the province of Cilicia and found two new provinces: Syria in the heartland of the Seleucid kingdom, and the province of Pontus at the core of Mithridates’ kingdom, which he then joined to Bithynia. It was a brave and difficult choice. Three provinces in hostile country would stretch Rome’s administrative means to their very limit; the dangers of riots from within and of invasions by both ambitious neighbors and far-from-reliable friends were factors Pompey needed to take into account in his plans. In the case of Pontus, the name the Romans gave to the province, the decision to place the region under direct Roman rule was further challenged by the size of the area—stretching from Paphlagonia in the West to Armenia Minor in the East—and by the lack of a civic culture in the hinterland on which the organization of the province could be based.1 In addition, the new province was culturally diverse, the home of various different Anatolian people, and geographically varied, with large rivers and high mountains that divided the coastal areas from the hinterland and that considerably complicated communications. Pompey’s solution was to found six new cities, and to convert the two existing centers—Zela, the temple community dedicated to the goddess Anaïtis, and Amaseia, the former royal residence—into cities too. There would then be eight city-states, each with the responsibility of organizing considerable territories. To found a province in a very hostile area and simultaneously to establish eight city-states all within a few years was a complicated task, on a scale that Rome had never carried out before. Considering the manner in which Pompey assumed the command against Mithridates VI and Tigranes II, using

2

Introduction

his influence with the tribunes in Rome and his popularity among the people, the general was running a considerable risk. If the province proved impossible to defend or if the cities failed to thrive, he would be the one to blame and could expect harsh allegations from members of the political elite in Rome, who would do what they could to weaken the victorious general by politically attacking him with his status as the one who conquered the East. There were other options available. A safer but surely less glorious solution would have been to follow Rome’s strategy elsewhere in the East and place the entire region in the hands of various client kings whose loyalty could be reasonably predicted. It is worth bearing in mind that Pompey did in fact keep a considerable part of the province under the rule of client kings. Tigranes II continued as king of Armenia just as Cappadocia carried on as a client kingdom under Ariobarzanes II. The decision to turn the kingdom of the Mithridatic kings into a province with the administrative challenges caused by a lack of a civic culture stands out as particularly ambitious. In comparison, the decision to found a province in Syria and enlarge the territory under the jurisdiction of Cilicia, although a considerable administrative task, was still less demanding. A Syrian province would be vulnerable to ambitious neighbor states such as Parthia, but the web of well-established cities, particularly those in Syria, offered the kind of legal and institutional framework and civic culture that were familiar to Rome—something that would have to be supplied largely from scratch in the province of Pontus. Pompey’s plans for Pontus and Bithynia and the reorganization of the East have occupied scholars for generations. They have discussed both the motives behind the urbanization and the types of civic communities Pompey wanted to establish. It is generally agreed that the web of cities that the general founded in the hinterland represents an attempt to break the previous royal organization of the region, in which a large rural population living in villages worked on the land as serfs overseen by the trustees of the king. There are, however, many different views on what Pompey wanted to achieve with the urbanization per se and on what kind of community the general hoped to establish. One school of thought sees the foundation of the urban network as an attempt to civilize the hinterland of Mithridates’ old kingdom by introducing what are believed to have been civic communities modeled on Greek urban traditions and a form of political organization that was based on Greek thought. In his Römische Geschichte, first published in the 1850s, Th. Mommsen argues that the urbanization of Roman Pontus was a way to move the population toward the West and replace what Mommsen saw as oriental military despotism with

Introduction

3

an urban culture modeled on Greek and Italian traditions. According to Mommsen, Pompey was keen to establish a civic culture in the sparsely urbanized parts of Anatolia and was responsible for the spread of Greek culture throughout the region.2 In his Roman Republic of 1923, T. Rice Holmes shares Mommsen’s thought that the cities were intended to draw the people in the East toward Rome. Like Mommsen, Rice Holmes sees Pompey as one who promotes the spread of Greco-Roman civilization.3 A similar view is found in the 1932 contribution to the Cambridge Ancient History series by H. A. Ormerod and M. Cary, who wrote that Pompey’s cities are said to have provided new impetus to the diffusion of Hellenic civilization in Syria and Asia Minor.4 J. G. C. Anderson and A. H. M. Jones also believed that Pompey’s cities were founded on a Greek model. In his treatment of Pompey’s reorganization of Pontus, Anderson suggests that as a result of the Greek population already living in the cities, Amaseia was fairly Hellenized by the time Pompey won the war. Jones argues in his The Greek City: From Alexander to Justinian (1940) that the new settlements followed Greek traditions in order to promote Greek civilization in what he calls the “backwater regions” of Asia Minor and the Near East.5 In his Roman Rule in Asia Minor: To the End of the Third Century After Christ (1950), D. Magie sees Pompey’s choice of government as a form of constitution that was inspired by Greek traditions of self-government but one in which ex-magistrates’ right to lifelong membership of the city councils and the introduction of the censorial institution to oversee council members are recognized as characteristically Roman elements. However, much focus is devoted to the Greek terms for the cities’ political institutions and to how the city names included the term polis, from which Magie concluded that Pompey aimed to Hellenize the region.6 In his From the Gracchi to Nero (1959), H. H. Scullard saw the urbanization of Pontus as a deliberate attempt to turn the region toward Rome and away from Parthia; Pompey is thought by Scullard to have aimed for a continuous line of provinces “around the coast of Asia from Pontus on the Black Sea in the north to Syria in the south.” Inspired by Alexander the Great, Pompey is seen as having introduced city-states with institutions modeled on Greek urban traditions.7 What constituted these so-called Greek communities is often far from clear, but they are sometimes defined as self-governing entities, where the political power was divided between the assemblies, councils, and magistracies, and as a political structure in which a comparatively large part of the civic body was eligible to participate in the decision-making process. While

4

Introduction

the latter element may differ from the oligarchic nature of Roman or Latin cities—at least when the Greek cities were organized along democratic principles—it does not differ from a form of organization with the same division of political power that Rome introduced in Italy and the West. From a constitutional point of view, it is therefore difficult to draw a clear distinction between what is a Greek city and what is a city modeled on Roman norms. This will be discussed in Chapter 2. Another school of thought has questioned whether Pompey really did establish city-states with developed civic landscapes. Instead, the cities are seen as legal frameworks with the necessary political institutions needed to administer and, more importantly, tax the newly conquered region. Even if the cities’ institutional landscape seems to have been modeled on Greek traditions, it is not generally believed that the introduction of cities was motivated by an attempt to introduce Greek culture into the rural parts of Anatolia. In their Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire, F. F. Abbott and A. C. Johnson maintain that the urbanization was an attempt to facilitate taxation by letting the local magistrates help settle standards for how much tax was to be collected.8 The same line of thinking was followed by T. Frank in his Roman Imperialism of 1914. Frank sees the urbanization and the foundation of the new provinces in the East as an attempt to increase the area under Roman rule and so to extend the land that the publicani, Pompey’s alleged supporters, were allowed to farm.9 Frank argues that Pompey continued Alexander’s strategy by inviting Greek settlers to live in the most fertile parts of the hinterland in order to form a nucleus of civilization. Even if the civilization of the hinterland was not the main objective, this settlement provided, along with improved cultivation of the land and a system of taxation, the spread of Hellenic culture and a model of how to live in a civic culture.10 On the other hand, W. G. Fletcher sees no indication that Pompey tried to introduce an urban culture when he turned the kingdom of Mithridates into a province. Once again, the purpose of the cities is mainly described as an attempt to ease the collection of tax and as a way to split up Mithridates’ kingdom into smaller parts. In order to tackle the administrative challenges, the rural population had to be set free and the tax collection had to be placed in the hands of local institutions in order to administer the region by Roman standards.11 J. Van Ooteghem also identifies financial and administrative motives behind the settlements. In his Pompée le grand, bâtisseur d’empire of 1954, he does not see the cities as intended to promote Greek civic culture, though he agrees that the administration was modeled on

Introduction

5

Greek tradition.12 That the cities were founded to facilitate tax collection is also claimed by R. M. Kallet-Marx in his Hegemony to Empire of 1995.13 In another approach to the question of taxation, K. Morrell has recently argued that Pompey was hoping to improve the government of Rome’s provinces. Pompey is seen to have chosen a different way forward when he, according to Morrell, practiced another form of conquest than his peers in the mid-first-century bce. Pompey is here seen both as a general who tried to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and as a rather un-Roman politician who seemingly did not have the interests of the publicani at heart when he expanded Roman rule farther into the Near East.14 Other studies have paid more attention to the sort of community Pompey wished to introduce and to the implications of the provincial legislation, the lex Pompeia. In an article on the lex Pompeia in the Journal of Roman Studies, A. J. Marshall views the overall aim of the urban settlement in the hinterland as a way to dissolve the long tradition of centralized royal rule. Marshall examines two laws designed to keep the cities, particularly the new settlements, well populated. One law allowed sons of Pontic mothers to obtain Pontic rights, which is seen as the right to citizenship in one of the Pontic city-states; the other law prevented cities in Pontus and Bithynia from granting legal rights to individuals who already held citizenship in one of the other cities in the province.15 With references to the correspondence between Trajan and Pliny the Younger on how to handle the cities’ individual legislation, Marshall concludes that even if the lex Pompeia did set a constitutional standard for the entire province, it did not impose uniform internal organization on the cities.16 Discussion about what sort of civic community Pompey hoped to introduce has continued into more recent studies. In his Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (1993), S. Mitchell points to how the urbanization of the Pontic hinterland was necessary in order to turn Mithridates’ kingdom into a province, which Pompey could then add to the recently founded province of Bithynia. The urbanization of the Pontic hinterland is seen by Mitchell as an attempt to establish a system whereby communities were self-governing, as a way both to organize the heartland of the former kingdoms effectively and to provide the necessary administrative stability for Rome in the region.17 That the cities were modeled on Greek traditions is also the thesis of C. Marek, who, in his Stadt, Ära und Territorium in Pontus-Bithynia und Nord Galatia from 1993, points to how Pompey would have depended on Greek advisors, some of whom served at Mithridates’ court, when the decisions in the new province was being made. According to Marek, it is only reasonable to assume

6

Introduction

that they would have promoted a form of organization that followed Greek practice and that it was also likely that they could persuade a busy Pompey, who, as we shall see in the following, was anxious to finish what he had started and return to Rome. Also, Marek repeats the point about how Rome in the East modeled the cities they founded after a Greek fashion in order to promote Greek culture in the region and to facilitate the taxation in the newly won territories.18 In his Geschichte Kleinasiens in der Antike (2010), Marek interprets Pompey’s use of the term polis for the city names as evidence for how he modeled the cities after a Greek fashion. Again, the meaning of the term polis or a polis status is seen to have implied a certain form of Greek civic organization that was already established in Bithynia. This leads Marek to conclude that there was no reason for Pompey to introduce a form of organization other than the one already in place in the other part of the newly joined province.19 Even if the introduction of censors and lifelong membership of the city council did bring changes to the city council in a democratic model, the foundation of the cities and the reorganization as a whole are seen as deliberate attempts to introduce a number of civic centers inspired by Greek civic standards across the whole of Asia Minor.20 The assumption that Pompey was looking to model the new settlements on Greek traditions finds some support in the strong influence from Greek culture visible in the imperial period, when various Greek institutions such as the gymnasium, Greek deities, and Greek as the official language dominated the cities in the hinterland.21 But what seems to inspire this consensus among modern scholarship is a widespread belief that Rome’s admiration of Greek civilization and its readiness to sustain an already-working form of administration in provinces such as Asia and Bithynia encouraged Roman authorities to employ a Greek model of urban culture.22 Another school of thought sees the constitution Pompey introduced as a form of government with a clear Roman imprint. M. Wörrle in Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien (1988) and H.-L. Fernoux in Notables et élites des cités de Bithynie aux époques hellénistique et romaine (2004) both interpret the lex Pompeia as a radical revision of the Bithynian polis model and as an attempt to make the Greek model fit Roman standards.23 The introduction of a minimum age of thirty years for magistrates and council members, the right to lifelong membership of council for ex-magistrates, and what Fernoux believes to be the introduction of property qualifications for council membership are all seen as indicative of an oligarchic form of constitution, which effectively ensured the political elite control over the political process.24

Introduction

7

Wörrle and Fernoux focus on the changes that the lex Pompeia brought to political culture in the well-established cities in Bithynia. The early phase of Pompey’s reorganization of Pontus has generally not enjoyed the same attention as the cities in Asia or in Bithynia. This may be because physical evidence from the cities in Pontus is sparse, but it is also because the cities in the new province have been seen either as administrative centers founded to facilitate the collection of tax, with little actual urban development, or as communities in which the population had little experience of life in a city-state. In both cases, this has led scholars to believe that in the Republican period the cities did not develop into vibrant urban communities. Another reason why the cities’ early period, in particular, has been less studied may have to do with the relatively short period of time between the foundations in the 60s and the moment Antony dismantled the Roman province sometime in the mid-30s. Antony’s choice has led some scholars to assume that the level of development in the cities was too modest to be useful to Antony, who therefore decided to redistribute the territory between loyal dynasts and leave the administrative and military burden in their hands.25 A recent alternative to the notion that the cities were abandoned because they had not developed into vibrant communities has been suggested by T. Bekker-Nielsen, who points out how the offer of territory to local dynasts is a classic example of divide and rule. By dissolving the province of Pontus and other parts of what was previously under direct Roman rule, Antony prevented any single dynast from gathering the former Mithridatic kingdom behind him in war against Rome, which Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates VI, had done only ten years earlier.26 The purpose of this study is twofold. First, the aim is to discuss the motives behind the choices Pompey made following the victory against Mithridates. Apart from the military and administrative reasoning behind the new provincial structure in Anatolia and the Near East and the large-scale urbanization of the Pontic Hinterland, this study also considers the political situation in Rome from the 80s to the early 60s bce. I will argue that the political climate in Rome played a key role in the decisions Pompey made in the years leading up to the war against Mithridates and in the choices made in the course of the campaign and with regard to the subsequent reorganization of Anatolia and the Near East, where Pompey hoped the campaign he waged and the war he won would further improve his position at the center of Roman politics. Second, the other question to be discussed is what kind of civic community Pompey chose for the Pontic hinterland, and also how these cities evolved over time from their early phase in the age of the republic to the imperial

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Introduction

period, when they were once again placed under direct Roman rule. Some of the basic questions that will be addressed are what role the cities were expected to fulfill, how they were organized politically, what we can deduce about the people living there, and how they perceived themselves and the lives they lived in what gradually became civic communities organized along the principles of Greco-Roman civic traditions. This study follows the cities from the early phase (mid-60s to mid-30s bce) to the third century ce, when most of Pompey’s settlements stood as well-established urban centers in which Greek culture played a key role both in urban landscapes and in people’s everyday lives. The investigation focuses on three questions. First, why did Pompey choose to establish a new province in a previously unfriendly region where urban civilization was largely nonexistent? The alternative of leaving the kingdom in the hands of one or more client rulers, as Antony did thirty years later, would have been a safer choice and would have been in line with Rome’s previous practice in Anatolia. The chance Pompey took was considerable. With few friends in the Senate, his position at the center of Roman politics might well have been weakened if the project proved unsustainable and future generations would be left with the impression of an overly ambitious, bold, and vain general who chose the most difficult solution in the hunt for glory and extraordinary military achievements. Pompey knew the implications of failing. His uneasy relationship with the Senate went from bad to worse as he assumed the position of one of Rome’s most successful generals on whom the city had had to rely time and time again—granting him one important command after another—even though he was not part of the Senate until the year 70. After he had used his popularity with the people to acquire the command against the pirates, with powers that were previously unheard of, and later to hold the command against Mithridates and King Tigranes, he could expect little help or sympathy from the members of Rome’s aristocratic elite. But, as is argued below, there are elements to suggest that it was precisely the combination of a poor relationship with large parts of the Senate and Pompey’s own desire to supersede his peers that encouraged him to pursue results in the East that would ensure his return to the center of Roman politics. Second, what was the intended role of the cities and how were they initially organized? The consensus that the cities were Greek is questioned together with the general notion that Pompey settled the cities either to promote Greek civilization in the rural parts of the East or to accommodate tax collection to

Introduction

9

meet the expectations of the equestrian publicani who were among Pompey’s trusted supporters. In what follows, Pompey’s settlements in the first phase are not regarded as having been particularly Greek or seen as a way to offer members of the equestrian order easier access to the wealth of Mithridates’ former kingdom. Instead, it is suggested here that Pompey had higher ambitions on behalf of the cities than simply to tax the region, even if taxation was an integral part of Roman foreign policy. The urbanization of the hinterland was a necessary next step if the new province were to develop into a thriving community in the land of what had been one of Rome’s most difficult enemies since the Punic Wars. Yet the cities were also a commemoration of his triumph in the war against Mithridates and Tigranes and a symbol of his achievement in bringing one of Rome’s most resilient enemies to a fall. There are elements to suggest that the general, or those assisting him in organizing the new province, aimed at a form of organization that would give a larger part of the population a role in the political process. As I shall discuss below, access to the city councils seems not to have been restricted by property qualifications, and laws were passed so that sons of Pontic women would obtain citizenship in their mothers’ hometowns no matter where their fathers were from, while rules against double citizenship, in both parts of the province, would discourage citizens from moving from one town to another. Third, how did the cities develop? There is little to suggest that the cities were replicas of Greek civic communities with Greek immigrants as a significant part of the population or a variety of Greek institutions that would encourage a life in which Greek norms and values were at the center. Greek was the official administrative language, but the people living in the cities were not Greek. Instead, they were local Anatolian people and an unknown number of Roman veterans who stayed behind when the rest of Pompey’s army left for Italy. Their everyday language and customs would therefore in the first phase have been Anatolian and Roman more than they would have been Greek. While the influence of Greek culture appears to be limited in the cities’ early phase, it was considerably more pronounced from the late first century ce onward, when epigraphic and archaeological material testifies to a number of different cultural institutions, such as gymnasia, theaters, and cults to a number of Greek deities. In the age of the High Empire, Greek culture had become a well-established part of the cities’ everyday life and there is every reason to assume that a significant part of the population would have seen themselves as Greek. The question of people’s identity is therefore essential to understanding how the cities developed culturally. Inspired by A. Maalouf ’s

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Introduction

and A. Sen’s thoughts on how people’s identity is formed by the sum of groups and memberships to which they belong, it is here discussed whether the population in the cities simultaneously felt a sense of belonging to Greek, Roman, and different Anatolian groups all at the same time, and whether they define themselves as Greek, Roman, and, say, Paphlagonian, again at the same time without much contradictions in terms.27 Chapter 1 focuses on the motives behind the organization of three provinces in the East and on the urbanization of Pontus. The discussion revolves around the question of why Pompey made the choices he did and sees the ambitious reorganization of Anatolia and the East in the light of the political struggle among members of the political elite in Late Republican Rome. Pompey’s untraditional route to power and his complicated relationship with the senatorial aristocracy are here seen as some of the main reasons why Pompey chose the ambitious solution he did when he placed the kingdom of Pontus under direct Roman rule. The victory against Mithridates and Tigranes and the comprehensive reorganization of Anatolia and the Near East provided exactly the kind of military and organizational achievement that would allow Pompey the chance to return to Roman politics as conqueror of the East and so as one of Rome’s most successful generals of all time. Pompey was driven by ambition and a quest for glory and prestige. Mithridates posed a threat to Roman interests in the region, but being the general who brought about his final fall was a driving factor. It seems, however, clear from the strategy Pompey followed when he entered the Near East that he was not looking to prolong the war by invading some of the large and resourceful kingdoms, such as Parthia. Instead he backed away when the opportunity to engage Parthia presented itself. The analysis of Pompey’s policies in Anatolia and the Near East is therefore relevant also to the still-ongoing discussion of whether Roman imperialism was defensive and motivated by fear, or by the urge for glory and the need to conquer prestigious and resourceful enemies. The strategy suggests a different set of motives in the East than fear of Parthia or an almost unstoppable urge for military glory and the enormous wealth that victories against kings of the old world would be expected to produce. As we shall see in Chapter 1, the choices Pompey made suggest that he was keen to settle the East and bring stability to the region but also that he was determined not to prolong the campaign more than was necessary for him to return as the undisputed victor. Chapter 2 is devoted to the types of cities Pompey settled in the hinterland. Key questions here are how their constitutions were organized, how

Introduction

11

political power was divided between average citizens and the elite, and what kind of influence the people in the cities could hope for. There is much to suggest that Pompey did not follow one form of constitution but a combination of democratic and oligarchic principles. There seems to have been no property qualification and the average member of the citizen body had access to the council and a role to play in the preparation and implementation of the laws that were afterward presented to the assembly. The city constitutions allowed the people to have a role in the decision-making process, but they favored members of the political elite granting lifelong membership of the councils to ex-magistrates. The choices Pompey made are here seen in the light of the ambitious decision to establish two new provinces, Pontus and Syria, and the extension of Cilicia. In order to succeed, in the case of Pontus, Pompey needed not only symbols of victory and military success but also thriving city-states able to organize the administration and taxation of the hinterland—a project that would have to depend on local forces and their initiative, efforts, and resources. One of the commentators on the cities’ early development was the local geographer Strabo from the city of Amaseia. In his brief account of Pompey’s settlement, he draws a clear distinction between what he describes as Greek cities on the northern Black Sea coast and the cities in the hinterland that (to his eyes) bore no resemblance to the former. In Strabo’s view the latter cities were not inhabited by Greeks and therefore not to be counted among Greek towns, even though Greek was the official administrative language and, as time went on, these settlements would have hosted still more Greek institutions. The cities Pompey founded in the province of Pontus could well prove to be a special case. Other cities, such as the Nicopolis Octavian founded at Actium, were inhabited by families with a Greek cultural background, and the cities had Greek cultural institutions such as a theater and a stadion; festivals and worship of Apollo formed a part of the city urban landscape right from the start. But the choices Pompey made for the Pontic hinterland indicate that we should not too readily adopt the notion that Rome was looking to Hellenize the rural part of the East by introducing cities modeled after Greek fashion. Chapter 3 is devoted to the institutional landscape in the cities and in the region where the koina councils served as a link between Rome and the cities in the province. The argument here is that many of the institutions that were being introduced in the cities’ early phase were Roman or oriented toward Rome, not toward Greek cultural institutions. Roman citizenship, emperor worship, and the provincial councils are here seen as essentially all

12

Introduction

Roman institutions. The imperial cults and the provincial councils found inspiration in Greek ruler worship and supra-civic leagues. But despite their roots in Greek political thinking, emperor worship and the provincial councils were for the largest part modeled after Roman rules and regulations. It is worth remembering that Rome and Roman authorities in the regions oversaw emperor worship. The provincial councils may have been inspired by the Greek city leagues but were also introduced by Roman authorities to ensure a channel of communication between Rome and the provincial communities. This chapter engages in the broader discussion of how emperor worship developed and whether it was Rome or the provincial communities that set the tone in the way this practice was organized. The approach here challenges the common view among scholars that the imperial cults in the eastern provinces were Greek institutions introduced along principles of Hellenistic ruler cults, suggesting that emperor worship was a Roman institution, whereby Roman authorities (the Senate, governors, or the emperor himself ) not only approved the cult but also set the standards in how it was organized. What is suggested here is that the cult depended more on Rome and the emperor than is often assumed by modern scholars, who, inspired by the work of Beard, North, and Price, have seen the imperial cult or cults as more autonomous entities with fewer ties to Rome than will been suggested in the following discussion.28 As time went on, Greek institutions became a more established part of the cities’ urban landscapes, with public buildings, different cults, and more advanced architecture. The presence of various Greek cultural institutions is documented by the studies at Pompeiopolis and the epigraphic material across the region, which predominantly dates to the late first to third century, but also by the different coin series that contained references to various Greek deities—suggesting that the deities on the coins had found a way into the cities’ religious landscapes. As the dominant definition of Greekness among Greek intellectuals rested not on ethnicity, as it did in the eyes of Strabo, but on cultural criteria such as the ability to speak some form of Greek and live a life with Greek customs, norms, and gods, a significant part of the population in the cities would have had every reason to see themselves and many of their neighbors as Greek. The question of identity is treated in Chapter 4. With the thoughts of Sen and Maalouf providing a theoretical framework, the focus is on the different groups and memberships that people in the cities belonged to and how access to some groups and exclusion from others decided how people saw themselves and the way they were perceived by others. In the second century ce, a

Introduction

13

member of the elite in the city of Neoclaudiopolis could have belonged to the group of people who held Roman civic rights; he could have been priest in the imperial cult and proud of belonging to the privileged few who held the legal and financial privileges that came with Roman rights; at the same time he may well have been a priest in any of the Greek and local cults, committed to the gymnasium, and someone who cherished Greek literature and political thinking, provided that he could get his hands on the relevant texts. Choosing one over the other as the principal or dominant sense of belonging is often a matter of speculation. What is more interesting to establish is how the individual in question would have announced the many different groups and memberships that he and his family were part of. Judging from the available material, people were proud of being Romans, just as they were proud of belonging to the group of people who lived their lives according to Greek norms and values. Being Greek did not carry political rights or any legal privileges, at least not in this region, but was attached to a certain level of cultural refinement, which would have been a matter of social status. Some people in the region—such as, for instance, the citizens of Amaseia, the former residential city of the Mithridatic kings until 183 bce—may still have felt a commitment to the cults of the pre-Roman deities, such as to the worship of Zeus Stratios. Apart from being Roman citizens and perhaps devoted to Greek cultural norms and customs, some of the people in Amaseia kept their ties to the old world and to a time when the city was the center of a kingdom that ruled key parts of central and eastern Anatolia. With a focus on identity as the sum of relationships people had to different social, political, and cultural groups, the discussion in this chapter hopes to take the question of identity in the Roman empire in a different direction than the one that has dominated the field in recent decades. The hypothesis is that the inhabitants in Rome’s Greek provinces were keen to be Roman and happy to show their affiliation both in a local setting and in a more empirewide context. Seen collectively, the cities were hosts to a number of different institutions. They had histories that differed from the cities in western Anatolia or from the colonies on the Black Sea coast, where Greek norms and values had dominated both the political and cultural landscape for centuries before Rome conquered the East. Pompey’s cities, on the other hand, were founded in a part of Anatolia where the level of urbanization was limited and there were no city-states. From the beginning, Roman norms, legal as well as political, set the standards for how the new settlements were organized. Greek cultural elements were introduced, but only slowly, and they seem not to have been

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Introduction

in place until well into the imperial period after the towns were brought back under Roman rule. To follow how these cities developed, it is important to start with the beginning—the decision to urbanize the Pontic hinterland in the first place, and the underlying motives behind that decision. We turn to the mid-80s bce when, in his early twenties, Pompey entered the political and military scene in Rome after lying low following his father’s death and his political downfall in the civil war between Sulla and Marius, and their supporters. The young general gathered a private army and set out to join Sulla, who was on his way back from Anatolia where he had defeated Mithridates in the First Mithridatic War. But as the threat from Rome and Marius’s supporters grew ever more dangerous, Sulla had to let the king off the hook and offer him a harsh peace agreement that required Mithridates to withdraw to the core of his kingdom, pay substantial compensation, and hand his fleet over to Sulla. Mithridates had lost but was in no way defeated. Instead, he was free to mature into the enemy that Pompey was to bring to a final fall some twenty years later.

Chapter 1

The Eternal Hunt for Glory

Pompey’s settlements in the new province of Pontus and the function they were intended to fulfill need to be seen in the context of the overall organization after the Third Mithridatic War. The rearrangement of Anatolia and the Near East from the Caucasus in the north to the Red Sea in the south widened Rome’s sphere of interest to the borders of Egypt, Arabia, and the Parthian kingdom. It was a considerable military and administrative achievement, which is best described as a project that developed gradually as Pompey’s campaign moved along. It is difficult to say exactly what kind of plan Pompey had for the East when he replaced Lucullus in the war against Mithridates and Tigranes, but there are elements to suggest that they grew more ambitious as he proceeded, particularly when he realized that the war against Mithridates and Tigranes would not last for long. What he set out to do and how he planned to organize the region afterward therefore need not have been what he ended up doing and may have developed as new opportunities presented themselves. In other words, the thorough reorganization of the East, including the foundation of three provinces and the ambitious urbanization of the Pontic hinterland, would not necessarily have been on the table when the campaign against the pirates brought him into Asia Minor. The desire for prestigious commands was an essential feature throughout Pompey’s public life, as it was for any Roman politician with the resources to pursue large-scale military and political ambitions. What made Pompey stand out from most other ambitious men in Roman politics was not the desire to surpass his peers but the lengths to which he was prepared to go to in order to fulfill his goals and, equally important, what seems to be a strong desire for recognition both militarily and politically. This ambition for both prestigious

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victories and influence on Roman politics was always a central element in Pompey’s public life but seems to have reached a peak in the years after his consulship in 70 bce when he, with the help of the tribunes and considerable popular support, acquired extraordinary financial and military resources to fight first the pirates in the Mediterranean and later the war against Mithridates and Tigranes. Other Roman generals, such as Scipio, Marius, and Lucullus, had previously been given extraordinary commands of various kinds, and Marcus Antonius, the father of Mark Antony, had already as praetor been allocated significant powers to solve the problem of the pirates in 74.1 Yet the extent of the command that Aulus Gabinius, the tribune of the year 67 bce, proposed should be given to one of the ex-consuls was without parallel in both the size of the forces and the resources allocated him. The 6,000 talents, 500 ships, 120,000 infantry, and 24 tribunes and the right to operate in an area of 50 kilometers from the coastline everywhere he needed was unprecedented (Plut. Pomp. 26).2 The proposal was not surprisingly met with considerable opposition from a rarely united Senate, which further complicated what was an already problematic relationship with Rome’s aristocratic elite. The war against the pirates brought Pompey into Asia Minor just at the time when, after a promising start, Lucullus was beginning to lose his grip on the campaign against Mithridates and Tigranes. In 67, with Lucullus absent, a part of his army led by his legates suffered a devastating defeat to Mithridates near the temple community of Zela, where, according to Plutarch, 7,000 legionaries, 150 centurions, and several military tribunes lost their lives (Plut. Luc. 35.1–2).3 The heavy casualties and the dissolution of the army forced Lucullus to withdraw, while Tigranes invaded Cappadocia and Mithridates took back control of his kingdom. From a military perspective, Pompey was the logical choice to take over from Lucullus. Not only was he winning against the pirates, he was conveniently already in the region with a considerable army and had the military authority as well as the momentum to turn Lucullus’s demoralized soldiers around—in short, he had a considerably better chance of winning the war. Scholars generally agree that Pompey had his eyes set on the Mithridatic command before Lucullus’s troubles started to materialize in the early 60s and efforts were then made in Rome to limit the mandate Lucullus received to fight Mithridates and Tigranes. In 69 the Senate turned Cilicia into a consular province with effect from the year 68, and Asia, also in the year 68, was restored and placed under the authority of a praetor. Gabinius, one of Pompey’s devoted associates, used his powers as tribune in 67 to propose

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Map 1. Roman Pontus before the urbanization by Pompey.

another law that narrowed Lucullus’s mandate further when the people turned Bithynia with troops over to the former consul Acilius Glabrio.4 Lucullus’s initial progress against Mithridates and the important victory against King Tigranes at Tigranokerta in October 69 meant that part of the region now lay well behind the front line and consequently could be seen as stable enough to be governed as a regular province. It has been suggested by R. Kallet-Marx that the changes to Lucullus’s mandate need to be seen in light of the progress he made, which called for a new form of organization, not as an attempt to weaken the general’s command, but as a natural next step forward.5 Seen in isolation, Lucullus’s progress perhaps justified the changes to his powers, and it is not difficult to imagine that senators or ex-magistrates were looking to become the next governors in Asia Minor. Kallet-Marx is therefore right to point out that the Senate did not necessarily aim at watering down Lucullus’s command. It was Marcius Rex, Lucullus’s brother-in-law, who was allotted Cilicia. He for one was in no hurry to acquire his province just as it has to be remembered that for strategic reasons Cilicia needed a governor who was present in the province, not someone who was fighting wars elsewhere. Yet it is worth remembering that the changes to Lucullus’s mandate had already been carried out before the defeat at Zela

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and it is indisputable that Gabinius played a key role in the attempt to narrow down Lucullus’s powers, which suggests that there were ulterior motives behind the changes to Lucullus’s imperium that do refer back to Pompey. Cassius Dio emphasizes, as does Plutarch, that Lucullus was accused of prolonging the war intentionally and that he was believed to be waging the war not to subdue the kings but to plunder their kingdoms, a point of view readily available in Cicero’s speech in favor of Manilius’s law that would recall Lucullus and offer Pompey the command against Mithridates and Tigranes (Plut. Luc. 33.4; Cass. Dio 36.2.2). Dio seems unconcerned about whether these accusations were justified or politically motivated but goes on to describe how, with success, Lucullus moved on into the Near East and how he caused considerable damage to both kings before being recalled in 66 bce. Yet Dio does suggest that Lucullus offered Tigranes an easy escape, focusing on how the general was plundering the region rather than on apprehending the king, which in part is a general tendency in Dio to characterize almost every Roman politician in the Late Republic as greedy and keen to maximize his own personal gains.6 In any case, the opportunity to take over the command against one of Rome’s most resourceful enemies in the first century must have been a very attractive one to Pompey, not least because a victory in the East would allow him to win back some of the support he had lost when, despite the opposition in the Senate, he initiated the campaign against the pirates. That members of the Senate were receptive to successful campaigns and prestigious victories was already clear from the support Pompey enjoyed from a number of senators as the news of his success against the pirates began to reach Rome. As suggested by Dio, what made Pompey attractive, particularly to up-and-coming senators such as Cicero and Caesar, was the public support he enjoyed, which must have increased considerably after his success against the pirates. According to Dio, by supporting Pompey they themselves hoped to benefit from the general’s increasing popularity with the public (Cass. Dio 36.43).7 Pompey’s general ambition, repeated quest for prestigious campaigns, and desire to celebrate yet another triumph were no doubt other reasons why he reached out for the campaign against Mithridates. It is also worth noticing that the Senate did not propose a change of command, nor was Pompey, as far as we know, approached by some of Rome’s magistrates asking him to replace Lucullus. Instead, he was given the campaign against Mithridates and Tigranes by the adoption of the lex Manilia, which Manilius, another of his associates, prepared and saw through the assembly. To be the general who defeated the kings had considerable potential and had been an aim for many

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Roman generals since Rome’s first war against Mithridates in the early 80s. Not only would a victory against an enemy that Rome had fought for more than two decades set Pompey apart from any of the previous attempts to bring down Mithridates (and later Armenia too),8 it would also allow him to return to Roman politics as the general who had subdued Anatolia and the Near East and so ensured Rome a tighter grip over a region that had previously caused considerable military problems. Even if we do not need to see economic motives as the primary reason behind every one of Rome’s wars, exploitation of newly conquered territories was one of the main objectives behind Rome’s expansion. Taxation, together with plunder, confiscation of land, and the slave trade, was a natural outcome of warfare and was a calculated prize for the general, just as it was for his soldiers, who got their part of the spoils, for the state, and for the people of Rome, who expected their share of the success as well.9 One of the motives ascribed to the establishment of the new provincial communities and the ambitious urbanization of the Pontic hinterland has been seen as an ambition to secure more land for the publicani on which they could collect tax revenues.10 Taxation was no doubt an important element in the organization of the new provinces and Pompey had financial interests in mind when he, in moderate form, restored the Gracchan tax system in Asia, which Sulla had earlier replaced with a less radical form in 84.11 The scope of the entire rearrangement of the East, including the foundation of the new provinces and several new cities across Anatolia and the Near East, seems, however, an ambitious plan if the aim was primarily to accommodate requests for more land to tax. The project to conquer Anatolia and later reorganize the Near East not only constituted a major military and administrative task, but also carried considerable risks, which had the potential to ruin Pompey’s political life. When discussing the motives behind Pompey’s plans for the East, it must be remembered that there were less ambitious alternatives than a form of organization that involved the establishment and protection of three provinces in a region where the influence from Rome had previously been marginal. Also, a province in the former Mithridatic kingdom was not immediately attractive to the publicani, since considerable logistical and geographical challenges complicated the collection of tax in an area where it would be a new phenomenon—at least in the way it was done by the Romans. Instead of placing the entire region under direct Roman rule, Pompey might have added the old colonies on the Black Sea littoral to the province of

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Bithynia and divided the hinterland among the most loyal dynasts available in central Anatolia. Zela could have continued as a temple community and together with Comana supervised the southeastern part of Mithridates’ kingdom, while a loyal client ruler in Armenia, such as Tigranes turned out to be, could have been given control over the central parts of his kingdom. Another option would have been to give Deiotarus—one of the Galatian nobles—a larger share of the Pontic heartland. An organization based on local rulers was no alien idea, as underlined by Lucullus’s plan for the region or by the strategy Antony followed when he reorganized Pontus some thirty years later. The decision to turn the kingdom of Mithridates VI into a province should therefore be seen as a deliberate and extremely ambitious choice that placed the Roman administrative structure under considerable pressure—not least because this previously hostile region had only just been conquered and because of the general lack of urban culture in the Pontic hinterland around which a provincial administration could be organized. The magnitude of the solution Pompey chose and the risks he took politically, should the new provinces or cities prove unsustainable, suggest that the general was driven by more than a need to repay the support from the equestrian ordo. In the rest of the chapter, his considerable ambition to exceed other Roman generals and so surpass what any Roman general had previously accomplished will be seen as what in the end drove Pompey to choose as he did. This desire for victories and glory may be explained as a result of a problematic relationship with the Senate both before and after his consulship in the year 70 bce. In 66, Pompey could not count on a large number of friends in the Senate, even if more influential members of the consularis supported his command against the kings. However, a victory against Mithridates and a large-scale reorganization of the East would be the kind of victory that would make his reentry into Roman politics less complicated. It also would be the sort of achievement that would generate the kind of public support that could allow him to confront his critics and reassume the strong position at the center of Roman politics that he had jeopardized when acquiring the command against the pirates and Mithridates in the first place. It is in the light of the campaign farther into the Near East, as well as the ambitious attempts to rearrange the political borders in the region, that the urbanization of the Pontic hinterland needs to be seen. The cities were pieces of a much-bigger puzzle that was to figure Pompey as conqueror of the East and one of Rome’s most renowned generals of all time. In a Pontic

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context, the cities were to provide the administrative backbone in a province of considerable size, not simply a way to provide new and more land for the publicani to tax. Instead, the urbanization of Roman Pontus was an important element in Pompey’s propaganda and self-promotion as the new Alexander who succeeded where every other Roman general had previously failed. It was a symptom of an aggressive form of imperialism that is particularly evident in Late Republican Rome. Here, conquest and wars against foreign enemies took on a life of their own in which members of the political elite strove to surpass each other in order to acquire the wealth, military prestige, and overall success that were becoming ever more important in the struggle to win and uphold a leading role in Roman politics. To better understand the choices Pompey made as part of the organization of his Roman Pontus, we turn to his first appearance on the public stage to see how he managed his public career and how he came across to members of Rome’s political elite.

The Desire to Be Recognized The uneasy relationship between Pompey and the Senate goes back to his early twenties, when his public career got off to a difficult start. Pompey arrived relatively late to the political scene in Rome. The first Pompeius to reach the consulship was Quintus Pompeius in 141 who in addition became censor in 131. Pompey’s father, Gn. Pompeius Strabo, consul in 89, fought with his own agenda in the war between Sulla and Marius (Vell. 2.21.1–5; App. BCiv. 1.66–67, 1.80).12 When Pompeius Strabo died during the war, his body was seized and humiliated by the masses in punishment for what they saw as his failure to protect the city from Marius’s and Cinna’s troops. With a dead father seen to have betrayed not only Sulla but the Roman public as well, Pompey saw that his political career was on the wrong track from the beginning.13 As the son of someone who had fallen from grace, with no family support, young Pompey had few opportunities in Rome’s traditional career system, and he had a steep climb ahead of him should he choose the traditional path (see also Plut. Pomp. 1).14 Instead, he withdrew to Picenum, the family’s home region, and when Sulla returned to Italy in 83 after the First Mithridatic War, Pompey used his and his family’s status in the region to raise a private army and offered Sulla his support, a move that immediately drew him into the war against the anti-Sullan opposition (App. BCiv. 1.80; Plut. Pomp. 7.1-8.1–3).15

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Having offered Pompey a marriage alliance, and recognized his first victories by welcoming him as imperator, Sulla sent his new associate on to Africa and Sicily to fight Marius’s supporters.16 Pompey instantly proved a success. He defeated Domitius Ahenobarbus and the Numidian king Iarbas and used the opportunity to reorganize Numidia and several African cities (Plut. Pomp. 9–12; App. BCiv. 1.80).17 The victory was of great significance for the Sullan side. The dictator was now rid of the opposition south of the Italian Peninsula and a major step closer to more complete control over the political and military situation both in Rome and in Italy more broadly. Pompey, for his part, at the age of just twenty-four, was the general who had conquered Africa and defeated several members of the anti-Sullan opposition in a civil war in which several respectable members of the Senate had fallen. A considerable blow had been dealt to the part of the Senate that hoped Sulla’s takeover could be prevented, and Pompey had definitively asserted himself as one of the strongest supporters of the new regime and its reforms and persecutions of the dictator’s political enemies.18 Pompey’s support of Sulla and the zealousness with which he had pursued his master’s enemies would have given him a patchy reputation among the senators particularly outside Sulla’s faction. As a young general, who was not yet a member of the Senate and not a magistrate of any kind, Pompey had very little if any legitimacy among the senators, to whom he must have appeared as a sort of self-made warlord and as one of the dictator’s more dangerous thugs. The quest for glory, or what may have been a desire for public recognition, given his untraditional entrance on the political scene, also put the goodwill of Sulla’s supporters to the test, as when the young general challenged the dictator about his right to a triumph after his victories in Sicily and Africa. According to Plutarch, Pompey used the support of his army and his newly won popularity with the public to pressure Sulla on the matter of a triumph.19 By not backing down when Sulla initially dismissed the claim to a triumph on the grounds that Pompey, just like Scipio Africanus, had not been a magistrate, the young general not only challenged the dictator’s authority and illustrated the cracks inside Sulla’s faction, but also infringed unwritten rules when he made the senators sit through his pompous celebration of a victory in which several esteemed senators had lost their lives (Plut. Pomp. 13–14). The spectacle itself must have been particularly painful to endure when Pompey, in order to outdo previous imperatores, made the unsuccessful attempt to drive a chariot with four elephants through the city gate (Plut.

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Pomp. 14.4; Cic. Pro lege Man. 61).20 Furthermore, Pompey’s successful claim to a triumph might very well have upset the harmony within Sulla’s faction and forced the dictator to provide similar honors to others of his associates, as suggested by the way Murena was allowed to celebrate a triumph in 81 for the Second Mithridatic War, which in effect ended with the Roman general’s defeat and recall from Asia Minor.21 This lack of moderation was no doubt a source of much disgust and frustration within the Senate, and it surely did not help matters that Pompey made no attempt to join the Senate afterward. Pompey’s decision to keep his equestrian status and exercise his influence through popular support, as when in the year 79 he supported the consular election of Aemilius Lepidus, one of Sulla’s strongest critics, was another choice that tested his relationship with the aristocracy. The now former dictator responded by reminding Pompey that he too was responsible for the political course suddenly under scrutiny, and Sulla is said to have warned Pompey that he would be equally vulnerable to the new consul’s efforts.22 The strategy of operating outside the Senate culminated in the early 70s when Pompey was given the commands first against the same Lepidus whose consular election he had just supported and later against Sertorius in Spain, the last pocket of Marian supporters.23 Pompey was the Senate’s only real choice; the consuls were not able to wage a war against Sertorius, and Rome’s political elite was once again forced to rely on the talents of strong individuals to solve its immediate military and political crises. After heavy fighting against Sertorius and allies, Pompey was once again the winner of a war against other Romans and on his way back to celebrate his second triumph and run for the consular election in 70, with Crassus as his colleague (Plut. Pomp. 18–21.3).24 We know very little of the relationship between Pompey and the Senate during his year as consul, except for the observations made by Plutarch on how the Senate backed Crassus while the people supported Pompey (Plut. Pomp. 22.3). In any case, Pompey used his year in office to reintroduce the tribunes’ legislative powers that Sulla had revoked in order to prevent the tribunate from being used to influence the political process (Plut. Pomp. 22.3).25 Judging from the available evidence, there seems to have been little opposition to the law, which both Crassus and Pompey supported, even if some members in the Senate still favored limitations on the tribunes’ legislative powers.26 The revocation of Sulla’s abolition of the tribunes’ legislative rights seems not to have alienated the senators, many of whom were displeased with Sulla’s model and self-proclaimed role as one of Rome’s lawgivers.27 Just as significant is the fact that members of the aristocracy, such as Catulus, and some of the younger

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Figure 1. Pompey the Great. Photo courtesy of the Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

senators on the rise, such as Caesar, spoke in favor of reinstating the tribunes’ rights to send bills to the assembly (Suet. Iul. 5; Cic. Verr. 1.1.44–45).28 Judging from what we know of Pompey’s year as a consul, he did not on the whole meet much opposition from his fellow senators, who, it seems, did not try to block the law that allowed equestrians back on the jury, nor did they try to stop the reintroduction of the Gracchian taxation system in Asia.29 His past as one of Sulla’s associates and military commanders may still have caused some concern and envy among the senators, even if many preferred Pompey as a senator and a magistrate rather than him taking part in Roman politics as a sort of free agent operating outside the political institutions. The first significant military challenge available after his year as consul was the pirates, who had grown gradually bolder to the point that the coast of Italy and the corn supplies to Rome were under threat.30 The senators appear to have

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been neglecting the problem, and it is symptomatic of political life in Rome that it was Gabinius, in his function as a tribune, who in the year of 67 issued the proposal that would give Pompey the extraordinary proconsular command with powers to overwrite any other imperium in the relevant coastal regions (Cass. Dio 36.23.4).31 The Senate heavily opposed the law and the debate ended in chaos when, on hearing about the resistance to the bill, the people attacked the Senate (Cass. Dio 36.24).32 In the following debate before the vote, some of Rome’s most influential senators spoke strongly against the law; Catulus, for example, warned the people that extraordinary commands had turned Sulla and Marius into tyrants (Plut. Pomp. 251–27.4; Cass. Dio 36.31.3–4).33 The extraordinary nature of the command, the way it was obtained, and its almost immediate success in the war on the pirate communities made Pompey even more unpopular among certain circles in the Senate, who feared that his popularity with the public would lead to further attempts to bypass the council. Kallet-Marx has pointed out that influential members of the Senate now did support the change in command and that the resistance Pompey faced in the Senate should not be overestimated. In his Pro lege Manilia, Cicero counts four ex-consuls among the supporters of the lex Manilia: Servilius Isauricus (cos. 79), Scribonius Curio (cos. 76), Cassius Longinus (cos. 73), and Lentulus Clodianus (cos. 73).34 At first glance the support of the four ex-consuls seems significant; taken together with the number of senators who fought with him against the pirates, many of whom were older than he was, it seems as if the senators were gathering behind Pompey, hoping that they too would benefit from his success. Yet the support of the four former consuls that Cicero uses as an argument in favor of the lex Manilia should not be overemphasized. All four consulares that Cicero found it worth mentioning had close ties either to Pompey or to Cicero himself. Lentulus Clodianus was one of Pompey’s close associates. He may have served with him in Spain and was elected consul in 72 and later censor in the year 70, no doubt with the support of Pompey, whom he later followed into the war against the pirates (App. Mithr. 95).35 Back in Rome in 66, it is no surprise that he would support a bill that would grant his close associate the command in the war against Mithridates and Tigranes. Cassius Longinus knew Cicero personally and served as a witness in the trial against Verres (Cic. Verr. 2.3.97). Also, in the case of Scrinonius Curio, it is not all that surprising that he would back his friend Cicero on a bill that would support one of Rome’s most popular generals at this time in particular, if one considers that Curio started his career as a tribune of the plebs with every

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Figure 2. Mithridates VI Eupator. Cast from the original in the Louvre, Paris. Photo Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen.

reason to identify himself with the maneuvers of the people’s champion. Servilius Isauricus fought with Pompey in the late 80s as one of Sulla’s supporters but argued against Pompey’s premature triumph in 81. Later, Servilius Isauricus fought in Cilicia and celebrated a triumph in 74 after he had organized the region. Despite his efforts to prevent Pompey’s triumph, he ended up supporting Pompey for the campaign against Mithridates, perhaps because of his ties to Cicero as one of the judges in the Verres case, or because he recognized the need to keep Eastern Anatolia, his own old battleground, under firm Roman control (Cic. Verr. 2.1.56–57; Plut. Pomp. 14.5). Cicero’s claim that it was only a few old retrogressive senators such as Catulus and Hortensius who objected to the change of command against Mithridates and Tigranes is unconvincing. Cicero’s reference to his own or Pompey’s

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friends and associates suggests that the support from the Senate was not as overwhelming as he would have his audience believe; the aristocracy, with Catulus and Hortensius in the foreground, still saw Pompey as a tyrant who had used his popular support to outmaneuver the Senate. Therefore, the image of Pompey as a greedy dynast who wanted every prestigious war for himself gained further traction with the efforts to replace Lucullus in Asia Minor. The proposal once again came on the initiative of a tribune, this time Manilius, who drew up the law that would terminate Lucullus’s command and hand it over to Pompey. Even if the success against the pirates was beginning to weigh in his favor, as suggested by the way Caesar and more obviously Cicero supported the lex Manilia, the version given by the other sources available suggests that the Senate was still very much in opposition to Pompey as a political figure and to the idea that he was to replace Lucullus and get the opportunity to wage another prestigious war, this time against some of the more persistent kings in the East (Cic. Pro lege Man. 5–7; Cass. Dio 36.43.1–5; Plut. Pomp. 30).36 Still, as we can tell from Cicero’s support of the bill, there was not the same kind of universal resistance to the lex Manilia as there had been against the lex Gabinia and the command against the pirates, which suggests that Pompey was gaining ground also within the Senate. Part of the reason why may be related to a general fear in Rome that Lucullus would not be able to win the war—something that may have earned the support of a military man such as Servilius Isauricus—a feeling that would have grown stronger after the defeat suffered at Zela. Yet opposition to the law, particularly by members of the aristocracy, was nonetheless still pronounced, as attested by Cicero’s strong criticism in the Pro lege Manilia of how Catulus and Hortensius had failed to support Pompey’s campaign against the pirates (Cic. Pro lege Man. 51–64, esp. 52, 64).37 What then says Hortensius? That if one man is to be put in supreme command, the right man is Pompeius; but that supreme command ought not to be given to one man. That line of argument is now out of date, refuted not so much by words as by the event. For it was you yourself, Quintus Hortensius, who, with all your consummate eloquence and unrivalled fluency, both denounced that courageous man, Aulus Gabinius, in a weighty and brilliant speech before the Senate, when he had introduced a measure for the appointment of a single commander against the pirates; and also from this platform you spoke at length against the same measure. (Cic. Pro lege Man. 52)38

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By the time the lex Manilia was passed, Pompey was already in Asia Minor. There was therefore little the Senate could do to change either Pompey’s mind or the course of the process. But it should be remembered that Pompey, unlike when the lex Gabinia was debated, was not in Rome and was therefore unable to speak for himself and thus even more vulnerable to the version offered by his critics than he was back in 67. What his critics could do, unopposed by Pompey himself, was to attack him on a personal level by presenting him as greedy and obsessed with military glory to the point where he would readily push a commanding general out of the way to assume a war that was essentially already won. Part of the strategy was to convince the people that Lucullus deserved a triumph that would, if not question the significance of Pompey’s campaign as a whole, then at least underline how a considerable part of the job had been completed before he took over from Lucullus (Cass. Dio 36.42.1–43.5, 46.1).39 The assertion that Lucullus was winning or had practically won by the time he was replaced was an exaggeration. True, the kings had suffered considerably from years of fighting Lucullus, and Mithridates was weak on the eve of his last battle in Armenia Minor. Still, the belief that Lucullus had already defeated Mithridates and Tigranes was far from the case. Even if Lucullus had defeated Mithridates on several occasions and managed to evict him from the heartland of his own kingdom, Pompey and his supporters back in Rome could comfortably argue, as did Cicero in the Pro lege Manilia, that the current command was losing momentum. Lucullus was no longer in control of his own troops, and the blow his army took at Zela was seriously compromising both the campaign and his ability to remain in control of Anatolia (Plut. Luc. 35.1). The kings had suffered from Lucullus’s campaign but so had the general himself; the situation was back to the status quo with the extra complication that Tigranes was now back in control of Cappadocia. Lucullus’s initial success, however, as the first Roman general to expel Mithridates from his kingdom, gave ancient commentators a reason to question the significance of Pompey’s victory.40 Such beliefs are testified by both Plutarch and Cassius Dio, who describe how Lucullus had already inflicted heavy losses on the two kings at the time he was recalled; both treat Pompey’s success with considerable reservations, criticizing what they saw as ambition and the quest for extraordinary commands, which were obtained through popular support.41 Also, as pointed out by I. Östenberg, Caesar was among the contemporary Romans who questioned the magnitude of Pompey’s victory

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against Mithridates, as when the dictator highlights his own rapid victory in the war against Pharnaces at Zela in the year of 47, questioning whether Pompey deserved the honor received for the victories in the East (App. BCiv. 2.91; Suet. Iul. 35.2).42 For Plutarch, Pompey’s ambition and desire for more power and glory are seen as matters of pure greed and arrogance. This line of thinking is readily discernible in the writing of Cassius Dio, who portrays Pompey’s extraordinary commands and the people’s decision to grant him the war as examples of how the political system in Late Republican Rome was falling apart.43 “Roscius likewise introduced a law, and so did Gaius Manilius, at the time when the latter was tribune. The former received some praise for his, which marked off sharply the seats of the knights in the theatres from the other locations; but Manilius came near having to stand trial. He had granted the class of freedmen the right to vote with those who had freed them; this he did on the very last day of the year toward evening, after suborning some of the populace.” And later in the same paragraph: “He, then, in fear because the plebs were terribly angry, at first ascribed the idea to Crassus and some others; but as no one believed him, he paid court to Pompey even in the latter’s absence, especially because he knew that Gabinius had the greatest influence with him. He went so far as to offer him command of the war against Tigranes and that against Mithridates, and the governorship of Bithynia and Cilicia at the same time” (Cass. Dio 36.42–43).44 In Dio’s version Pompey replaced Lucullus not because the latter was failing in the war against Mithridates and Tigranes, but because Manilius was failing politically. Even if we cannot know the evidence that Plutarch and Dio used for their account of the event, we may presume that both writers were relying on some sort of contemporary or near contemporary texts, which again adds to the picture of considerable reservations concerning Pompey and the attempt to replace Lucullus. Now, despite the skepticism in the Senate and the criticism of later commentators, the victory against Mithridates was important to Pompey and to Rome in general. With the fall of the king, Rome was rid of an ambitious, resourceful, and highly competent enemy, who had managed to defeat several Roman armies, conquer the province of Asia, and invade Attica and Athens, as well as orchestrate a systematic massacre of thousands of Roman and Italian settlers in the cities of Asia. Even if Pompey enjoyed the support of the Roman public, members of the equestrian ordo, and an increasing number of senators, at least by the time

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the lex Manilia was passed, a version of how Pompey had organized the recall of Lucullus to harvest the glory for himself could easily have turned into a tradition to be repeated whenever needed. That such a tradition seems to have materialized is suggested by Plutarch’s and Dio’s accounts of Pompey as the overambitious general who took away Lucullus’s victory—one that in fact, to say the least, was slipping away from the latter. Still, Pompey’s popularity among the Roman public was at its highest in 66, and although more senators supported the lex Manilia than the lex Gabinia, the nature of that support was frail and easily manipulated, either by talented senators such as Caesar and Cicero, whose support he enjoyed at the time, or by the agendas of other ambitious tribunes. How priorities quickly changed is also demonstrated by Cicero’s sudden support for Lucullus’s right to a triumph and the way the orator now spoke favorably about the same man whom he had described a few years earlier as unfit to finish the war against the two kings (Cic. Luc. 3).45 Cicero was surely hoping to impress the members of the aristocracy who were trying to soften the people on the question of Lucullus’s triumph. But the change in Cicero’s tone toward Lucullus may also be read as a sign that he too, after having reached the consulship, was starting to see Pompey as a strong force in Roman politics, which could also affect his own political opportunities. Just as Lucullus was able to send letters to Rome about his progress in the war against Mithridates, so too would Pompey have known about affairs in Rome. In addition, information would have traveled between Italy and Pontus through the already-existing network of roads, which tied together the pre-Roman centers and strongholds, and via the new roads that were being initiated as part of the organization of the new province that linked Pompey’s cities and western Bithynia with Syria.46 The situation in Rome, in terms of how Pompey would be received on his return, was complex. The people were likely to welcome Rome’s new conqueror of the East with open arms and were surely looking forward to the triumph he would be celebrating and the chance to honor their successful general in the streets of Rome. The attitude in the Senate was much less predictable. As tribune, Q. Metellus Nepos tried to pass a bill that would recall Pompey in order to take up the command against Catilina and offer him grounds to run for consul in absentia.47 If the proposal carried the day and Pompey was elected consul, this would allow the general to return in 63 or 62 with the immunity of a magistrate. The plan failed. Cato used his powers

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as tribune to veto the bill and the Senate passed a senatus consultum ultimum, which encouraged Nepos to leave Rome to join Pompey in the East. The general was therefore well aware of the opposition that awaited him at his return. The way the lex Manilia had gained support in the Senate could suggest that Pompey was gaining favor in some parts of the Senate, at least among the senators who hoped to benefit from the general’s popularity or from fighting next to him in the East, but Cicero’s newfound backing of Lucullus and Nepos’s failed attempt to ensure Pompey’s return as consul was a reminder of how quickly politics could change. Many senators would have had no choice other than to acknowledge the victories in the East and celebrate the achievement at an official level, but it is fairly evident that there was still much resentment against Pompey among the senators and a justifiable fear that he would return as an even more powerful figure in future Roman politics. Cicero’s support for Lucullus dates to 63, the year of his consulship, when Pompey’s campaign was in its last phase, and will not have made much difference to the general’s plans for the East. Apart from his contact with associates in Rome, Pompey had experienced opposition in the Senate firsthand, when the campaign against the pirates was debated. He therefore knew that efforts were made to question his victory against Mithridates and Tigranes. But Nepos’s test of strength with the Senate was a sign that Pompey would be placed under pressure when he returned. Regardless of any opposition, Pompey’s ambition for more prestigious commands is still likely to have played an essential role in his plans for Anatolia and the Near East. The opposition in Rome and what comes across as widespread and, on the whole, not entirely unjustifiable skepticism toward Pompey meant that he would be in a much stronger position if he returned with a significant military result to show for his extraordinary command and for the decision to replace Lucullus. The victory against Mithridates and the political strategy that would grant Rome control over the East would be the kind of outstanding and unparalleled military accomplishment that would give him the strength to make his way back to the center of Roman politics. But before he could come to any decision about how to organize the region, he had to ensure that Rome would stay in control not only of Anatolia but also of a considerable part of the neighboring regions as well, including the parts Tigranes had conquered as king of Armenia. In other words, much to his own satisfaction, presumably, Pompey would have to prolong the campaign into the Near East in order to pacify the entire region.

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A Conqueror of the East After the victory in Armenia Minor, Pompey was essentially left with two choices. One was to place central Anatolia and the kingdom of Mithridates in the hands of client kings, which would require him to ensure the necessary military stability either by leaving a Roman army in the region or by handing the responsibilities over to client dynasts. The alternative option of turning the heartland of Mithridates’ kingdom into a Roman province was evidently a more demanding way forward. Not only would Pompey have to make sure that the area was militarily stable, but he would also have to supply the administrative framework to organize the region in accordance with Roman practice. The most immediate danger to Roman Pontus was the kingdom of Armenia and its king, Tigranes, whose invasion of Cappadocia after his defeat by Lucullus testified both to the king’s ambitions and to the considerable financial resources at his disposal. A war against Armenia was well within the mandate of the lex Manilia, and it was a natural next step for an ambitious general who had just defeated Mithridates in a single battle. To make sure that Mithridates was on his way north and not simply regrouping, waiting for the right moment to reengage, Pompey had to continue into Armenia and further on into the Near East to take hold of the areas Tigranes had conquered, particularly those from the Parthian kingdom. The invasion of Armenia was instantly successful and offered a bridge into the Near East, allowing Pompey to take possession both of the kingdom itself and of Tigranes’ conquests in the Near East. In the following peace negotiations, Tigranes was allowed to keep the heartland of his inherited kingdom but was forced to renounce the conquests in Cappadocia, Syria, Phoenicia, and Sophene as well as to pay Pompey considerable compensation in cash. Tigranes’ son, the younger Tigranes, who had assisted Pompey in his takeover of Armenia, was offered the land of Sophene in return for his support, but when he proved unwilling to release the agreed compensation, he was placed under arrest and sent to Rome to walk as one of the captives in the coming triumph (Plut. Pomp. 33.4–6; Cass. Dio 36.53.2).48 While the conquest of Armenia was necessary to ensure stability in the region, the subsequent campaign in the Caucasus and farther into the Near East was arguably not, even if that too may be explained as an attempt to apprehend the king or at least as a need to make sure that Mithridates had indeed left the region. The decision to continue into the Near East was justifiable in the sense that a considerable part of northern Syria and the area toward Parthia were already under Armenian occupation and were, therefore,

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territories now under Roman control. But, as with the decision to turn Mithridates’ kingdom into a province, there were alternatives to the largescale solution Pompey chose for Cilicia, Syria, and the rest of the Near East. One option would have been to distribute the Near East among local rulers. Pompey had already decided that Tigranes and his son were to retain control over Armenia and Sophene, respectively, and he could have chosen to follow the arrangements laid out by Lucullus, who, during the invasion of Armenia in 68, had promised Antiochus—one of the pretenders to the Seleucid throne—that Coele-Syria would be restored to him.49 Judging from Pompey’s actions, the plan to extend the campaign into the East may have been the intention from early on, either when Pompey realized that Mithridates would be easily defeated or just afterward as he assumed control over Armenia and needed to subdue the regions Tigranes had added to his kingdom. Armenia and its conquests were part of the mandate given to Lucullus and therefore militarily justifiable for Pompey to pursue. Sherwin-White has suggested that the campaign into the Caucasus and the Near East was an attempt to secure an important military victory against a formidable foreign enemy.50 The argument is that Pompey’s career and his victories could be characterized, as Caesar allegedly did later on, as less important achievements against other Roman commanders, African cities, and eastern kings who were already weakened from years of fighting Lucullus. It is no doubt true that Pompey was happy to add more glory to his long list of military accomplishments. But to argue that he invaded the Near East only or mostly to prove he was able to defeat a large foreign enemy is to accept uncritically the versions offered by Plutarch, a moral philosopher who wrote about greed and quests for glory; by Caesar, Pompey’s enemy; and by Cassius Dio, a historian keen to show how personal ambition and political competition were what brought Republican Rome to its knees. Furthermore, that the invasion of Caucasus was yet another hunt for glory against one of the powerful kingdoms in the East does not seem to fit the strategy Pompey followed in the course of the campaign. Had he been looking to conquer what Sherwin-White refers to as a formidable enemy, the obvious opportunity would have been to engage the Parthian kingdom, which was not yet as strong as it was to become, but still powerful and resourceful enough to qualify as a strong and prestigious opponent (the equivalent in Pompey’s time of the Persian kingdom). A victory against Parthia would be the kind of achievement that would allow Pompey to return as the first Roman general ever to have successfully followed in the footsteps of Alexander. How

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prestigious a victory against the legendary Persian kingdom was believed to be is illustrated by the way the younger Tigranes was presented as the king of kings in Pompey’s triumph in 61, as if he were the rightful heir of the Persian dynasty, and by the many times Roman generals waged war on Parthia in the hope that they would be the ones to succeed (Cass. Dio 37.6.2).51

In Search of a Roman East As one of his first actions, Pompey entered the Caucasus, where he defeated the Iberians and the Albanians. There is no reason to doubt that he was happy to conquer the region and that he followed an offensive strategy when he moved north. But we need to remember that even if Mithridates had fled from his kingdom, he was still in the region and Pompey’s decision to move north should also be recognized as an attempt either to apprehend the fleeing king or at least to make sure he had left for his northern domains (App. Mithr. 101–2). That Pompey’s focus was generally on stability and not on engaging new, large-scale enemies is suggested by the way in which he dealt with Parthia and in how he handled the question of Coele-Syria. With his successful conquests in Anatolia and Armenia behind him, Pompey started to assume the role of a hegemon with whom the region’s kings and people had to come to terms. His lieutenants were already operating in the eastern parts of Armenia’s former possessions and in Mesopotamia. The strategy was to discourage the Parthian king Phraates from any hostile acts against what were now, in Pompey’s eyes, spoils he had won when defeating Armenia. According to Cassius Dio, Phraates feared that Parthia would be Pompey’s next target; to avoid what he saw as a likely invasion, the king sent envoys to Pompey in order to confirm the treaty with the Romans, which had already been negotiated during Lucullus’s invasion of Armenia (Cass. Dio 37.6.35).52 One of the differences between Pompey and Phraates concerned control of Corduene—a land that Tigranes had previously conquered from the Parthians but lost only the year before Rome’s invasion. Pompey ignored Phraates’ request to keep Corduene and sent his legate Afranius to secure the region, which he considered a part of Tigranes’ possessions. According to Dio, Pompey added to this insult by not recognizing Phraates with a title as the King of Kings.53 The question of titles was one thing. More disturbing to Phraates, surely, was the breach of what Dio describes as the already-existing agreement between Lucullus and Parthia when Afranius, on his way back to

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Armenia, cut through Mesopotamia (Cass. Dio 37.5).54 In response to this hostile act, Phraates reinvaded Corduene, defeated the Armenian forces, and so challenged both Armenia and Rome by conquering what Pompey had just declared to be part of Rome’s sphere of interest. Phraates’ move was a bold one and could easily have led to war, particularly if Pompey was in the Near East to stir up yet another campaign against one of the old kingdoms in the region. Phraates and Tigranes both sent envoys to Pompey who then decided not to intervene but to accept Phraates’ right to Corduene. From the whole incident, at least as it appears in Dio’s account, one gets the impression that Pompey lost his own test of strength. The general is said to have been ashamed and alarmed by Phraates’ move and to have excused his decision not to assist Tigranes on the grounds that a war against Parthia was not part of his mandate, which he, unlike Lucullus, was not prepared to ignore (Cass. Dio 37.7.1). Cassius Dio heavily criticizes what he presents as Pompey’s arrogance and miscalculation of the entire situation, and he relates how Armenia and Parthia came to terms following the incident, realizing that their disputes served only the interests of Rome (Cass. Dio 37.7.3–4). In Dio’s mind, Pompey could have avoided the whole situation had he not pressured Phraates or had he decided to protect the interests of Tigranes, his ally (Cass. Dio 37.7.3–4).55 From our perspective, the whole episode shows a noticeable change in the way Pompey acts as general. Even if we need not fully believe Dio’s version of how the general backed down, the way Pompey handled the situation illustrates that he had no intention to fight Phraates, even if that would make him look weak in the eyes of the Parthians and Tigranes and perhaps also among his own legates and soldiers. The acceptance of what Dio presents as a loss of face further underlines that Pompey’s strategy was not to stir up new wars, as suggested by SherwinWhite, but rather to ensure stability and Rome’s ability to control the region through negotiation with the neighboring powers. If Pompey had invaded the Near East to secure a prestigious victory against a considerable foreign enemy, we might expect that he would have used the opportunity to wage what would then have been a justifiable war against the Parthians, who had just attacked one of Rome’s client kings and invaded what could be argued to be Roman territory. To fight such a war in Parthia would be a considerable undertaking, but Pompey could perhaps have counted on support from a vengeful Tigranes, which would have given him enough fighting power either to conquer Parthia or to hurt Phraates enough for him to surrender quickly if, for instance,

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he were allowed to keep his crown. If victorious, Pompey would then have returned to Rome as the Roman general who had conquered Mithridates, Armenia, the various people who dwelt in the Near East, and, as another Alexander, the Persian kingdom of his time. The reason why Pompey took a step back is therefore best explained as that he had no intention of opening up a new front and a new long-lasting war against an enemy with considerable fighting power who had just proved unimpressed with his presence in the region. Corduene was not important, or at least not important enough to start a war that would take Pompey further away from Roman politics and alienate him even more from the senatorial elite. Also, if Pompey had given it any thought he might have concluded that a war on such a scale was probably not in the interests of his soldiers either, some of whom had already refused to follow Lucullus.56 Moreover, an invasion of Parthia, even if justifiable, is unlikely to have found much support in Rome. Both his enemies in the Senate and those who had supported the change of command back in 66 would most likely be against a new war, this time against one of the largest powers in the East, which if successful would provide Pompey with yet another magnificent victory. In order to distance themselves from Pompey, the supporters of the lex Manilia, men such as Cicero or Caesar who had political capital invested in Pompey’s campaign, would soon be forced to criticize a strategy that went far beyond the mandate they had worked to secure. Pompey’s ambition to provide a long-term solution to Anatolia and the Near East and his plan to become the protagonist who placed a large part of the Old World under Roman rule is further illustrated in his dealings with Coele-Syria. Judging from the available evidence, Pompey planned to place Coele-Syria and the more urbanized parts of Palestine directly under Roman rule by turning Syria into a Roman province. The decision, however, was controversial. When establishing a province in Syria, Pompey ignored Antiochus’s claim to the region, which he and the Seleucids saw as their motherland, and disregarded the agreement made between Antiochus and Lucullus. As suggested by the evidence, Antiochus had already assumed control over Coele-Syria and, it seems, lost it again in an internal dispute with a certain Philip—another pretender to what was left of the Seleucid kingdom.57 According to the historian Justin who wrote the résumé of Pompeius Trogus’s Historiae Philippicae, Pompey justified his annexation of Coele-Syria on the grounds that it was impossible to place the region in the hands of someone who had already proved incapable of defending his own kingdom (Justin 40.2.2–5; Cass. Dio 37.7a).

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In Pompey’s view, he or Rome had the right to Coele-Syria. The territory was another part of the spoils won when Tigranes was subdued, and given the uncertainty about who controlled the territory, Pompey could argue, quite comfortably even, that he was under no obligation to investigate any previous arrangements. It has been pointed out that the primary reason for ignoring Antiochus was that Pompey felt no obligation to acknowledge any previous agreement made by Lucullus, and that he wanted to benefit as much as possible from his conquest of Armenia.58 Surely Pompey would not have been particularly keen to honor any agreements Lucullus had made. If CoeleSyria were to become a kingdom with some dependence on Rome, Lucullus’s efforts, which had started the dissolution of Armenia, would have to be acknowledged (App. Syr. 49). Another reason why Pompey would choose to annex Coele-Syria is said to be the lack of a suitable ruler who could serve as an alternative, and problems with piracy and other bands of robbers that were threatening to destabilize the region may also have been of some concern. Parthia was another of Pompey’s worries: Phraates had just proved bold enough to challenge Pompey militarily and therefore, encouraged by his success, could have been tempted to invade a newly reestablished Seleucid kingdom if the region were left to its own fate (Plut. Pomp. 39).59 These are all valid concerns. By turning Coele-Syria into a province, Pompey would offer Rome tighter control over the other neighboring powers, which may well have been less likely to invade if that involved conquering a Roman province. On the other hand, Pompey was not without alternatives. The problems with pirates and gangs of bandits were hardly reason enough to establish a new province with all the administrative and military challenges that would entail. Also, pirates and robbers in the region were being dealt with as Pompey and his legate moved into Syria and farther south into Palestine, and even if Antiochus was weak, a Roman army stationed in Cilicia would still be able to defend both Cilicia and a new Seleucid kingdom.60 Finally, a Parthian attack on Coele-Syria would be a much bolder move than the invasion of Corduene, which had previously and relatively recently been part of Parthia’s territory.61 The ambition to extend the empire and so provide more tax revenue for the publicani to farm was surely also a motivation that Pompey included in his plans for organizing the East. Pompey had recently been a member of the equestrian ordo, something he himself made a point of by appearing at the forum in front of the censors to report his military credentials, as any other eques was expected to do before entering a political career (Plut. Pomp. 22.4–5).

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To judge from his strategy, there is much to suggest that Pompey generally did look out for the interests of the equestrian ordo, such as, for instance, when he secured his former peers the right to sit on jury panels or when he restored the Gracchan tax system in Asia, which scholars have argued was introduced in both Bithynia and Syria either in its original shape or in a modified form, where the governor had a large role in settling the level of taxation (Cic. Ad Quint. 1.1.33; Cic. Verr. 2.3.12).62 That the publicani were playing a very active role in both Syria and Cilicia in the years after Pompey’s reorganization is also suggested by the accounts of Cicero, who was forced to deal with the frustrations of both the publicani and the cities they taxed. That tax collection was an essential part of Pompey’s reorganization and that the publicani were given the opportunity to farm Syria are further suggested by Cicero’s description in the De Provinciis Consularibus of how Gabinius was trying to regulate tax collection and how the publicani, whom Cicero represented, were prevented from collecting the sums they thought they were entitled to (Cic. Ad Att. 5.13.1, 5.16.2; Cic. Prov. Cons. 10).63 There is no reason to doubt that Pompey was looking to secure new financial opportunities for the equestrian ordo and so meet their expectations. As pointed out by K. Morrell, it was well within reason and widely accepted to tax conquered people.64 Judging by how Pompey prepared the way for tax collections in Asia and by the conflicts between the publicani on one side and the cities and governors who tried to regulate the level of taxation on the other, the question of tax was important and part of the reason why Pompey founded new provinces in the East. The expansion of Cilicia shows that Pompey was looking to place new land directly under Roman rule and that he chose a more expansionistic strategy than, say, Lucullus, who, as indicated by his readiness to restore the Seleucid kingdom, relied more on local government.65 Therefore, even if it is not necessary to assume, as Frank does, that Pompey did little political thinking of his own, he seems to have introduced a system that would offer the equestrian ordo new land from which they could collect tax.66 A strong commitment to equestrian interests would be a natural policy for someone whose military career had relied on the support of groups outside the Senate. Still, as has been pointed out by Sherwin-White and Morrell, the form of taxation Pompey introduced was designed in a way that gave the governors more influence over how the tax was collected and over what would constitute a reasonable level of taxation. Instead of having the auctions for the contracts in Rome, they were now held in the province, so it offered both the governor and the local magistracies a chance to negotiate a more realistic level

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with the publicani.67 Therefore, even if taxation ultimately was in the interests of the publicani and an essential part of Pompey and Rome’s policy, the attempt to introduce measures that regulated taxation shows that Pompey was trying to introduce a more sustainable system within the new provinces and also that he was not simply the agent of his equestrian supporters.68 In addition, there are several elements in Pompey’s policy to suggest that the decision to reorganize Anatolia in the way he did was part of his plan to outdo any previous Roman generals fighting in the East. Therefore, another scenario behind the decision to turn Coele-Syria and Phoenicia into a province is that the heartland of the former Seleucid kingdom was appealing because it offered the opportunity to turn one of the old Macedonian kingdoms into a province and add its land to the Roman empire. Also, the already well-established civic culture in the region could provide the needed urban structure, which Pompey knew had to be supplied in Pontus. As pointed out by Sartre, Pompey was hardly able to introduce a provincial community in the part of the region that was dominated by Jewish or Arabic people, who were believed to be too hostile to give up their independence or accept direct Roman rule. A province in the Near East, therefore, would have to be founded on the administrative framework of the Greek city-states in the region.69 This is no doubt true, but the implications would be that Pompey was looking to found any kind of province in order to provide new land for the publicani to farm, and that he took the most obvious solution, one where the existing civic culture and a population with a Greek cultural background made the transition to Roman rule less demanding. But it should also be acknowledged that Arabia or Palestine would not have been quite as appealing or have had the same political potential as the land of the old Seleucid kings. Not only would it not have had the same level of urban civilization to offer as Syria, it might not have the same historic significance to the Roman public or the senatorial elite as a province in the former Seleucid kingdom. That Pompey’s aim was to find a solution in which Rome would have firm control over Anatolia and the Near East without engaging in new long-term wars is further underlined by his maneuvers and the choices he made during the last phase of the campaign. Pompey and his legates met relatively little resistance in Palestine except from Jerusalem, where the temple was taken after heavy fighting against the troops of Aristobulos II, one of the pretenders to the Jewish kingdom. By the time the temple fell, Aristobulos had already surrendered and was soon on his way to Rome as another prominent captive to be put on display in the coming triumph. Hyrcanos II, Aristobulos’s brother,

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was reconfirmed as High Priest but stripped of his royal status, and the Hasmonean kingdom was accordingly maintained but considerably reduced as Pompey chose to add several of the cities to the province of Syria.70 It was in Palestine that Pompey heard of Mithridates’ death, news that made him return almost immediately to Anatolia, where he arranged for the king’s funeral and ordered the demolition of Mithridates’ many strongholds before leading his army back to Italy (Plut. Pomp. 42.1-6). The decision to hasten back to Anatolia and more importantly to terminate his own role in the campaign suggests that further fighting and conquest were not a priority. Scaurus, one of the legates, was left behind to conquer Petra. In the end he did not manage either to take the city or to defeat Aretas, the Nabatean king, who was given the opportunity to buy his way out.71 Again, if Pompey desired another victory or thought he would need one in order to be recognized as one of Rome’s greatest generals, a victory against the Nabatean kingdom would have offered such an opportunity if a war against Parthia was considered too large or too dangerous an endeavor, but Pompey decided not to pursue that opportunity. Instead, he broke off and hastened back to inspect Mithridates’ body and then went quickly on to Rome, leaving the reorganization of the region at a very early and, one would suppose, critical stage. The return to Rome only a few years after the region had been pacified is an interesting new side to Pompey’s activity, at least compared to the way he had previously taken time to reorganize both Africa and Spain before returning to Rome. The immediate departure from Anatolia is one more aspect to suggest that Pompey was not prolonging his campaign in order to stay away from his critics in Rome. Instead, he used the first opportunity available—the confirmed death of Mithridates—to return and report that the wars against the pirates, Mithridates, and Armenia had been completed. Pompey’s conquest of the East, the foundation of the new provinces, and the ambitious urbanization of what was now Roman Pontus met the administrative needs that were essential to control and administer the region. Yet the level of ambition and the scope of the reorganization as a whole were themselves a manifestation of Pompey’s talent as a general and carried with them not only a strong message to the political elite in Rome but also an element of very forthright propaganda aimed at the Roman public as a whole. The new settlements in the Pontic hinterland were an essential part of this propaganda, not only because they were named after their founder, but also because they served as a reminder that the region was now pacified to the point where the formerly hostile kingdom was now a province, organized according to Roman standards.

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Pompey’s behavior in the East is also relevant to the discussion of Roman imperialism more broadly. Even if it was not the ambition to prolong the war unnecessarily, for instance by invading Parthia, there is much to suggest that Pompey’s strategy was not driven by an urge to protect Rome or Roman interests from threats posed by people on the other side of the new borders.72 True, Mithridates threatened Rome’s interests in Asia Minor, but the decision to incorporate Armenia’s conquests suggests that Pompey was driven both by economic incentives (in particular, tax revenues and spoils) and by an urge to win glory and prestige for himself. Pompey is therefore an example of how important it is to view different wars in their own contexts. As suggested by J. Rich, Rome fought its wars for a number of different reasons. The quest for glory, greed, and the urge to acquire as much wealth and prestige as possible were decisive factors, but so was fear of neighboring states, which may or may not have had the strength to challenge Rome’s interests in Italy or outside the peninsula.73 Pompey, for his part, worked to acquire control over Anatolia, Armenia, and a considerable part of the Near East, but without getting involved in new, exhausting wars against one or more of the resourceful kings in the East. There was an ambition to become the general who finally defeated Mithridates and the first Roman to pacify the old and previously powerful East. But at the same time, there was awareness that one should not be away from Roman politics for too long. Should Pompey have taken a moment to reflect on Roman politics in the 80s, he would have remembered that Sulla was compromised when he left Rome to fight Mithridates in the first of the Mithridatic Wars. Pompey was eager to finish the job, place the region under Roman control, and return to Italy as soon as possible, as the general who had brought down the troublesome king. In that sense he acted progressively as a realist hunting for both honor and prestige and also the economic opportunities that followed the expansionist wars, but he did not act like a general who wanted large-scale victories at any price.

Trophy Towns Pompey’s eastern campaign was celebrated with a supplicate in 63 for the victory against Mithridates and a triumph in 61, which Plutarch describes as an extraordinary event in which an enormous amount of booty and the famous prisoners of war were displayed in the streets of Rome (Plut. Pomp. 45).74 The

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achievement itself was commemorated in an inscription Diodorus Siculus saw when he visited Rome later in the first century: Pompeius Magnus, son of Gnaeus, Imperator, freed the coasts of the world and all the islands within the Ocean from the attacks of pirates. He rescued from siege the kingdom of Ariobarzanes, Galatia and the territories and provinces beyond there, Asia and Bithynia. He protected Paphlagonia, Pontus, Armenia and Achaïa, also Iberia, Colchis, Mesopotamia, Sophene and Gordyene. He subjugated Dareius king of the Medes, Artoles king of the Iberians, Aristobulus king of the Jews, and Aretas king of the Nabataean Arabs, also Syria next to Cilicia, Judaea, Arabia, the province of Cyrenaica, the Achaei, Iozygi, Soani and Heniochi, and the other tribes that inhabit the coast between Colchis and Lake Maeotis, together with the kings of these tribes, nine in number, and all the nations that dwell between the Pontic Sea and the Red Sea. He extended the borders of the empire up to the borders of the world. He maintained the revenues of the Romans, and in some cases he increased them. He removed the statues and other images of the gods, and all the other treasure of the enemies, and dedicated to the goddess Minerva 12,060 pieces of gold and 307 talents of silver. (Diod. Sic. 40.4)75 How the Senate realized that there was a need to acknowledge Pompey’s victories is shown by the decision to grant him a triumph, which on the whole testifies to the Senate’s anxiety to settle its differences with the returning general. Based on Cassius Dio’s description of how Pompey was offered the triumph, F. Vervaet has suggested that the Senate granted the triumph when Pompey was still on his way back to Rome, a gesture that can be read as an attempt to welcome back Rome’s star general (Cass. Dio 37.21.1).76 Pompey made a gesture of his own by sending his soldiers home on his arrival to Italy, which Dio sees as an attempt to assure the Senate of his good intention (Cass. Dio 37.20–21). Despite this, and despite the fact that Pompey had subdued the East and expanded the territory under Roman rule considerably, it is fair to say that the senators were not happy to see Pompey or to welcome him back to the center of Roman politics. Since Pompey’s departure to fight the pirates, the Senate had been trying to take the wind out of his success by discrediting him as a general and by questioning the significance of his campaigns. The intense atmosphere between Pompey and the Senate reached a new level when the

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senators, led by the vindictive and envious Lucullus, blocked the ratification of Pompey’s eastern acts, a move that kept him from fulfilling his promises of land to his soldiers.77 Yet, despite the criticism and the political games in Rome, which in the end resulted in the formation of the first triumvirate, Caesar’s consulship, and the adoption of the land reform—which finally allowed Pompey to fulfill his promises—the campaign and the settlement of the East still set Pompey apart from any of his fellow senators and from most other Roman generals up to his time. The victory against Mithridates and the pacification of his kingdom, to the extent that it was possible to turn the region into a province, were signs of how he had succeeded where several Roman generals had fallen short. In the First Mithridatic War, Sulla defeated Mithridates both on the Greek mainland, where he expelled Mithridates’ troops from Athens, and in Asia Minor, where he forced the king to surrender. Mithridates had been weakened considerably but was still strong enough to prolong the war, for instance by fleeing into the heart of his kingdom to hide in the many strongholds that lay scattered within the hinterland.78 Sulla may have won in the end, but he could easily have had years of fighting ahead of him, particularly if Tigranes had decided to intervene on the side of his father-in-law. In return of the peace agreement, Mithridates was allowed to keep his kingdom and was offered Rome’s friendship. Sulla no doubt got the best out of the situation, but that there were critics who disapproved of the agreement is shown by the fact that Cicero felt comfortable enough to remind his audience of how Sulla and Murena had both triumphed even if they did not bring Mithridates to a fall (Cic. Pro lege Man. 3.8).79 That Sulla let Mithridates off too easily is also a point made by Plutarch, who tells the story of how Sulla’s soldiers were displeased that Mithridates was allowed not only to keep his kingdom but also to become a friend of Rome. Much of the resentment against Mithridates in Rome was no doubt tied to the invasion of Asia and the massacre of Roman citizens carried out as a coordinated attack in several of the cities of western Asia Minor. And even if the soldiers and Roman public were not looking to prolong the war with years of fighting in central Anatolia, there is little reason to doubt that the decision to offer Mithridates peace was controversial. No matter what reasons Sulla may have had for offering Mithridates a harsh deal, even if it was not upheld, the agreement and the offer of friendship would still stand in sharp contrast to Pompey’s conquest and the subsequent urbanization of the former kingdom.

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While Sulla’s triumph against Mithridates marked a significant military achievement, Murena’s right to celebrate his war against Mithridates with a triumph in 81 is best described as a political maneuver to cover up what was in reality a military disaster.80 Murena attacked Mithridates, presumably because he too was keen to be the general to finally bring the troublesome king to his knees. But after a couple of raids into Mithridates’ land during which the king remained passive, he finally moved out and defeated Murena (App. Mithr. 65). Sulla recalled Murena and had to underline that Mithridates’ borders were to be respected (App. Mithr. 9.66).81 Cicero’s criticism of the lack of success in the wars against Mithridates was, of course, directed at Lucullus. But that Cicero emphasizes how both Sulla and Murena had celebrated triumphs for wars against Mithridates without having defeated the king illustrates that there were groups in Rome who would agree with the view that the enemy was getting off too easily; this, in turn, questioned the justification for celebrating a triumph. There are a number of reasons why Sulla allowed Murena a triumph for what was essentially a defeat. One was that the dictator felt he needed to reward Murena for his loyalty, particularly as Sulla had, that same year, allowed Pompey the opportunity to triumph after the war in Africa. Another explanation was that Sulla needed to show that he was on top of the situation in Anatolia and that Mithridates was being dealt with efficiently.82 In any case, compared to what Pompey had accomplished, Murena’s results amounted to very little and offered no real ground for comparison. Lucullus’s efforts and the progress he made are another matter. From 74 to the beginning of the 60s, he did considerable damage both to Mithridates, whom he expelled from his own kingdom, and to Tigranes, who was defeated inside Armenia (App. Mithr. 85–89). It is worth noticing that in the Pro lege Manilia Cicero emphasizes the results against both kings.83 The acknowledgment of Lucullus’s results suggests that there was a widespread belief in Rome that Lucullus had made more progress against the kings than any other Roman general to date. Pompey’s advantage over Lucullus lay therefore not so much in how he surpassed Lucullus militarily, at least not when it came to fighting Mithridates, but primarily in the defeat at Zela of Lucullus’s army in his absence, which showed that the troops and legates were no longer answerable to him. Lucullus’s initial success at Cyzicus in central Anatolia and in Armenia was overshadowed by this devastating defeat, which questioned whether Lucullus was able to keep the soldiers in line and win the war (Cass. Dio 36.16).

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Lucullus had to fight for his right to a triumph, which he was finally granted in 63, symbolically the same year that Mithridates died, and after having waited outside Rome for three years. Still, even if Lucullus made considerable progress against both kings and was finally awarded the triumph, there was still a considerable gap between his efforts, which ended in defeat and an army that refused to cooperate, and Pompey’s victory that ended the war and allowed him to reorganize the entire region. The new cities that were being settled in Pontus stood as monuments to Pompey’s conquests and complete success in wars against some of Rome’s most resilient enemies. Similarly, the obvious parallel to Alexander’s foundation of cities in Asia and Egypt characterized Pompey as conqueror of the East and so as one of the most successful generals in the history of Rome.84 It has been questioned whether or not Pompey was really imitating Alexander. Roman commentators were critical of the Macedonian king, and the fact that Mithridates was already imitating Alexander made him a less attractive model to emulate.85 However, it should be remembered that the critique by Livy and other Roman writers dates to the imperial period, when the view of kings and Alexander in particular was influenced by Antony’s subsequent use of the latter as part of his propaganda in Egypt.86 Now, even if Alexander was looked upon with a degree of skepticism both at the beginning of the principate and later in the imperial period, this negative attitude should not be overemphasized, particularly not in the first half of the first century bce.87 It is also worth noting that Augustus followed Pompey’s example of imitating Alexander’s hairstyle on portraits when he chose to appear as the perpetual youth.88 Furthermore, intellectual dislike of Alexander in the principate was not necessarily shared by the wider public in the 60s, when the Roman people did not view Pompey as a king (even if he did draw parallels between himself and Alexander), but rather as a young general with a considerable and thus comparable military talent. The reference to Alexander as the Great (Magnus) in the Latin tradition is first datable to Plautus in around 200 bce, which Pompey obtained from his soldiers in the 80s but started using only during the Spanish war. The use of Magnus as his cognomen is therefore best explained as a comparison between Alexander as the young gifted general and Pompey who was still in his mid-twenties when he won the civil war in Africa (Plautus Most. 775; Plut. Pomp. 13.4–5). Alexander’s own contemporaries may not have known him as “the Great” but that mattered little in a Roman context, where Magnus was already a common way of referring to the young king by the time Pompey returned from Africa. In this

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light, the foundings of Pompeiopolis, Magnopolis, Megalopolis, and Nicopolis, another name inspired by Alexander, are therefore still best explained not only as ways to imitate the king but also as trophies or symbols of having won the war and pacified the region. In terms of the local population in the region, they were assured that one strong ruler had been replaced by another. They were familiar with city names such as Eupatoria, Laodikeia, and Mithradation, so they would have recognized the symbolism of naming the cities after the general who ordered their foundations. Pompey’s decision to extend the campaign into the Near East and place Anatolia, Caucasus, and the Near East in the sphere of Rome’s control was no doubt more than an attempt to set himself apart from his critics in a hostile Senate or to reassume the initiative in Roman politics. As mentioned above, there were financial and military reasons why Pompey would want to subdue the entire region and draw new provincial borders in Syria and Cilicia. But the ambitious efforts it took to conquer Anatolia together with the Near East and the decision to urbanize the Pontic hinterland were not only major military and administrative tasks; they also constituted a move that carried considerable political risk, which, if it failed, had the potential to ruin Pompey politically. Seen in this light, the ambitious plan was more than an attempt to satisfy the expectation of the equestrians, who were given new opportunities in the newly established provinces but in a more regulated fashion, as discussed above. The large-scale reorganization of the East was an achievement that surpassed what any other Roman general had accomplished, but it was also a dramatic move to set the record straight with his rivals and critics in the Senate, who, as Pompey surely thought, would have to recognize his status as a natural leader. A complete success would depend on whether or not the cities and the provinces were functional. Could the provinces be defended and would the cities, many of which carried his name, evolve beyond victory towns into prosperous and viable city-states able to fulfill their administrative obligations? The victories against Mithridates and Tigranes and the reorganization of the East were not the successes that Pompey had hoped they would be. After the triumph, the political reality hit Pompey hard. Not only were his acts in the East blocked, but he also needed help from Caesar to carry through the land reform that would grant his soldiers the land they had been promised. A little over a decade later, Pompey had lost the civil war to Caesar and fled to Egypt, where he was killed by representatives of the Ptolemaic king after he had finally earned a place among the aristocratic part of the Senate who had come to fear Caesar more than Pompey and once again needed his skills as general to defend

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their interests. Pompey did not, as far as we know, return to Pontus, and he seems not to have followed the development of his cities. Still, the cities were founded, and to ensure that they would be able to fulfill the necessary administrative tasks required of them, Pompey needed a form of organization that would ensure that the cities continued to evolve.89 The solution he ended up with was a form of constitution that, even if it did favor the wealthy few, allowed a larger part of the citizen body a role in the decision-making process. Identical civic constitutions were introduced across the province to ensure a uniform political structure in the cities, and initiatives were made to provide and maintain functional citizen bodies in the newly founded towns. But what were Pompey’s intentions with the cities and what sort of civic community did he hope to establish? Did he, as is so often argued, try to introduce a Hellenic form of civic society to Hellenize what is sometimes referred to as the rural backwater of Asia Minor, or did he introduce a form of constitution that was fundamentally different from the more democratic Greek cities? Chapter 2 is devoted to Pompey’s constitutional and administrative choices and to how the cities developed after he lost the war to Caesar.90

Chapter 2

Building Cities from the Ground

The kind of civic culture Pompey chose for his new settlements has been a matter of much debate and should be seen as part of a general discussion of what sort of policy Rome followed in its attempt to organize the East. Scholars tend to agree that Rome chose a form of urban organization that was modeled on Greek urban traditions.1 The cities are not generally believed to have been Roman at the outset or built on Roman norms and institutions, as in the urbanization of the West, but rather modeled around political and cultural institutions that were essentially Greek. Whether Roman authorities chose a Greek or Roman model for the cities founded by Roman generals is complicated by the lack of a clear definition of what constitutes a Greek city. Sometimes the question is straightforward, as in the case of cities such as Athens, Ephesus, or Heraclea on the northern Black Sea coast, where Greek culture had dominated urban life essentially from the moment the cities were founded. In other cities, such as those founded or re-founded by some of the successors of Alexander the Great, by later local kings such as the Mithridatids, or by Roman generals, the answer is often less obvious. If one turns to Strabo, the local historian and geographer from the city of Amaseia, the definition of what it meant to be Greek ties in to the question of ethnicity and to the origin of the people living within the community. Most Greek men of letters, however, writing both before and after Strabo, define Greekness by cultural criteria: speaking Greek, living a life in accordance with Greek norms and customs, and respecting the Greek gods (Hdt. 8.144.2; Polyb. 34.14; Diod. Sic. 5.6.5; Dion. Hal. 1.89–90). Therefore, judging from the writings of most Greek commentators, what defined a Greek city was perhaps not, or so it seems, a matter of a particular constitution or

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a certain form of political organization. What seems to have mattered more are the city’s cultural institutions, its cults, and its educational provision, such as the gymnasium or the ephebeia, along with the customs, the language, and also the cultural heritage of the people living there.2 That said, and even though Greek cities were organized in a variety of ways, there still seems to have been a link between being Greek and the idea of a democratic approach to civic government, which may be defined as the ideal that a larger share of the citizen body was to have at least some part in the decision-making process.3 It is therefore not unreasonable to see as a Greek trait a form of constitution in which, in contrast to the oligarchic constitutional practice in Rome, Italy, and Rome’s colonies, a larger share of the population was allowed to participate in the political process. A form of constitution that included a larger part of the population, for instance by less restricted access to the city council, where new laws and lists of magistrates were debated before being presented to the assembly, may therefore have been inspired by Greek political thought. Even if Pompey seems not to have promoted Greek culture in any particular way, he may, as suggested by Marek, have chosen to organize the cities on a model that had already proved successful and attractive to people in the region, hoping that his cities too would thrive and prosper.4 The following discussion focuses first on what kinds of cities Pompey introduced in Roman Pontus, and second on whether these cities were from the beginning modeled on Greek traditions, customs, and institutions, or whether, from the moment they were founded, they were influenced by Greek urban culture up to the point where the inhabitants, on their own initiative, modeled the cities’ institutional and civic landscapes and their everyday lives on what they believed to be Greek fashion.5 If we turn to the form of constitution that Pompey chose for Pontus and Bithynia, there is much to suggest that he did not follow a single model but rather drew up a constitution with elements from both Greek and Roman traditions in order to create a form of government that would serve the particular need to sustain the development of the new towns. Compared to other parts of the empire, we are better informed about the cities’ constitutional framework because of the references to the lex Pompeia in the correspondence between Pliny the Younger and the Emperor Trajan. It is worth noting here that the content of these letters has been analyzed by G. Woolf, who questions whether they should be read as a discussion of actual administrative challenges that Pliny encountered as the governor of

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Pontus et Bithynia. Woolf points toward the oddities in the collection: the well-structured style and the fact that each letter deals with only one matter at a time. Woolf suggests that book 10 should be understood as a literary construct that models the ideal relationship between the inclusive and cooperative emperor and his loyal associate.6 However, the view that the letters do not constitute an authentic correspondence has its problems. First, the letter Ep. 10.97, where Pliny and Trajan discuss how the former was to deal with the Christians, seems to have been used by Hadrian in a later ruling, suggesting that both Pliny’s letter and Trajan’s response were kept in the imperial archive (Euseb. Hist. Eccl. 4.8.6–4.9). That the correspondence was authentic is further suggested by a number of instances in which Trajan’s answers are missing from the correspondence. Even if one could imagine deliberate gaps as a way to enhance the credibility of the collection, the missing letters do suggest that book 10 is an authentic collection of letters in which some of Trajan’s letters are missing from Pliny’s files, either because they never found their way to Pliny, because he lost them, or because they were never written. Pliny’s choice of an easily accessible style and the way he treats one issue at a time certainly allow him to stand out as a well-organized and dedicated governor who did his job carefully. But there are practical reasons why Pliny dealt with one issue at a time. As the letters between the emperor and the governors contained the emperor’s rulings on all sorts of matters, they would have been filed in the imperial archive to establish precedents when similar cases were discussed in the future. It was therefore essential that the letters should be easily recoverable and accessible when later emperors and magistrates wished to consult previous rulings.7 In the second century ce, the province was considerably smaller than the province Pompey founded in the 60s. By the time Pliny arrived in Pontus et Bithynia, the province covered Bithynia and the coastal region from Heraclea to Amisus. None of Pompey’s cities or any parts of the hinterland were under Pliny’s jurisdiction and they were therefore not part of the discussion of how the lex Pompeia was to be interpreted. In addition, there is little to suggest that Pompey’s code for Pontus and Bithynia was reinforced when Augustus and later emperors placed the region bit by bit under the provincial jurisdiction of Galatia and Cappadocia. But while there is little to indicate that the lex Pompeia applied in the hinterland during the imperial period, the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan suggests that the code constituted a common provincial law across the entire double province, both in the Late Republican period and in what was left of the double province at the

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beginning of the second century ce, which suggests that the code did apply to the new settlements. There is an inconsistency in how the province is referred to when Pliny and Trajan discuss legal matters. One example is when Pliny describes how, according to Pompey’s code, no one under the age of thirty was allowed to hold magistracies or sit on the city councils in the Bithynian cities (Plin. Ep. 10.79.1). A similar example is found in the issue of honorary citizenships, which were offered to individuals who already held civic rights in one of the other cities in the province, something that was becoming a widespread phenomenon in what Pliny describes as the Bithynian towns (Plin. Ep. 10.114.1). Again there are no references to Pontus, which could suggest that the law against double citizenship applied only in the Bithynian cities. The inconsistency in how Pliny refers to the province is further illustrated in two other letters, where the question of admission fees for those who had obtained a seat on the city councils is discussed. In his letter Pliny mentions how Pompey’s law applied to both the Bithynians and the Pontic people: “The Pompeian law, Sir, which the people of Bithynia and Pontus observe, does not order those who are enrolled in a council by censors to pay money; but those whom your generosity has allowed some of the cities to add over and above the lawful number have paid one or two thousand denarii each. Later the proconsul Anicius Maximus ordered those who were enrolled by censors to pay as well, but only in a very few cities, and different sums in different cities” (Plin. Ep. 10.112.1–2; translation from Williams 1990). In his reply, Trajan refers to Bithynia alone when he informs Pliny that he was unable to lay down general rules on whether new members of the councils were to pay an entrance fee (Plin. Ep. 10.113). Although Trajan refers only to the people of Bithynia, the two letters still offer the clearest indication of how the lex Pompeia provided a common constitutional framework for both the Bithynian and the Pontic cities and so also for the cities founded in the hinterland.8 It cannot be ruled out that in the lex Pompeia there were laws that applied in only one part of the province or in certain cities, and we know from Trajan’s answers that in the cities there were bodies of local laws that were to be respected.9 On the other hand, there is not much to explain why rules on minimum age for magistrates and council membership or rules against enfranchising other citizens from Bithynia would apply in one part of the newly established province but not in the other, when apparently it was a common rule across the province that one was not to pay a fee for council membership.

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Furthermore, there are no obvious differences between the cities in Bithynia and those on the Pontic coast, which makes it even more reasonable to assume that the major constitutional issues regulated by the lex Pompeia applied in both parts of the province. One possible explanation for the inconsistency in how Trajan and Pliny refer to Pontus and Bithynia may be found in the fact that Pontus et Bithynia was not the official name of the province until King Polemon II was forced by Nero to abdicate in 64 ce. Until then, the province may well have been known under the name Bithynia, as suggested by Strabo’s description of Pompey’s rearrangement of the region:10 “Pompeius, after putting him down, received this territory within these boundaries. Those parts towards Armenia and around Colchis he distributed to the dynasts who had fought on his side, and the remainder he divided into eleven political entities and added them to Bithynia, creating a single province from them both” (Strabo 12.3.1; translation from Roller 2014).11 Pliny’s and Trajan’s references to the Bithynian cities are therefore likely to have been relics from the past or abbreviations used inconsistently after the province had been given a new name in the late 60s ce. Therefore, even if some or all of the cities had their own individual laws, which applied only locally, the constitutional framework laid out by the lex Pompeia is still best understood as a body of laws in effect for all the cities in the province, including the settlements in the hinterland.12

Settling In As in the democratic Greek cities, so also in Rome, Latium, and Roman colonies across the empire, political responsibility was divided between the assembly, the city council, and boards of magistrates who carried out the daily administration. Oligarchic rule continued, it is true, to exist as a real choice of constitution for Greek communities, but democratic governments did become more and more common from the age of Alexander and under his successors, not least in western Asia Minor, but also in cities founded by the Seleucid kings farther to the east.13 Compared to Rome’s oligarchic ideals, where the decisionmaking processes rested largely with members of the elite, the councils in the Greek cities were often larger and less exclusive—both in the democratic constitutions and in some oligarchies.14 As a result, access to council membership could help determine whether Pompey aimed at a form of government that was inspired by Greek democratic thinking or whether he preferred a more

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oligarchic form of constitution, one where political power and control of the decision-making process rested with the elite. A way to limit the influence average citizens had on the political process was by introducing property qualifications for magistrates and council membership. The entire citizen body could still be given the right to vote, but legislative power would then fall into the hands of an elite with the necessary qualification and financial means to ensure a stable form of administration of the cities and the assigned territories.15 The political organization of the Pontic and Bithynian cities is addressed in several of the letters in Pliny’s book 10, where he deals with the question of eligibility for council membership and whether sons of socially and economically privileged families were to be admitted to the council even if they had not yet served as magistrates. Pliny said that this was how it was traditionally done and was to be preferred because it was better to fill the empty seats with sons from the best families than what he calls members of the plebs (Plin. Ep. 10.79.3). But before addressing how political life was organized in Pompey’s settlements, we must first turn to what little we know of the cities he founded. One of the most informative sources for Pompey’s reorganization of the Pontic kingdom is Strabo, who offers an insider’s view of the early phase of the cities.16 In book 12 of his world geography, Strabo describes how Pompey ordered the destruction of the fortresses from which the associates of Mithridates VI and the earlier kings had overseen a rural population settled in hundreds of villages across the hinterland. According to Strabo, Pompey was hoping to break the previous form of organization and make sure that robbers and potential opposition groups could not use the strongholds as hideouts (Strabo 12.3.38).17 From Strabo’s account of Pompey’s activities in Pontus, it appears that the general chose to settle the new cities in already-existing centers (as when Magnopolis was founded on the still-unfinished Eupatoria) (Strabo 12.3.30–31). Other examples of how Pompey reused existing centers include Amaseia, the former royal city of the Mithridatic kings; Zela, the previous temple community of the Persian goddess Anaïtis, which Pompey turned into a city-state; and Comana, the temple community to the goddess Ma, which kept its autonomy under the authority of the priest Archelaüs, one of Pompey’s appointees.18 Neapolis, the new city, was founded in the land of Phazemonitai, close to the stronghold Sagylion. Pompeiopolis, the only city Pompey founded in Paphlagonia, was raised farther west near the stronghold of Pimolisa. The city of Megalopolis was founded near the stronghold of Ikizari on the borders of Armenia Minor, and Diospolis at Kabeira, another of the former royal residences.19

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Map 2. Roman Pontus after the urbanization by Pompey.

An important aspect of the urbanization of the Pontic hinterland was to supply the new cities with a citizen body large enough to fulfill their administrative obligations. There is no available information on how the inhabitants of all of the new cities were gathered, but there are a number of sources that allow some general observations. In his account of how the cities were founded, Strabo mentions that the city of Megalopolis was built on a synoikisme of people from Culupenê, Camisenê, and those who lived in the immediate vicinity of the site where the city was located (Strabo 12.3.37). In the case of Nicopolis, Strabo briefly mentions that, after the victory, Pompey founded Nicopolis near the site where the battle had taken place (Strabo 12.3.28), but it is Cassius Dio who offers a more detailed account of how the city was inhabited: “In the course of these events Pompey sent men to pursue him (Mithridates VI); but when he outstripped them by fleeing across the Phasis, the Roman leader founded a city in the territory where he had been victorious, and gave it over to the wounded and superannuated soldiers. Many also of the neighbouring people voluntarily joined the settlement and later generations of them are in existence even now, being called Nicopolitans and belonging to the province of Cappadocia” (Cass. Dio 36.50.3; translation from Cary 1914).

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A synoikisme of people in local villages or a settlement of wounded and exhausted soldiers together with people already living in the area may also have been the strategy that the Roman authorities followed for some of the other cities in the hinterland. In the case of Pompeiopolis, there is evidence from the city’s epigraphic record to suggest a spread of Roman names and so an early settlement of Romans in the city is a practice that may have applied in other cities as well.20 We have no way of knowing whether the general settled soldiers in all of the other cities either as the campaign continued into Armenia and the Near East or before he returned to Italy. What we can say, based on later evidence, is that most of the cities Pompey settled seem to have developed into well-functioning civic communities within decades of their foundation. That the number of Romans had reached a certain level by the time Pharnaces attacked the province is suggested by Hirtius. In his concluding remarks on Pharnaces’ initial success, Hirtius mentions how after the victory at Nicopolis, the king went into Pontus and “seized the effects of the Roman and Pontic citizens.” There is, of course, no hint as to the size of the Roman community, but the Romans are here described as a group in their own right (Caes. B. Alex. 41). In any case, there are elements in Hirtius’s writing that suggest that the civic communities in the hinterland had reached a substantial level of inhabitants, including a sizable community of Roman citizens, some twenty years after they were founded. One reason why the populations of the Pontic cities grew into what seem to have been viable civic communities may well have been a product of a deliberate policy that combined relatively easy access to civic rights in the new communities with measures that would make migration from the new communities less attractive. As suggested by the jurist Ulpian, sons of Pontic mothers were given civic rights in the cities in which their mothers were born, no matter whether their fathers also held civic rights in the same cities.21 In his Edict Ulpian quotes Celsus’s outline of the law: Celsus states that the inhabitants of Pontus also enjoy this advantage (the right to citizenship where the mother is born), through the favour of the Great Pompey, that is to say, that anyone whose mother was born in Pontus will be a citizen of that country. Certain authorities, however, hold that this privilege was only granted to illegitimate children, but Celsus does not adopt this opinion. For it would not have been provided that a child born out of wedlock should follow

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the condition of its mother (for what status could it have), but the rule could only apply to children of parents whose birthplaces were in different cities. (Digest 50.1.1.2) How effective such a law could have been is difficult to say. It would, as Ulpian concludes, have secured legal rights for sons of Pontic women, no matter where their fathers were from as long as the sons’ parents were legally married. Yet the law may have encouraged men from outside the empire’s borders to move to one of the cities in Pontus and marry Pontic women since their future sons would thus, in just one generation, obtain citizenship in one of the cities within the Roman empire. Another measure to prevent citizens in the newly founded cities from leaving is the law that did not allow civic rights to those who were already citizens in one of the other cities in the province (Plin. Ep. 10.114–15).22 In order to have Trajan’s ruling on the matter, Pliny describes the law in the following way: Under the Pompeian law, Sir, the Bithynian cities are allowed to enrol any persons they choose as citizens, provided that none of them come from those cities which are in Bithynia. In the same law it is laid down for what reasons men may be expelled from a senate by censors. And so some of the censors decided that they should consult me about whether they ought to expel a man who came from another city. I myself, because the law, although it forbade a foreigner to be enrolled as a citizen, yet did not order a man to be expelled from a senate for that reason, and because, moreover, I was assured that in every city there were very many councillors from other cities and that the result would be that many men and many cities would be thrown into confusion by that part of the law which had long since become a dead letter by a kind of general agreement, thought it necessary to consult you about what course you think should be followed. (Plin. Ep. 10.114; translation from Williams 1990, slightly adapted) From Pliny’s letter it appears that the law was no longer being observed. That in the second century it was common practice to allow citizens from other cities in the province a seat on the council is also confirmed by the orations of Dio Chrysostom, who appears to have been a citizen in Prusa, Nicomedia, and Apameia (Dio Chrys. Or. 41.1, 38.1). As the law had fallen into disuse, it is far from certain that it had ever had its intended effect, and it is difficult

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to tell when exactly it became a dead letter. It may well be that the cities and Roman representatives were more inclined to follow the lex Pompeia in the Late Republican period when the law was first introduced and that the ban on double citizenship did work. But what matters here, in this context, is not so much whether the law worked as intended but rather the motives behind it and the kind of constitution Pompey planned for the cities. In his Pro Balbo Cicero spelled out how it was against the law to be a Roman citizen and a citizen in another city, in this case Gades, at the same time. If a Roman citizen wanted to assume civic rights in a city other than Rome, he was first obliged to surrender his Roman citizenship (Cic. Balb. 28–29).23 As pointed out by Fernoux, that the lex Pompeia banned dual citizenship need not be seen as a means to prevent citizens in Pontus and Bithynia from giving up their original hometown but could instead have reflected Roman legislation on the issue of dual citizenship.24 Pliny’s letter, however, still suggests that the law against double citizenship may have been aimed specifically at circumstances in the new province. Judging from Pliny’s description of Pompey’s code, cities were allowed to enroll anyone as honorary citizens provided they were not already citizens in another town within the province (Plin. Ep. 10.114.1). According to Pliny’s outline of the law, dual citizenship was prohibited only for individuals who already held civic rights elsewhere in the province; and the remark that “the Bithynian cities” were allowed to enroll any persons they chose as honorary citizens suggests that men from other provinces or from Italy were free to obtain citizenship as they or the cities pleased. That the cities were allowed to grant civic rights to citizens from cities outside the province suggests that Pompey followed the Greek tradition of isopoliteia—the opportunity to be an honorary citizen in a city other than one’s hometown—but also that the law against dual citizenship for individuals who already held civic rights within the province had a particular purpose.25 The success of the settlements in the hinterland would depend on their ability to sustain the population and the citizen body at viable levels. Only then would the cities be able to organize their own affairs. To ensure that taxation would run smoothly, Rome needed local magistrates to negotiate and collaborate with the publicani—which would be possible only if the cities enjoyed functioning political institutions. Large-scale migration from the hinterland settlements would pose a considerable threat to both the taxation and the overall administration of the province, and it would also have the potential to threaten the existence of the cities and so the entire urbanization of the Pontic hinterland.

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If the collection of tax failed, the governors could expect to face lawsuits from the publicani, who would eventually lower their expectations of how much they could generate from farming the province. Pompey for his part would be exposed to criticism and tried for having organized a province and a legal system that did not live up to the expectation of the publicani. Also, as a manifestation of Pompey’s victory and the pacification of Mithridates, it would be unfortunate if the cities and their political institutions were deserted within a relatively short period of time. It is, of course, wise to remember that migration was no easy task, particularly for those whose assets were made up of land. What Pompey may have hoped to prevent was perhaps not so much that the population in the hinterland would give up their belongings in the cities to which they had been assigned. Rather, he may have hoped to avoid the most resourceful members of the citizen body moving to one of the other cities in the province—drawn, perhaps, by the more devolved civic landscape in one of the Greek colonies on the coast or in one of the more developed cities in Bithynia. That questions like these were a matter of debate is suggested by Gaius’s thoughts on the provincial edict and whether individuals would be liable for munera in their “new” cities but not obliged to hold magistracies.26 Whether such concerns were already part of Pompey’s planning is not possible to know with certainty, but it is to be expected that if citizens left their hometowns they would be more likely to invest in their new cities than in their old ones. Prohibition of dual citizenship for individuals who were already citizens in one of the cities in the province would also have rendered migration less attractive. Individuals could still move to another city, but they would enjoy no civic rights there. Instead, they would be guests with no access to political institutions. That is, of course, if the law was upheld. Also, it seems that the settlement of Roman citizens in Nicopolis and Pompeiopolis did not require them to give up their Roman status. Judging from Cassius Dio’s account of how Roman veterans were settled in Nicopolis and from the remarks in the Bellum Alexandrinum on the presence of Roman citizens, Romans continued as a separate category of people (B. Alex. 41; Cass. Dio 36.50.3). Groups of Roman citizens organized in various associations in cities across the East are a well-known phenomenon. Members of these groups were Romans from Rome or Italy with economic interests in the region and enough resources to influence the political agenda, but they did not hold civic rights in the cities in which they lived. The Romans in the Pontic hinterland, on the other hand, were settled into newly established cities in a region with no preexisting civic culture. It is therefore only reasonable to assume that the

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veterans would have been given full civic rights in their new hometowns if for no other reason than because this would make it more attractive for them to stay behind. Another reason why Pompey would have offered his veterans citizenship in one of the new settlements was to use them as role models for how to live and organize life in a city in ways that would meet the expectations of the Roman authorities, and the publicani in particular. In other words, one could also ask whether Roman veterans would have accepted having no political influence in communities in which they were settled and as a consequence leaving the decision-making process in the hands of local villagers with no tradition or personal experience of civic government. To meet the expectations of his former soldiers and to ensure that the cities’ political systems evolved in the way needed to organize the region, Pompey would have turned to his soldiers to form the political and administrative backbone of the communities, whether in one or several of the new towns. For all we know, there might have been Roman soldiers in all the new cities. Cassius Dio mentions only Nicopolis specifically, but epigraphic evidence from, for instance, Pompeiopolis suggests as Marek has pointed out that the settlement of veterans could have been more widespread.

Sharing Power: A Choice of Constitution Another of Pompey’s challenges was how to organize a stable political system that would support the growth and further development of the new civic communities and ensure the urbanization of the region in the long run. What sort of constitution Pompey introduced in Pontus is closely tied to the organization of the city councils (Plin. Ep. 10.79.1–3). Did Pompey aim for an oligarchic form of government with tightly regulated access to the council, for instance, by introducing property qualifications that would keep average citizens from entering the council? Was the council intended as a body of former magistrates, or did Pompey aim at a more inclusive form in which a larger part of the citizen body could obtain a seat and take part in the decision-making process? Pliny asks Trajan for a ruling on whether men under the age of thirty would be eligible for a seat on the council even if they had not yet served as magistrates. The letter is a centerpiece for the reconstruction of the local civic government that Pompey introduced in the cities across the province, and it deserves to be quoted in full.

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It is prescribed, Sir, in the Pompeian law which was laid down for the Bithynians, that no one should hold a magistracy or be a member of a senate (senatus) who was under thirty years of age. In the same law it was provided that those who had held a magistracy should be members of the senate. Next there followed an edict of the deified Augustus in which he allowed men to hold lesser magistracies from the age of twenty-two. The question is therefore raised whether a man under thirty years of age who has held a magistracy can be enrolled in a senate by the censors, and, if he can, whether those who have not held a magistracy can also, under the same construction, be enrolled as senators from that age at which they have been allowed to hold a magistracy; furthermore this is asserted to have been the practice hitherto and to be necessary, because it is far better that the sons of honorable men (honestorum hominum) should be admitted to the senate-house than that of commoners (plebs) should be (Plin. Ep. 10.79.1–3; translation from Williams 1990) By the time Pliny served as governor, there were different groups with seats on the council. One group consisted of the ex-magistrates who were admitted after they had held their first office in the cursus honorum. Another group was citizens over the age of thirty who had not held one of the magistracies in the cities, either because they had no ambition to serve or because they did not have the necessary funds to do so. Pliny addresses how efforts were made to keep the latter group out of the council. But the facts that the censors found it necessary to draw Pliny’s attention to the question and that Trajan underlined that the lex Pompeia was to be observed suggest that access to the city council continued to be an important political issue in the cities. A third category of council members were those discussed above, who, Pliny says, were admitted by the emperor’s generosity and who were asked to pay entrance fees of between one and two thousand denarii (Plin. Ep. 10.112.1–2). The identity of this group is less straightforward. Pliny mentions that these groups were added above the maximum number with Trajan’s permission, which testifies to how Trajan and perhaps other emperors before him had given some of the cities a dispensation to add more members to the council. The increase in the number of council members is also the theme in one of Dio Chrysostom’s speeches made to the people of Prusa before he went on to lead a delegation to meet Trajan. The emperor later granted his permission to increase the number of seats on Prusa’s council, which suggests that the right to enlarge

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the council was given to the cities on an individual basis and not as part of a general decision that applied across the province (Dio Chrys. Or. 45.7–8).27 The distinction drawn between those who were enrolled when more members were added to the council and those enrolled by the censors is puzzling. One solution is to take Pliny literally to mean that the first group consisted of men who were added on top of the legal number, determined either by the lex Pompeia or by local laws. For this to make sense, it would require that the councils were filled to the last seats with citizens already enrolled by the censors and suggest a system in which ex-magistrates and ordinary citizens sat on the council for life. In that case, censors were then appointing new members when seats were freed up as their holders died, moved, or were convicted for crimes that made them unfit for council membership.28 The new members would then be ex-magistrates, who had held their first public office, waiting for a seat to become available, and citizens over the age of thirty, who were presumably elected by the assembly.29 Such a practice of filling up the council, where membership was for life, is known from the constitution of Cyrene, where the council of elders with 101 members, serving for life, was supplied by election as seats became available.30 This scenario is surely possible but would not be without complications. If both ex-magistrates and those members who were eligible because they were citizens over the age of thirty sat for life, one can easily imagine a situation where ex-magistrates would be impatient and less inclined to take on administrative responsibility. It might very well be that natural events would free up the seats required to allow the few new magistrates access to the council each year. But it may also have been the case that the council was revised if not every year then every five years, resulting in a relatively short period of time that ex-magistrates had to wait before they could assume their seats. This would allow a model in which the censors would come together and appoint the council members by choosing the citizens who had served as magistrates first and then filling any vacant seats with citizens over the minimum age elected by the assembly.31 One thing that seems fairly certain, though, is that those who paid entrance fees obtained their seats for life. This suggests that, in the imperial period, some civic councils in Pontus et Bithynia were filled to the last seats.32 If not, it is difficult to see who these people were and why they would be willing to pay their way into the council. It seems unlikely that they belonged to the group who would become magistrates, as they would then obtain a seat after serving their first office. Why they would have to wait for the council to

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be expanded and why they did not obtain one of the seats available to those over the minimum age remains unclear. One explanation could be that, by Pliny’s time, the council had turned into what was de facto an ordo decurionis, in which councils in the cities of Pontus et Bithynia were occupied almost entirely by magistrates, their sons, and perhaps other members of the cities’ economic elite, some of whom, as we have seen, were from one of the other cities in the province. If others desired a seat on the council, they would have to hope that someone from the inner circle of the elite, someone like Dio Chrysostom, would ask the emperor’s permission to increase the number of seats, and that they would pay in order to be enrolled.33 Councils filled to the last seat, and a situation in which the economic elite monopolized access to them, was not, as is suggested by Pliny’s letter 10.79, the case everywhere. It need not have been a problem in the hinterland cities during the Late Republican period. In any case, the remark on how there were no legal grounds in the lex Pompeia to ask new council members to pay entrance fees suggests that in the Late Republican period enrollments did not exceed the legal numbers but also that entrance was not in use in the Republican period.34 This leads to the question whether council membership was regulated by property qualifications. Again, scholars differ on whether Pompey introduced property qualifications. It has been suggested that he did, in order to limit access to the council, while others see the lex Pompeia as a continuation of already-existing Greek traditions where access to the city council was less restricted.35 That Rome did introduce property qualifications in Thessaly and Achaia is well established (Livy 34.51; Paus. 7.16.6). The question here is whether Pompey chose a similar model for Pontus and Bithynia. The theory that property qualifications regulated council membership in the double province rests essentially on four letters in which Pliny and Trajan discuss the personal finances of two individuals: Julius Piso of Amisus and Flavius Archippus from the city of Prusa. In the case of Julius Piso, Pliny informs Trajan that the city of Amisus had asked Piso to return a sum of 40,000 denarii, 160,000 sesterces, which he had received as a gift twenty years earlier—a decision that both the people and the council were behind at the time. Apart from the anticipated claim that Piso had already spent the money to the benefit of the city and that he had used up most of his fortune, Pliny goes on to describe how Piso begged not to repay the money, as it would ruin his social standing (Plin. Ep. 10.110.2). The other example is a letter attributed to Domitian, which Pliny forwards to Trajan. Here, Domitian orders a Terentius Maximus to buy a farm for

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Flavius Archippus, one of Domitian’s associates, for up to 100,000 sesterces and charge it to the emperor’s account. According to the letter, it was the emperor’s hope that Archippus would be able to live a respectable life on the revenue of the estate (Plin. Ep. 10.58.5). Pliny mentions elsewhere that 100,000 sesterces was the property qualification for decurions in Como, a sum that corresponds to some extent with the figure of 40,000 denarii, 160,000 sesterces, that Piso had to return and the amount Terentius Maximus was allowed to use on Archippus’s farm (Plin. Ep. 1.19). There are all sorts of reasons why these examples and the figures quoted do not relate to a certain census of 100,000 sesterces. A request to return a sum of 160,000 sesterces, 50 percent more than the property limit for a decurion in an Italian city, could easily have been a problem for many members of the civic elite in Pontus and elsewhere, who could have been forced to sell property in order to raise that kind of money. Piso’s remark that the demand to pay back the gifts would ruin what was left of his dignity suggests that he was not talking about a specific census qualification, as that dignity could not be partly lost, but his reputation in general, which would suffer from the insinuation that he had obtained the gift in an unlawful or unreasonable manner.36 The example of Archippus’s farm is closer to the figures from Como, but again the case is not in any way clear-cut. As specified by Domitian, Terentius Maximus was not to spend more than 100,000 sesterces and, it seems, Domitian would be satisfied if a farm could be bought at a lower price. In other words, if the aim was to make sure that Archippus would meet the census requirement for council membership in Prusa, why not buy a farm that would safely meet the qualification?37 One explanation is that Roman ideals of wealth, office, and prestige meant that members of the elite felt they were elevated above the average part of the population and therefore saw no reason why they should share the decisionmaking process with the general public. As pointed out by W. Jongman, some members of the plebs, freeborn and freedmen, were able to generate considerable wealth without acquiring the social respect of the urban elite.38 In that light, it is worth considering whether the members of the plebs Pliny wanted to keep out of the council were men who had made enough money to meet the property qualification but lacked the social and cultural status and prestige of the more established members of the elite. When Pliny mentions the plebs, he might be referring to the wealthy but socially inferior members of the public who had the money to make the property qualification, sometimes many times over, but not the social standing needed in order to be invited into the political elite or the decision-making

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process. It would be against the intention of the law and that would be the reason why Pliny was faced with a question when he visited the cities. It is not unlikely that there were individuals who made large fortunes in the Pontic and Bithynian cities but it is less likely that they constituted a large-enough number to generate a serious political problem that the governor would have to discuss with the emperor. It might well have been considerably more difficult to have generated wealth to the scale of 100,000 sesterces in provincial towns in Pontus and Bithynia than it would have been in Rome, in Italy more broadly, or in some of the large cities and trade centers across the empire. Also, if a man of considerable wealth wanted to be part of the decision-making process or hold office in the city and so contribute to the upkeep of the city, few cities in the Pontic hinterland or in the provinces in general would have been in a position to deny him that ambition, even if he was considered socially inferior. Judging from the admittedly few inscriptions that show members of the elite managing a whole range of costs related to the upkeep of the cities, one gets the impression that the task of running them was in the hands of a relatively small group of wealthy citizens. It would therefore have been difficult for the censors and other members of the elite to prevent men with means from being elected if they promised to cover some or many of the costs faced by the rest of the political elite or if they wanted to contribute to the upkeep of the cities’ public buildings or architecture. The question therefore remains why the censors, the civic elite in Pontus et Bithynia, and, for that matter, Pliny, would bend the rules to allow sons of the elite to be enrolled in the council at the expense of the lower social strata. If access to the councils was already determined by the candidates’ assets, why was this still an issue at the beginning of the second century? And why would Trajan underline that the minimum age of thirty was to be observed? The only exception Trajan allows is for the enrollment of early career magistrates who, following Augustus’s edict, could serve in some of the minor magistracies from the age of twenty-two. In his decision, Trajan goes up against Pliny’s recommendation that it was preferable to have men of the elite fill up the council than to leave the vacant seats to members of the plebs. This must mean that average citizens were still eligible for a seat on the city councils by the time Pliny arrived in the province—even if efforts were made to keep this group out. Judging from how the lex Pompeia allowed members of what Pliny refers to as the plebs a seat on the council, it seems that neither Pompey nor any other Roman authorities up to the time of Trajan had introduced property qualifications for council membership in Pontus et Bithynia. Instead, what

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emerges from the correspondence is a form of constitution in which the elite obtained political privileges in the form of lifelong council membership, provided they took administrative responsibility and served as magistrates. Simultaneously, and untraditionally from a Roman political perspective, members of the next social layer, even the cities’ lower levels, were eligible for a seat on the council from the age of thirty and accordingly allowed a role in the process by which decisions on local administration and magistrate lists were made. The role of the censors was therefore not to check whether the members of the council still met the property qualifications or whether newly enrolled council members possessed the necessary funds to obtain a seat in the first place. Instead, the censors were expected to revise the lists before the new election so that those without lifelong membership would step out of the council and, if they desired, be added to the lists of candidates for the coming election. The censors would also have made sure that those who had held one of the junior magistracies were added to the list of council members. What little we know of the lex Pompeia suggests that Pompey and those who assisted him in the process of writing the code tried to introduce measures to support the development of viable citizen bodies, particularly in the new cities founded in the hinterland. The grant of civic rights in the towns to the sons of Pontic mothers, no matter where their fathers were from, was intended to help increase the number of citizens in the towns, and the decision not to introduce property qualifications is also best understood as a measure to ensure that a comparatively larger part of the citizen body was eligible to take part in the political process and therefore had a reason to engage in public life. At the time Pompey founded the cities in the hinterland, there were no political traditions within the cities and no real experience of local autonomy or, for that matter, a political elite of local origin whose members could claim a legitimate right to govern the new cities. Instead, Pompey had to introduce a system whereby the citizens felt some sense of belonging and over time a sense of shared responsibility for administrative obligations in the cities in which they or their families had civic rights. The form he chose was not only a political system in which the average citizens, through the city council, had relatively greater influence on the decision-making process than was usually the case in Roman local politics, but also a form of constitution in which the presumably more conservative ex-magistrates were favored with lifelong membership of the city council to ensure much-needed stability. The idea that Roman authorities organized the cities they founded in the East after a Greek fashion ties into the persistent idea that Rome, and so also

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Pompey, worked to Hellenize the rural parts of Anatolia and the Near East. The Greek civic model is traditionally seen to have offered a proven form of urban organization that Rome could immediately employ. In addition, Roman settlers in the East are said to have been too few in number to have any significant impact on life in the Greek-dominated East, and it has been implied that Greeks would have had little to gain from what Rome had to offer because the urban culture in the East was already well established.39 This line of thinking finds some support in a number of examples in which Greek culture continued to dominate everyday life in the East and in the number of instances where influence from Rome was less apparent than in the cities of the West.40 The foundations of Nicopolis at Actium, where a number of Greek institutions shaped both the urban landscape and everyday life in the city, or the various Roman colonies in the East, such as Corinth, Apameia in Bithynia, and Sinope, where Greek customs, language, and cults continued to dominate life in the city, testify to a continuously strong influence of Greek culture.41 Members of the Roman elite traditionally admired Greek architecture, art, and philosophy, and they studied Greek literature, philosophy, and political thinking in Rome, Athens, or one of the other centers of Greek learning. The Roman youth of the Late Republican period was certainly no exception. Lucullus, Octavian, and Mark Antony, to focus on Romans with a part in the history of Pontus, were all devoted to Greek culture, and Pompey surrounded himself with Greek men of letters, just as his theater on the Campus Martius was inspired by the theater in Mytilene.42 While Roman fascination with Greek culture is evident, it is far less obvious that the cities in the Pontic hinterland were modeled after a Greek fashion, let alone part of a deliberate attempt to promote Greek urban culture in the rural parts of Anatolia or the Near East. The influence of Greek communities or Greek immigrants would, in the early phase, have been limited, and much time was needed before Greek cultural institutions, norms, and customs became an integrated part of the inhabitants’ everyday life. It is worth remembering that the inhabitants were, as far as we know, a mixture of mostly local families and a number of Roman army veterans who chose to stay behind, either because they were adventurous or because they were too worn out to make it back. There is no evidence to support the notion that Greek migrants settled in the new cities in any significant numbers, which means that life in the cities was dominated more by Anatolian and Roman norms and customs than by Greek ways of life. One reason why scholars often assume that Pompey introduced cities modeled on Greek urban traditions rests on a notion that the term polis covered

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a certain Hellenic-inspired type of political organization.43 In his Politics, Aristotle made it clear that he understood the polis to be a political collective and specifically Hellenic.44 From the passage in which the philosopher compares the political abilities of Greeks with Asians and men from the north, it appears he believed that only his fellow Greeks were gifted with the necessary mixture of intelligence and spirit to be free and to surround themselves with useful political institutions (Arist. Pol. 1327b20–35). Since to Aristotle the term polis was a political community where all members of the political class ideally held similar rights, the polis would have to be a Greek phenomenon. But, as has been pointed out, it should be remembered that many Greek writers, in the Classical period and later, did not share Aristotle’s definition. Aristotle’s contemporaries or near contemporaries, writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, all use the term polis in the general sense of a civic community and all refer to non-Greek cities as poleis.45 A similar use of polis in the sense of a city is found in the writing of the geographer known by the name PseudoSkylax, who has been dated to the second century bce. In his survey of the Mediterranean coast, from Gibraltar to Thessaly, Pseudo-Skylax draws a clear distinction between Greek and non-Greek cities—both referred to as poleis— by specifying explicitly when he is referring to a Greek polis, a polis Hellenis.46 Strabo also uses polis without any ethnic or cultural connotations attached, as, for instance, in the account of Pontus, where he emphasizes when a city was Greek. In other parts of his geography he uses polis in the sense of a civic community with some sort of political organization to distinguish it from a village.47 Furthermore, Strabo’s description of Comana offers another example of how the term polis was not used as a term to describe a Greek city with certain political institutions or a specific form of constitution. Even as a temple community, Comana is referred to as a polis: “He [Archelaüs] was their commander, and master of the temple slaves who lived in the city (polis)” (Strabo 12.3.34, translation from Roller). Later (12.3.36), Strabo describes how in his day Comana was a populous city (polis) and the emporium for the people of Armenia. There is nothing to suggest that Comana would have been recognized by anyone as a Greek city with specifically Greek political and cultural institutions, but it was a sort of urban center either before Pompey’s arrival or after he handed the administrative responsibility over to the priests. A definition of polis as a state with some sort of political institution attached is also found in Strabo’s reference to Zela, which, according to the geographer, was not governed as a city (polis) under the kings but turned into one as part of Pompey’s reorganization (Strabo 12.37).48

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Based on how Greek commentators at all times used polis as a reference to a civic community, there is no reason to assume that Pompey placed much ethnic, cultural, or ideological significance on the term polis when he decided to name the new cities Pompeiopolis, Magnopolis, or Megalopolis—or for that matter that he was looking to introduce a form of constitution that was particularly Greek at its outset. The decision to name the cities after himself seems, as discussed in Chapter 1, to have been determined more by a desire to draw a parallel between Alexander’s foundations of cities in Asia and Egypt and his own urbanization in the East. Instead of focusing on the use of the term polis, where the meaning is not altogether clear, it may be more useful to discuss how the lex Pompeia fits Greek political norms. Even if in Aristotle’s thinking, the best form of government was where the citizen body was included in the decision-making process, it is equally true that Greeks lived under many different forms of government, of which far from all were democratic. Also, it has to be remembered that Aristotle drew a distinction between citizens who were capable of governing the city and citizens who were not, and that he believed that not all kinds of artisans should be included among the group of citizens who made political decisions (Arist. Pol. 1277b33–1278a40). Furthermore, from early on, minimum age and property qualifications were an integral part of Greek politics. Solon’s property qualifications, which continued to play a role in Athenian politics, and the minimum age of thirty years for boule membership demonstrate this neatly, and there is ample testimony that not every citizen was eligible to participate in all of the city’s institutions even if they enjoyed full civic rights (Arist. Ath. Pol. 30). Cyrene was one city with an oligarchic form of constitution. In an inscription dated to 322 bce, it appears that political power was divided between an assembly of 10,000 citizens over the age of thirty with wealth of 2,000 drachmai and a council of 500 over the age of fifty chosen by lot among the 10,000 for a two-year period. A gerousia of 101 life members was originally appointed by Ptolemy I and later supplied with new members chosen by and from the 10,000 as another exclusive council. The city’s daily administration was carried out by various kinds of magistrates of whom the strategoi were the most prestigious. All the magistrates had to be over the age of fifty. It is worth noting that, from what we can tell from the inscription, the form of government Pompey introduced in Pontus and Bithynia was considerably less exclusive than the constitution in Cyrene.49 Had Pompey wished to introduce a constitution where the elite would hold a privileged position or even to introduce

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a property qualification to limit access to the council, he could have done so without having to break with Greek traditions. On the other hand, democratic forms of constitution had become a widespread phenomenon across the Greek world—not least in Anatolia, Syria, and the rest of the Near East—when Alexander and his successors conquered and urbanized part of Asia. As was the case with any other form of government used by the Greeks, there were several ways in which to organize a democratic form of government, although there was a strong belief that the citizens should have access to the process by which laws and decisions were prepared. One way to define a democratic constitution is therefore to look, as S. Carlsson has done, at the average citizen’s access to political institutions and magistracies. Another indication that the constitution was democratic is the size of the councils, the frequency of assembly meetings, whether a proconsular board met before the meetings to prepare laws before sending them to the assembly, and finally whether the assemblies were given enough time to prepare before the vote.50 Such information is largely unavailable for the cities of Pontus and Bithynia. It is, however, clear that the lex Pompeia did not offer the citizens equal opportunities to participate in the decision-making process. As far as we can tell, magistracies were not open to every citizen. Augustus’s decision to lower the minimum age of minor magistracies to the age of twenty-two suggests that there was a need to widen the pool of individuals who had the means to fulfill the administrative tasks. If the cost was largely paid for by the cities’ own funds, it would have been easier to find enough candidates to fill the posts, not least because of the law that secured ex-magistrates a permanent seat on the council. That magistrates paid for the upkeep of the towns out of their own pockets in the imperial period is attested by the epigraphic material from Bithynia.51 On the other hand, all citizens over the age of thirty were eligible for the council, regardless of their social and economic status. But the grant of lifelong council membership to ex-magistrates still ensured that over time the elite would obtain a privileged position in the cities’ political life.52 Seen in that light, Pompey was not aiming at a democratic constitution when he settled the province of Bithynia and the Pontic kingdom into a province. Instead of looking to introduce a specific form of constitution or form of government based on either Greek or Roman customs, he introduced what is best understood as a practical arrangement designed to meet the challenges that followed the decision to form a civic culture in the sparsely urbanized region. The previous organization, in which the population lived in villages

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with no political influence, meant that Pompey had to supply the physical city-states and encourage a culture of political participation from scratch. It is reasonable to assume that there was a hierarchy within the villages and that some families were richer and more influential than others. It therefore seems likely that a village elite would have formed the top of the new social strata together, perhaps, with the veterans Pompey left behind and whatever privileged families—from Pontus or from one of the neighboring regions— wished to try their luck in one of the new towns. On the other hand, there was no elite in the Pontic hinterland similar to those in the well-established and independent communities in Spain and Africa, which Pompey already knew firsthand, or to those in Gallic oppida that Caesar and later Augustus turned into local governments.53 Pompey could have chosen a form of government that would have been more in line with how Latin communities were organized. The cities in Latium, which came to set the legal standards for Rome’s urban settlements in Italy and in the West, were organized on an oligarchic model, and Rome was already allowing property qualification to regulate access to the councils on the Greek mainland.54 The reason why Pompey did not choose a similar model for the cities in Pontus was not because he admired the democratic model or hoped to establish cities after the Greek fashion. A form of constitution that included a larger number of the citizens in the political process was important to ensure that the cities could grow and continue to evolve into vibrant political and administrative units. Influence on public matters would be one of the factors, together with security, law and order, and economic growth, that would encourage people to contribute to the development of the civic life that was so fundamental to the provincial administration. Also, a citizenbased form of government would be the most efficient way to break with the old organization, whereby the rural population cultivated the land of the kings and their dependents. Also, even if the constitution that Pompey introduced across the province allowed a larger share of the citizens seats on the council, the elites were still favored by the grant of lifelong council memberships to ex-magistrates. Over time, this would give the elite a still tighter control over the political process in the cities—something that may have been Pompey’s intention from the beginning. The average citizen had access to the council, though not on equal terms, and, of course, to the assemblies, but was not, as suggested by the decision to lower the minimum age for magistracies to twenty-two, eligible or wealthy enough to hold office. The constitution introduced as part of the lex Pompeia

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was not democratic. The inequalities between the elite and the average citizen were too significant for that to have been the objective. But it was the ambition to encourage a political culture in which the citizen bodies at large were allowed a share in political life, and a form of constitution in which the citizen bodies as a whole were given reasons to invest in the upkeep of the cities. Whether a city was Greek was not determined by its constitution, the names given to its political institutions, the title of its magistrates, or, for that matter, the political influence enjoyed by its citizens. What decided whether a city was Greek were its cultural institutions and the religious life and customs of its inhabitants. As time passed, the influence of Greek culture became more and more pronounced in the Pontic hinterland, but the process was slow, particularly because there were no preexisting cities or, for that matter, Greek cities in the region from which the new citizen bodies could take inspiration.

In a World Far Away from Hellas The general lack of sources until well into the imperial period constitutes a methodological problem, which makes it difficult to reconstruct the cities’ cultural and institutional framework in the first phase. The introduction of an urban culture and the need to organize the rural areas could suggest a model where Pompey primarily provided the administrative means and the most essential political institutions to ensure that assemblies and council meetings were held, that magistrates were elected, and that legal disputes were tried according to the law. The early urbanization, therefore, need not and probably did not include a large number of public buildings or a mixture of cultural institutions, such as theaters, temples, stoas, or gymnasia, institutions and buildings that were common features in a Greek civic context. However, it has to be remembered that the discussion is challenged by the issue that absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence. The lack of traces to support the construction of public buildings in stone does not necessarily mean that no public buildings were raised in the first phase after the city was founded. Buildings could have been built and disappeared; systematic surveys and excavations are few and far between, even if they are more frequent now than just a decade ago. Later studies may, therefore, reveal more vivid building activities in the cities’ early phase than suggested here. For a population where the vast majority would have a limited knowledge of Greek and Roman city life and no experience of

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local politics, it took time to acquire the knowledge and the necessary means to integrate the different Greco-Roman institutions into their everyday life. As Pompey was keen to return to Italy to collect his prize for having conquered Anatolia and much of the Near East and so reassume a central role in Roman politics, the development of the civic landscape was left to local initiatives.55 It is far from certain that the number of soldiers who remained behind was large, or that they were energetic, or healthy, let alone wealthy and knowledgeable enough to initiate and carry through a systematic formation of urban landscapes (Cass. Dio 36.50.3).56 But even if they had resources to invest in public buildings, it is not obvious that Roman veterans, in the 60s and 50s bce, would have used their own resources to inaugurate cults and temples to Greek deities or to build gymnasia, stoas, and theaters, or introduce other institutions that were Greek in origin. Furthermore, a considerable period of time would be needed before Greek institutions or Greek customs in general could spread to the new cities, let alone be established as an integrated part of the cities’ everyday life. Unlike in the case of Nicopolis at Actium, where the inhabitants were Greek, those in the populations of the new settlements were either Roman veterans or, for the most part, people from the region with a limited knowledge of Greek culture. In order for them to introduce various Greek cultural institutions, they would have had to get acquainted with and be inspired by Greek cultural practices before they could acquire the knowledge needed to introduce and establish, for example, a gymnasium or an ephebeia. The construction of temples and other public buildings was an even bigger challenge. One obstacle would be how to fund and build large and lasting structures in stone. Before that process could even start, the population in the cities had to feel the need for such buildings and then the confidence to initiate such projects, as well as the means to carry them through. While ambitions for a notable civic landscape with several significant public buildings may have been there, at least in some communities, the challenge of how to see the projects through to completion would have been considerable for any of the cities in the hinterland. From Pliny’s correspondence with Trajan, we know that public buildings and larger infrastructural projects did challenge the cities, as they required considerable resources. At the beginning of the second century ce, Pliny reports that the theater in Nicaea had used up more than 10 million sesterces. The building was still unfinished and at a stage that made Pliny wonder whether it would be better to give up the project altogether (Plin. Ep. 10.39.1–3).57

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Another failed project in Nicaea was the gymnasium that was restored and enlarged after a fire. Here, the structure is once again said to have been ill planned and to have already swallowed up considerable sums, and, judging admittedly by the opinion of one of the rival architects, Pliny thought that the foundation was perhaps not strong enough to carry the structure (Plin. Ep. 10.39.4). A similar example of how these large-scale projects were considerable challenges as late as the second century ce is described in one of Pliny’s other letters. On his arrival in Nicomedia, Pliny realizes that the attempt to supply the city with an aqueduct had failed. Trajan is informed of two unsuccessful attempts to build one, on which the city had spent more than 3.5 million sesterces. Again, the structure had to be rebuilt and Trajan was prepared to send specialists to take over the entire project (Plin. Ep. 10.37–38). If public building programs in the imperial period turned out to be a challenge in wellestablished cities in Bithynia, earlier attempts to erect public buildings of a certain scale in Pompey’s cities would have faced some of the same obstacles, even if the structures were of a more modest kind. The question of know-how was another challenge. Who in the cities of, say, Magnopolis or Megalopolis in the late 50s or 40s bce would have known how to build a stoa or a Greek temple in stone, and who would have had the means Pliny mentions with regards to Nicaea and Nicomedia? Mithridates and the previous kings did, of course, build in stone, and Pompey is said to have found the city of Eupatoria half finished—whatever that implies with respect to the cities’ urban landscapes. There is, however, a noticeable difference in the resources and expertise available to Mithridates and the opportunities or resources accessible to former villagers and veteran soldiers. It is interesting that Pliny asks Trajan to send an architect to inspect and take over the failed projects in Nicaea. The emperor brushes Pliny off with the remark that he had to find local expertise as Rome got its architects from Greece (Plin. Ep. 10.40.3). But there can be little doubt that if Pliny had been able to find the required experts locally, he would sooner have informed Trajan that he had a useful solution at hand than admit he had a problem he was unable to solve on his own.58 If competent architects were difficult to come by in the early second century ce in one of the most important cities in the province of Pontus et Bithynia, this would also have been a concern in Late Republican Pontus. Some Roman soldiers would have known how to build housing and fortifications, as well as how to organize the infrastructure in the cities they were settled in, but they did not necessarily have the expertise, means, or interest

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to build some of the public buildings that were characteristic of Greek towns, even if, after the wars in the East, they had the necessary funds or had seen such buildings with their own eyes as they traveled through Asia Minor. With little or no material remains from the cities’ early phase, it is difficult to estimate their sizes and we can only speculate on the number of people living in them. In his description of the region under the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, Strabo refers to Nicopolis as well peopled and mentions that Comana was a populous city and an important center for the people of Armenia.59 Conversely, one needs to remember that a period of more than fifty years, from the time Antony allowed the foundation of the new kingdom of Pontus in the mid-30s bce to the moment Strabo wrote his Geography, is too long a period to give any meaningful indication of how the cities developed in the early phase, or, for that matter, how well inhabited they were when Antony arrived in the East. Furthermore, it is equally true that many cultural institutions, such as theaters, cults, sanctuaries, and gymnasia, would not have needed lasting public buildings or a developed infrastructure in order to operate. It was only shortly after Pompey’s return from the East that he initiated the construction of what would be the first stone theaters in the city of Rome.60 Another issue is when and to what extent Greek became the cultural language in the hinterland cities. Judging from the epigraphic material, Greek had become the dominant language by the late first century ce. The majority of the inscriptions preserved were set up in Greek, and Greek names and terminology were, together with Roman naming practice, widely used across the region. But how quickly are we to expect this to have happened? In the first phase after the foundation, the number of Greeks or other individuals able or keen to speak Greek must have been relatively small. It has been argued by Frank that Greek settlers were invited to live in some of the more fertile parts of the region, but there is no evidence that they did in Pontus, or for that matter to suppose that Greeks migrated to Pontus in any significant or systematic way.61 As a result there were no significant Greek communities in the Pontic hinterland between the 60s and the early 30s, when Antony dissolved the Pontic part of the province, that could serve as a source of inspiration for new cities and their inhabitants. Moreover, the law to prevent individuals from holding more than one citizenship within the double province made it even less attractive for citizens in, say, Heraclea to give up their civic status there to join the citizen body in, for instance, Magnopolis or Neapolis (Plin. Ep. 114). Pompey and the Roman authorities would have insisted that the

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administrative language was Greek, which then would have promoted Greek as a common language also in a cultural setting. On the other hand, it needs to be remembered that Mithridates is said to have spoken several local tongues in order to communicate with his subjects, and Latin spoken by the Roman veterans would have dominated the communication in cities, where veterans had settled—at least in the early phase after the foundation (Aur. Vict. De Vir. 3.76.1–2).62 It should therefore also be acknowledged that there were many local languages in the region in which people would communicate long after the cities were founded, particularly outside the political and administrative context. Still, Greek was surely part of the everyday routine. On occasions when the cities had to deal with governors, military commanders, or other representatives from Rome, the means of communication would have been Greek when it was not an issue between the governor and the veterans. Members of the elite may well have started to study Greek and Greek literature, and the inhabitants of the cities may have adopted some of the customs that were characterized as Greek. What is far less certain is how deeply interest in Greek culture was rooted among the inhabitants in the first phase after the cities were founded, and it is even less obvious that Pompey would have been looking to promote Greek culture and ways of organizing civic life when he decided to settle the cities. With the lack of epigraphic material, coins, and building remains from the cities’ early phases, the evidence for whether Pompey modeled the towns on Greek urban traditions rests essentially on the account of Strabo, who offers an admittedly not very detailed survey of the hinterland. What is interesting, though, is how he as a local geographer with strong ties to his own Greek cultural background seemingly drew a clear distinction between the Greek colonies on the Anatolian Black Sea coast and the cities in the hinterland.

The Thoughts of a Local As someone who grew up in Amaseia during the first century bce, Strabo had firsthand knowledge both of Pontic geography and of the civic culture in the hinterland. By the time Strabo left Pontus to see the world, his family had already lost its elevated position in Amaseia after his maternal grandfather had betrayed Mithridates in the war against Lucullus (Strabo 12.3.33).63 The effort had not, according to Strabo, been sufficiently acknowledged by Rome, and

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Strabo’s grandfather was not, so his grandson felt, properly rewarded for the risks he took when he encouraged fifteen of Mithridates’ garrisons to revolt. This disappointment on behalf of the family and the feeling that his grandfather was let down by the Roman authorities may well have been behind Strabo’s reservations concerning Rome and Roman power and what provoked his rather critical portrait of Roman civilization as a whole.64 The clear distinction between people and cities that were Roman, Greek, or of other cultural origin is apparent throughout Strabo’s Geography, where one of the objectives is to show his readers how the world was divided into three levels of civilization: the Greeks, who enjoyed the highest stage of development; civilized barbarians, who lived with respect for laws and in fear of the gods; and the uncivilized barbarians, who spent their time and energy fighting each other.65 One of the features of the Geography is its description of how, through conquest, Rome civilized the barbarian people in the western provinces by, for instance, teaching the people in Gaul and Spain how to settle their disputes peacefully and live a life through law and order.66 Agriculture in the Pontic hinterland was already well advanced with olive, fruit, and wine production by the time Pompey defeated Mithridates, but it was Rome that brought laws and political institutions to the region as part of the urbanization of Pontus. Two interesting questions are therefore whether Strabo thought that it was Pompey and the Romans who civilized Pontus, and whether he believed Pompey’s cities to have been modeled on Greek urban traditions.67 A way to determine whether Strabo believed that the cities and their inhabitants were Greek is to compare how he describes Pompey’s towns with his description of the Greek colonies on the coast. Strabo offers no definition of what he thought it meant to be Greek or what a Greek city was, neither in his description of the cities in Pontus nor anywhere else. The closest he comes to a definition of a Greek city or of Greekness is in the account of Naples (the Italian Neapolis): “Numerous traces of Hellenic attitudes are present there [in Naples], such as gymnasia, ephebeia, phratriai, and Hellenic names, although they are now Romans. Today a sacred contest in music and gymnastics is celebrated every fifth year, lasting several days, a match for the most famous ones of Hellas” (Strabo 5.4.7; translation from Roller 2014).68 This suggests that in Strabo’s eyes Naples was strictly speaking no longer Greek, even if the life that was being lived there was still dominated by Greek customs and cultural institutions. Strabo thus seems to have had a different and much less inclusive definition of Greekness than writers such as Herodotus, Polybius, Diodorus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who focused on cultural criteria such as language, lifestyle,

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and religious practices (Hdt. 8.144.2; Polyb. 34.14; Diod. Sic. 5.6.5; Dion. Hal. 1.89–90).69 On the other hand, heritage was not enough. Naples was originally Greek but, like most of the other cities in the former Magna Graecia, it was no longer Greek even if it was one of a few cities not yet barbarized. “Today all of it [Magna Graecia]—except for Taras, Rhegion, and Neapolis—have become thoroughly barbarized, and are possessed by the Leukanians, and Brettians, and the Campanians (in name, but in fact by the Romans, as they have become Romans)” (Strabo 6.1.2; translation from Roller 2014). Although the population of Naples had become Romans, they had not become uncivilized, unlike most of the former Greek cities in southern Italy, because they lived a life that was still dominated by Greek norms. Now, in Strabo’s opinion Naples, Taras, and Rhegion were the exceptions in a part of the world where Greek culture was in decline. Naples is described as a place to which people from Rome and elsewhere could withdraw in order to relax (Strabo 5.4.7). And it may be because of its reputation as a city where Greek culture was still thriving that Strabo chose to mention some of the city’s Greek institutions. Throughout the Geography, Strabo seems to pay more attention to the history and the origin of the cities and whether they were founded or refounded by Greek colonists, Hellenic or other kings, indigenous populations, or Roman generals, than he did to the cities’ institutions and public buildings. This is what one might expect from a historian, but it shows that heritage or origin was more important to Strabo than cultural criteria, which is perhaps not all that surprising, considering his belief that the Greeks and their culture would always be superior to all other people, including, of course, the Romans. The question of heritage, the origin of the founders, and the populations that eventually ended up living in the cities were, to Strabo, what decided whether a city was Greek, Roman, or of a different cultural origin.70 This has significant implications for how he viewed the cities Pompey founded in Pontus but also affects how we can use the Geography as a source for the way the cities evolved over time, both when they were part of the double province and after they were handed over to Antony’s client rulers. Starting with the Greek colonies, Strabo begins his survey in Heraclea. Here he pays no attention to the public institutions or to the civic landscape but tells the reader that the city founded two colonies, Chersonesos and Kallatis, in the Black Sea region. He never refers explicitly to Heraclea as a Greek city, which he probably felt was needless information (Strabo 12.3.6). The next city in the account of the Pontic coast is Sinope. Strabo mentions that the city had received a Roman colony but also that it was founded by the Milesians,

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which emphasizes its Greek origin (Strabo 12.3.11). The Roman colony and the Greek community are described as two different societies that had not been united into one political unit by the time Strabo wrote his account. Strabo’s description of Sinope as a vibrant Greek community, with a beautiful agora, stoas, and a gymnasium, offers one of a few rare descriptions of traditional Greek cultural institutions. The portrait of Sinope ends with a reference to some of the city’s learned men: Diogenes the Cynic philosopher, who, according to legend, challenged Alexander the Great; a comic poet by the name Diphilos; and the historian Baton, who had written on the Persian War (Strabo 12.3.11). Strabo’s account leaves little doubt that Sinope was a Greek city, where Greek institutions, customs, and intellectual values dominated public life, at least in the Greek part of the community. However, one gets the impression that the rare references to Sinope’s public buildings, such as the gymnasium, serve to make the point that the city had not become Roman as a result of being colonized. Unlike in the case of Roman Magna Graecia, the inhabitants outside the Roman colony had not become Romans but were still in close contact with their Greek heritage. The next cities on the Black Sea coast, Amisus and Trapezous, are given much less attention. Strabo mentions that Amisus was a Milesian colony but offers no other information on the city’s institutions or the urban landscape; Trapezous is described as a Greek city, a polis Hellenis, but there are once again no references to public buildings, institutional life, learned men, or the city’s history.71 Strabo’s descriptions of the cities in the hinterland start in Armenia Minor with the characterization of the city of Nicopolis as being well populated by the author’s time (Strabo 12.3.28). Other than that, Strabo offers no information on the city or its infrastructure, agriculture, public buildings, or institutions. The statement that Nicopolis was well populated could suggest that the cities in the hinterland had experienced a demographic decline or never really caught on, which would support the notion that Pompey’s settlements never evolved into real urban communities. Yet the remark about Nicopolis’s population is a rare exception; the size of the cities’ populations, or how they developed, is not a theme to which Strabo pays much attention when he browses through the towns in the hinterland. Therefore, even if the comment on the population in Nicopolis could imply some kind of surprise, it is hardly enough to conclude that the cities had or were experiencing a general demographic decline by the time Strabo wrote his section on Anatolia’s geography. From Nicopolis, Strabo moves on to a brief description of Magnopolis. The focus here is on how Pompey founded the city near the unfinished

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Eupatoria and added a larger territory to its jurisdiction (Strabo 12.3.30). Again, there are no references to any institutions, temples, or public buildings. Diospolis is mentioned next, in passing, before Strabo turns to Zela, where he once again offers no information on the city’s institutions or public buildings (Diospolis: 12.3.31; Comana: 12.3.33–36; Zela: 12.3.37). Strabo moves on to Neapolis, where he touches on the area’s corn production but ignores the civic landscape altogether (Strabo 12.3.38). Amaseia, another of the pre-Roman centers, is treated next. The city is offered more attention as Strabo stops to describe the city’s rock-cut graves and the royal palace, and he mentions the two bridges that were built over the river Iris as well as the fortress that towered above the city (Strabo 12.3.39). Surprisingly, no attention is given to the history of Amaseia or its urban landscape, which would have been natural given that it was the first residential city of the Mithridatid kings and the home of at least a number of Greeks who, like Strabo’s family, served at the court.72 The last Pompeian city in the description of Pontus is Pompeiopolis. The account is short and focuses on the area’s mining industry. Again, there is no mention of the gymnasium or of the ephebeia that has been attested in the city’s epigraphic material (Strabo 12.3.40–41).73 There are various explanations as to why Strabo does not mention the two institutions. One is that he never visited the city, even if he did live in what was once the same province. Another is that the gymnasium was built after Strabo wrote the account of Pontus, which would fit the studies that date the gymnasium to the second century ce.74 A further possibility is that Strabo deliberately ignored Pompeiopolis’s gymnasium as a way of not admitting to the city’s Greek institutions. If that is the case, it may explain the generally superficial account of all the Pompeian cities and why no Greek institutions are mentioned at all; and it is tempting to see the brief description of the urban landscapes as a way to downplay their importance as urban and cultural centers. Unlike in the account of the colonies on the coast, there are no references to the history of Pompey’s cities and only in the case of Zela, which was not one of the new settlements, are the consequences of Antony’s reorganization treated in any detail. When compared to the descriptions of the cities on the coast, brief as they are, it is reasonable to assume that Strabo saw the cities in the hinterland as less important. Yet Strabo does not generally direct much attention to a city’s political or cultural institutions, not even when it comes to mainland Greece, where focus is mostly on the cities’ temples. Consequently, the few references

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to institutions, Greek or Roman, need not have been deliberate or politically motivated and it does not have to imply that there were no Greek institutions in Pompey’s cities when Strabo wrote the Geography. That Strabo does not mention the gymnasium in Pompeiopolis gives scope for speculation as to whether the cities in the hinterland could have hosted buildings and institutions that were Greek in origin but which he did not see or thought not worth mentioning. But even if Strabo’s light touch on the cities’ civic landscape can be explained as a lack of firsthand knowledge of how the urban landscapes were organized, it would be odd if Strabo did not know at least some of the cities better than others. The vivid description of Sinope suggests that he visited that town, and it seems only reasonable to assume that he had traveled to or through a number of the cities in the hinterland, even if he did not visit them all. If Strabo traveled from Amaseia to Sinope or to Amisus he is likely to have spent the night in Neapolis, and would have visited the city center and therefore seen the city’s highlights, including the altar to Augustus where the inhabitants had sworn the oath of loyalty to Augustus in 3 bce. Strabo claims to have visited Zela and with his own eyes seen the processions at the temples of Anaïtis and Omanus (Strabo 15.3.15). What seems more plausible is that Strabo did not see Pompey’s cities as Greek, no matter what types of public buildings they hosted. Unlike in the case of the cities at the coast, he never refers to Pompey’s cities as Greek or offers any indication that the population lived a life that was much influenced by Greek customs, cults, or institution, such as the life that was being lived in Naples or in Nicopolis at Actium. Instead he emphasizes that it was Pompey who founded the cities and that the inhabitants were settlers, which could mean both retired Roman soldiers and locals brought together from the neighboring villages. As we saw above, being Greek to Strabo was a matter of heritage and whether the inhabitants could trace their origins back to Archaic or Classical Greece. The inhabitants of Pompey’s cities were not, unlike the people in Nicopolis at Actium, Greeks who were brought together to inhabit the city and live a life in accordance with Greek traditions.75 Instead, the inhabitants in Pompey’s cities were, as mentioned earlier, Roman veterans and locals settled by Pompey and his associates, which to Strabo meant that the cities were, more than anything, Pompeian and therefore not Greek. The lack of epigraphic and archaeological data from the city’s early phase and the absence of ancient accounts of the cities’ institutions and public buildings, such as those Strabo supplies for Sinope, Nicopolis at Actium, or Naples in Italy, render it difficult to reconstruct the urban landscapes in cities

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Pompey founded or re-founded in the 60s. There is, for instance, no way of telling whether the gymnasium in Pompeiopolis dates to the early years after the foundation or to a later period when the city was back under direct Roman rule.76 What we do know is that the gymnasium found in Pompeiopolis dates to the second century ce, but that structure did not necessarily host the city’s first or for that matter its only gymnasium. It is therefore worth remembering that some of the institutions like the gymnasium did not require a specific kind of structure that would be easily recognizable in the archaeological record today, just as theaters constructed of wood could have been set up and taken down when needed. In other words, it cannot be ruled out that Greek institutions and public buildings of different kinds had already found a way into the cities and were part of the urban landscape when Strabo wrote on the geography of Pontus. But if they had, none of them left any reliable archaeological or epigraphic material behind until sometime in the late first century ce and early second century ce. What we may expect is that the cities in the hinterland—both those founded by Pompey and the centers he reorganized—developed differently from many of the other urban settlements Roman authorities planned in the East. For example, Nicopolis at Actium was, judging by the evidence, from the start intended as a city where Greek institutions were meant to stand in the foreground—even if Octavian settled some of his soldiers here on his way home from the East. The inhabitants of Nicopolis were brought together from the neighboring centers and Octavian built a temple to Apollo and founded a sacred festival in honor of Apollo with music and gymnastic contests to be held every fifth year (Strabo 7.7.6; Cass. Dio 51.1.2–3; Paus. 7.18.8–9, 5.23.3, 10.38.4; Suet. Aug. 18.2). Pliny the Elder and Tacitus describe Nicopolis as a colony, which has led to some speculation as to whether the city hosted a colony of Roman veterans alongside the Greek community (Plin. NH 4.5; Tac. Ann. 6.5.10).77 L. Ruscu points to an inscription found in the Macedonian city Serrhae, where an Octavius Secundus Curibus is honored with the right to carry the ornamenta of the duoviri in several colonies, including Nicopolis.78 Ruscu is right in saying that the inscription suggests that Nicopolis at some stage had colonial status, just as N. Purcell has pointed out that the city of Nicopolis had much in common with other Roman colonies in the region, not least Patrae, and that the Romans were already well represented in Epirus by the time Nicopolis was founded. The city of Butrint to the north had been a Roman colony since about 44 bce and wealthy Romans such as Cicero’s friend Atticus owned

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both land and villas in the region, just as the centuriation of the land around Nicopolis fits with the practice of colonial settlements.79 More recently, both C. H. Lange and W. Bowden have suggested that the general lack of references to Nicopolis’s colonial status in the epigraphic and numismatic material suggests that Nicopolis did not host a community of Romans with the status of a colony. Given Strabo’s descriptions of the colonies in Heraclea and Sinope, it seems altogether unlikely that he would have failed to mention the presence of a double community in Nicopolis or for some reason have decided not to mention that a colony had been settled in Octavian’s prestigious victory city. Pliny the Elder and Tacitus could have been mistaken.80 It is also possible that Pliny the Elder, as well as Tacitus, may have referred to the settlement of soldiers or Roman civilians, paying less attention to whether Nicopolis carried formal status as a Roman colony. Another option is that Nicopolis obtained colonial status later, after Strabo wrote the account, but the lack of inscriptions, apart from the one found in Macedonia, and the absence of coins with references to a colony at Actium remain a problem. What is interesting in this context is that Octavian chose to introduce a number of Greek institutions, apparently from the beginning, and so decided to orient the city toward Greek cultural norms and customs. The triumvir may have settled soldiers in the new city, but more importantly for this discussion he promoted Greek institutions actively right from its foundation. Compared to the cities in western Asia Minor, the inhabitants of the Pompeian towns were exposed to different cultural dynamics than the inhabitants of cities in Bithynia, Asia, or the Greek mainland. While the Greek civic communities accommodated influence from Rome and Roman rule into an already well-established urban culture, Greek institutions, customs, and ways of life were not, judging by the evidence, part of urban life in Pompey’s cities until well into the imperial period.81 Greek advisors were an integrated part of the Pontic court and they must therefore have been present in the region at least in some numbers, but even if they and the Greek cities on the Black Sea coast could serve as a source of inspiration for how to organize a civic community or an urban landscape, there must be a limit both to the degree of influence from the Greek cities and to how quickly such influence would materialize in the hinterland.82 One obstacle was the restricted mobility of people in the region, along with limited knowledge in the hinterland of how life was lived in the Greek colonies on the coast or, for that matter, in the Bithynian cities. People in the hinterland towns did, of course, travel to the colonies and to cities in Bithynia

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and elsewhere, but back home they would still have to find the support and the means to introduce new institutions and to erect public buildings such as theaters or gymnasia, just as they would need both the knowledge and resources to operate and sustain the activities of, say, an ephebeia or Greek athletic traditions in a context where the population had no or only a limited knowledge of Greek customs or urban life as a whole. On the other hand, it was Pompey’s intention to establish viable civic communities in Pontus to carry out Rome’s administrative needs and to stand as a symbol of his achievements in the East. As the cities all continued to exist well into the Late Roman period, they must have started to develop sometime during the Late Republic with private housing, cult places, and areas where the civic population could assemble. As a consequence of the challenges discussed above, it is only reasonable to assume that this process was slow and need not have required the construction of large-scale public buildings, and there is nothing in the sources to suggest that Pompey would have made the same choices in his cities as Octavian did for Nicopolis some thirty years later. There is no evidence to support the notion that Pompey was looking to Hellenize Roman Pontus by introducing a form of Greek civic culture, and there is nothing in the epigraphic or archaeological material to suggest that Pompey modeled the cities after a specific pattern or introduced a number of specific cultural institutions in the cities. With the influence of Greek culture being relatively limited, the cities’ first phases were dominated by the institutions and legal norms introduced when Pompey organized the province. The population is likely to have spoken one or some of the many languages that flourished in the region, and local cults dominated the religious landscape in the cities and the countryside.83 Additionally, the influence of Roman veterans must have been noted in the cities in which they settled. Latin would have been dominant there, and there is evidence to suggest that a Roman calendar was introduced in Pompeiopolis.84 The standardization that the lex Pompeia provided across the new province introduced a common set of rules for how political life was to be organized; and Roman laws set the framework for how legal cases, in which Roman citizens took part, were to be settled. The arrival of Roman citizens and the spread of Roman legal status locally, even if it is likely to have been a slow process, provided from the outset a social and legal framework. Although Pompey did not introduce property qualification for council membership, the constitutions still promoted a hierarchy within the cities that was Roman in origin. In this light, it is worth considering whether Rome and Roman generals did

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indeed promote Greek culture as one of the means to civilize the rural, scarcely urbanized part of Anatolia and the Near East, as this is still a dominant view in modern scholarship. The settlements’ development into autonomous city-states was challenged less than thirty years later when Antony took over the Roman East after the Battle of Philippi. His leading role in the victory against Caesar’s murderers and his seniority to Octavian allowed him to acquire the East and resume Caesar’s campaign against Parthia (Cass. Dio 48.35.1). Once again, the cities in Pontus were pieces in a larger puzzle and part of a struggle to win control over the empire and Roman politics as a whole.

Antony’s Short-Term Plans for Pontus and the East It has been argued that the reasons why Antony decided to separate the Pontic hinterland from Bithynia and distribute the region among local dynasts were a consequence of the moderate level of development in the cities. That was either because such development was never a priority for Rome or because, for all sorts of practical and structural reasons, the cities never really evolved into a viable civic culture in a region accustomed to the rule of oriental monarchs. Accordingly, Pompey’s attempt to urbanize the hinterland is often believed to have failed and the people in the region are judged to have been unprepared for urban life, something that gave Antony little reason to keep Pontus as a province.85 Other scholars, such as R. Syme and later C. Marek, have argued that the decision to dissolve Pompey’s arrangements in the East was a natural and reasonable thing to do at a time when the growth of the empire was placing the Roman state and the oligarchic elite under considerable pressure.86 Antony’s decision to redistribute much of Anatolia and the Near East between local rulers and dynasts is thus believed to have been well in line with Roman practice and regarded as a bold but mature and altogether necessary attempt to find a long-term solution to Rome’s control over the East.87 Syme argues that Antony’s reorganization of the East caused little concern among the political establishment in the capital, where the reorganization of kings and kingdoms would not have been seen as unusual. Antony only gave up regions that were either newly acquired or unattractive to the Romans, and Syme maintains that the decision was met with understanding in political circles in Rome.88 The provinces of Pontus and Syria had been in place for fewer than thirty years, and the province of Cilicia was said to have lost its

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function after the threat of pirates had been considerably reduced.89 In other words, what Antony is seen to have done is essentially to rationalize Rome’s control over the East by freeing Rome from the trouble of governing largely useless, unsettled, or uncivilized territories that were accustomed to the rule of kings and dynasts anyway and were therefore largely incompatible with the city-based form of administration that Rome saw as an indispensable element in its provincial administration.90 A more recent approach to the dissolution of Roman Pontus is that Antony came to realize that Mithridates’ former kingdom was not ready for Roman rule some thirty-odd years after Pompey’s invasion. Pharnaces II’s invasion of Pontus and the damage he was able to inflict on the province before Caesar defeated him at Zela in 47 was a reminder that Rome had not won the peace.91 Lately, Bekker-Nielsen has described the abandonment of Roman Pontus as an element of divide and rule. By giving local dynasts the responsibility to manage and protect different territories, Antony prevented one dynast from being able to gather the entire region behind him in an attack on Rome’s or Antony’s interests in the region.92 Syme’s attempt to rationalize the political and strategic decisions made by Antony is a well-known and justified tendency throughout the first half of his Roman Revolution.93 Antony’s reputation and his strategic choices have suffered from the negative tradition following Octavian’s victory. The portrait offered by the sources of the first and natural leader of the triumviri as incompetent and under the spell of Cleopatra is of little value as a source for Antony’s administrative and political skills and his strategies for the East.94 It is no doubt true that the slowly developing civic structure in Roman Pontus, with a local administration and a political culture still in its initial phase, was of little use to Antony from a short-term perspective. In the present situation he was looking for stability and local support in the coming war against Parthia (App. BCiv. 5.75). Pontus’s status as a former enemy, re-invaded not too long ago by a son of Mithridates, would have been another of Antony’s concerns, just as Parthia’s aggression against Syria and Judaea during the civil war between the triumvirs and Caesar’s murderers served as a reminder that Rome’s interests in the region would have to be upheld with military force or by defeating Parthia. Another more personal reason why Antony abandoned Roman Pontus and handed its cities to local dynasts is tied to the competition between the triumvirs for the supreme power. After Philippi, Antony assumed an informal role as leader of the three men, and the East with the campaign against

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Parthia offered him a chance to win the power struggle against Octavian and thus dominate Roman politics for the foreseeable future. If victorious in the war against Parthia, Antony would have exceeded all of his contemporaries in wealth and military prestige, and he would have returned to Rome with considerable political capital as the new natural leader figure of Roman politics. Unlike the time when Pompey arrived in Rome after having placed Anatolia and much of the Near East under the sphere of Roman control, there would be no or very little opposition in the Senate strong enough to prevent Antony from getting his way, many of the critics having already been removed either during the proscriptions in 43 or in the war against Brutus and Cassius (Cass. Dio 47.3–6; App. BCiv. 4.5–11).95 If he wanted it, there would have been little to prevent him from following Caesar’s example and letting the people elect him dictator, or he would have been able to use the tribunes and the assembly in much the same fashion as Pompey and Caesar had done earlier.96 Octavian, for his part, could not have done much to prevent Antony from assuming a leading role in Roman politics. He was, of course, Caesar’s heir and enjoyed the support of the dictator’s veterans—but only up to a point. After Philippi, several of the veterans whom Octavian raised in the first month after Caesar’s death would have been settled in Italy as part of the colonization in 42–41 and would be ten years older.97 The unpleasant task of settling the veterans on Italian soil had weakened the position of the young triumvir not only in Rome, where the flow of corn was challenged by the conflict between Octavian; Antony’s wife, Fulvia; and his brother Lucius Antonius, and by the threat from Sextus Pompeius, but also in Italy, where the landowners protested against the colonization (App. BCiv. 5.13–14).98 In a war against an Antonius Parthicus, Octavian would soon have found himself in a difficult situation. He would not have had nearly the same economic resources as someone with close ties to Egypt who had just conquered or forced Parthia to accept a peace agreement favorable to Antony. It also would be difficult to justify any hostile acts against who would then be Rome’s most successful champion of the East of all time—a Roman Alexander—who had just placed one of the more renowned kingdoms under Roman domination. Octavian’s troubles in Italy could easily turn out to be an obstacle and not give him the outlet he needed to wage a new civil war against an enemy who could not be framed as a murderer or as an enemy of the state. Furthermore, in the hope that Antony would ease their burdens in return for their support, the Italian cities would have been tempted to support the returning general if it should come to a war between the triumviri.

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It is by no means obvious that Antony was behind the attempt to obstruct the settlement of veterans. Fulvia and Lucius Antonius may well have acted on their own initiative when trying their best to prevent Octavian from establishing a strong base among the veterans in Italy and so might have been looking out for Antony’s interests in his absence. Yet the battle between Octavian and Antony’s wife and brother would have complicated the relationship between the two triumvirs even further and increased both the hatred and the mistrust between them.99 In light of the above, it is in the hope of conquering Parthia and winning power over Rome that we are to interpret Antony’s activities in the East. On his arrival in Athens in 42, Antony must have been full of confidence. After having lost the first test of strength at Mutina, where he was forced to flee into Gaul and wait for Octavian’s invitation to form an alliance against Caesar’s murderers, he was now, after his leading role in the victory at Philippi, the undisputed leader of the three and also the one to carry out Caesar’s campaign against Parthia. The coming war against a still stronger Parthia was a considerable task, even for a general with a strong mandate from the political elite in Rome. For Antony the situation was different. Not only could he not count on Octavian’s support, he would have to factor in that his younger colleague would do whatever was in his power to prevent a victory that would widen the gap between the two even further. One way forward would be to involve local forces in both the defense and the administration of the region and, equally importantly, reduce Rome’s military and administrative obligations in the region to a minimum, which would free up troops and resources for the coming war against Parthia and perhaps a new civil war against Caesar’s heir.100 Shortly after his arrival in the East, Antony began rearranging the power structures there, removing some of the local rulers while redistributing territories, cities, and kingdoms to dynasts of his own choosing.101 In Bithynia, Antony gave the city of Prusias ad Mare to Muse, the granddaughter of Mithridates VI, presumably sometime in 42 when he visited Bithynia just after his arrival in Asia Minor.102 While the Bithynian part of the double province was kept largely as it was, Pontus, on the other hand, was entirely remodeled. In Heraclea, the nonRoman part of the town was given to the tyrant Adiatorix, son of the Galatian tetrarch Domnecleius. Again, the most likely date for that arrangement is sometime shortly after Antony’s arrival in Asia Minor when he traveled through the Anatolian inland.103 According to Strabo, the arrangement in Heraclea ended fatally when Adiatorix killed the Roman colonists in the

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city just prior to the outbreak of the civil war, allegedly in accordance with Antony (Strabo 12.3.6). Many of the other arrangements should probably also be ascribed to the same period. Strabo notes how, at the other end of the Pontic coast, Antony handed the city of Amisus over to the rule of kings and mentions that the tyrant Straton neglected the town. It is unclear whether Straton counted as one of the kings or whether he had replaced them later on, or whether Amisus was added to the kingdom of Pontus (Strabo 12.3.14).104 It is, however, interesting to note that at some stage the city was apparently singled out and ruled in its own right, perhaps with a territory that may have included the city of Sidene (App. BCiv. 5.75).105 The reorganization of the eastern part of Pontus and Armenia Minor created a new Pontic kingdom in 37 or 36. The first king to rule was Darius, a grandson of Mithridates VI and the last member of the Pontic dynasty. Darius was soon replaced by Polemon, son of the Laodicean rhetor Zenon, who was first given Cilicia but moved up the ranks after his support of Antony’s invasion of Armenia. The new Pontic kingdom was quickly expanded from western Armenia Minor, Pharnakeia, and Trapezous on the coast to include all of Armenia Minor and the eastern part of the former province, including the cities Nicopolis, Diospolis, and Magnopolis.106 A part of the city Zela was placed under the rule of Comana, and Megalopolis was handed over to Ateporix, a dynast of Galatian origin who seems to have shared the territory of Zela with the temple community of Comana (Strabo 12.3.37). According to Strabo, Queen Pythodoris later ruled both Zela and Megalopolis and was still in power by the time Strabo wrote the part on Pontic geography, and she was, at least implicitly, given some of the credit for the region’s prosperity (Strabo 12.3.37).107 In the Paphlagonian part of Pontus, Pompeiopolis and perhaps also Neapolis on the other side of the river Halys, were handed over to Castor II in around 40 bce; he later passed the kingdom on to his son Deiotaus. The latter ruled as the last of the Paphlagonian kings until 6 bce, when Augustus added Paphlagonia as an eparchy to the province of Galatia and placed the region directly under Roman rule (Strabo 12.3.41; Cass. Dio 48.33.5).108 Another key factor behind Antony’s reorganization of the East was the hostility between the two triumvirs that went all the way back to Octavian’s first arrival in Rome and to the fighting at first Mutina and later Perusia, where Octavian would have been unsure of the role Antony played in the resistance against the colonization of the Italian cities. The growing tension between

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Antony and Octavian and the latter’s ever tighter control over Rome, Italy, and the West must have been a matter of considerable concern to Antony even if he did have the upper hand after Philippi and even if peace was restored between the two when the soldiers refused to fight at Brundisium.109 Instead, efforts were made on both sides to wear the other down, as when Antony allied with Sextus Pompeius or when Octavian refused to supply the troops he had promised Antony in return for the ships he got from Antony to finally defeat Sextus shortly before the invasion of Parthia failed (Cass. Dio 48.14–15; App. BCiv. 5.92; Plut. Ant. 35).110 The war between the triumvirs was not unavoidable. Few wars are, particularly not after the two armies had already refused to fight each other at Brundisium. Engaging another Roman commander was no easy task. The moral, social, and political implications were considerable, particularly for the one who made the first move. All wars, but particularly civil wars, had to be justified and the general needed to secure support from the political elite either before the war or shortly after the victory. On the other hand, as the relationship between Antony and Octavian grew more and more tense, a war to settle their differences was always a risk that needed to be factored in. After a century of political unrest and several battles in which Roman soldiers stood on both sides, full-scale war between Roman armies was one way to solve political differences. As the one who was away from Rome with no reliable reinforcement of Roman soldiers, Antony may quickly have realized that his fighting capacity had to rely on the strength of local dynasts both to defend his and Rome’s interests in the region and to be in a coming war with Octavian. That this was no perfect strategy is underlined in the Parthian campaign, when the Armenian king Artavasdes first failed to protect the train of Antony’s army and then withdrew to safety, leaving Antony behind without sufficient supplies.111 Artavasdes was later punished when Antony invaded Armenia and turned the kingdom into a province. The lack of loyalty of one of his clients meant that Antony had to take over one of the larger states in the region to ensure enough stability for him to wage war on Parthia, something he never got around to doing. Still, the problems with Artavasdes did not alter the fact that Antony had little choice other than to rest his military power and his organization of the East on local rulers, of whom some by nature would be more loyal than others.112 In this light, there is much to suggest that Antony’s reorganization of Anatolia was therefore determined by personal relationships and intended to

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leave the administrative and military responsibility in the hands of his clients. By dividing the East into political units ruled by kings, tyrants, priests, or tetrarchs, Antony was able to free up as many of his own forces as possible and, as pointed out by Bekker-Nielsen, protect himself against riots from ambitious local dynasts. He could also call in military assistance from his client rulers for war against Parthia or in the event that he would have to fight Octavian later on.113 That the client rulers understood what was expected of them is suggested by the personal contribution of Polemon in the takeover of Armenia and the fact that several of Antony’s clients were ready to join him at the battle of Actium (Cass. Dio 50.13.8; Plut. Ant. 61). The change of sides by some of Antony’s most trusted clients just prior to the events at Actium should not too readily be seen as a basic fault in the setup but rather as Antony’s inability to keep his supporters behind him when the political situation in Rome started to change (Plut. Ant. 63). Strabo, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio all comment on Antony’s reorganization of the East, but they do not mention the cities’ stage of development as a factor or blame the Roman administration for being inadequate. Instead, the few sporadic comments support the impression that Antony was gathering the East behind him for the war against Parthia and to prepare himself for civil war should Octavian make a move on the East or try to insert himself as some form of sole ruler in Rome. A way for Antony to ensure that kind of support would be by offering land and status to men whose future would then be closely tied to his success. That it was no easy task to be on the losing side is demonstrated by the appearance of some of Antony’s clients in Octavian’s triumph in 29 bce (Cass. Dio 51.2.1–2). Others, such as Amyntas of Galatia, who did manage to change sides, were too big to fail, while others again, such as Polemon of Pontus, made the case for why Octavian would want to keep them as his clients. But such gestures could not be expected, nor could the outcome of the war be predicted, which meant that they would be better off supporting their patron. Several aspects of Antony’s administrative choices seem not to have been geared toward a long-term settlement of the East; nor were they arbitrary. The decision to hand over Prusias ad Mare, Heraclea, and Amisus would not have eased the administrative pressure in Bithynia much. All three cities were, as far as we know, well-established communities. Prusias ad Mare belonged to the Bithynian part of the province, which as a whole underwent fewer changes. The city was the ancestral home of the Mithridatic dynasty and there may have been nostalgic reasons to accommodate Mithridates’ descendants, who

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would still enjoy some support in the region. The decision to place a tyrant in Heraclea seems irrational from an administrative point of view, as it would introduce a system that was considerably different from the one that applied in the city’s Roman colony. That the transfer of Heraclea and Amisus to local rulers was not part of a strategy to facilitate Rome’s administrative obligations is further suggested by the decision to keep both Sinope and Amastris as part of the province, which left much of the Pontic coast the responsibility of the Roman authorities anyway. The reorganization of the East confirms the picture of a plan designed to ensure powerful friendships. It is difficult to see how the decision to transfer Phoenicia, Coele-Syria, Cyprus, and parts of Cilicia, Judaea, and Arabia Nabataea to Cleopatra and her sons, including Ptolemy who was still a young boy, was in the best interests of the Roman people. Syria was a Roman province characterized as rich and fertile. If our sources have it right that Antony gave up most of the Near East to Cleopatra and her family, it must have raised eyebrows and fear among his associates in Rome, as is indicated by Cassius Dio’s remarks on how Antony’s supporters did not read out the order from Antony to carry out the transaction (Cass. Dio 49.41.4). The decision to distribute the land to Egypt was criticized in Rome (Plut. Ant. 54–55). Admittedly, neither Dio nor Plutarch had the intention of giving a fair account of Antony’s policies for Egypt, and both write within the anti-Antonine tradition; nevertheless, it is very likely that the decision to allocate a large share of the East, including the Roman provinces, to the Egyptian crown was met by opposition. If Egypt were to gain territorial domains of this size, it would considerably strengthen the kingdom’s position in the region, making it one of the richest powers in the East. But that served Antony’s short-term purpose to perfection. When victorious in the war against Parthia and in the coming settlement of affairs with Octavian, Antony could assume control over Rome and leave Egypt and the better part of the East in the hands of his family. Whether Antony was looking to assume sole rule in the way Octavian ultimately did is beside the point—he would still be by far Rome’s wealthiest and most powerful man for the foreseeable future and likely to enjoy considerable popular support. Cassius Dio’s impression, of a man whose love for his manipulative and exotic mistress made him lose control over himself and his part of the Roman world, is either a product of Augustan propaganda, of Dio’s own belief, or of a combination of the two. It is surely more complicated and also likely to be wrong. This said, the rearrangement of the East is not in any obvious way a judicious attempt to find a long-term solution to Roman rule there. For that

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to have been the case, one would think Antony would be looking for a form of organization in which the client kingdoms were able to balance each other to ensure that no one king was much stronger than the others. But with part of Cilicia, Cyprus, Phoenicia, and Arabia Nabataea added to its kingdom, Egypt would be considerably stronger than before with the potential to challenge Rome’s interests, particularly on a regional level, in much the same way as Mithridates VI had managed to do in the north. Even if Antony’s redefinition of the empire’s borders or the domains of the client rulers was not always logical from an administrative point of view, his rearrangement of the East as a whole was not arbitrary. Furthermore, one would think that a long-term solution to Rome’s activities in the East would have to include some form of regular or regulated taxation, which would require that some of the conquered areas be turned into provinces. To establish provinces across the East may well have been Antony’s long-term ambition. The decision to establish a province in Armenia suggests that Antony had plans in that direction, but at that moment, in the mid-30s, he lacked both the resources and the military and political stability to carry out a long-lasting reorganization of the East. What he needed more than anything else was some sort of solution to the problem of Parthia, which once again had proved stronger than Rome and its generals had anticipated. As almost the entire East was reorganized at some stage between 41 and 31 bce, it is not evident that Roman Pontus was given up because Pompey’s settlements were struggling to catch on. Both Cilicia and Syria were dissolved and placed under the control of client rulers. Another more reasonable explanation for why most of Pontus was abandoned is the size of the province and cultural differences, for instance, between Sinope and Zela or Amisus and Pompeiopolis. It is also noticeable that Pontus was never reestablished in its original form when Augustus and later emperors placed the region back under the jurisdiction of the provinces Galatia and Cappadocia. What seems reasonably certain is that Pompey’s cities would have experienced considerable administrative and legal changes after the province was dissolved. A likely scenario is that cities lost their autonomous status when handed over to Antony’s clients, but it should also be noted that the circumstances would have differed from city to city. It may well have been the case that some of the new rulers would have allowed the cities, or some of them, to govern their own affairs; and some of the dynasts may have followed a Hellenic tradition of leaving the local administration to the civic communities. With his

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Greek background, Polemon could have chosen such a model for Nicopolis and the other cities in his kingdom. But there is no way of knowing whether he did, or whether Darius, for that matter, had already abolished the cities’ constitution and political institutions by the time of Polemon’s nomination. Other cities certainly lost their autonomy and their political institutions when the province was dissolved. In Zela the citizens must have lost their political rights and presumably also at least some of their land when the city was placed under the jurisdiction of Comana, leaving Zela with little else than the temple to Anaïtis. The loss of civic rights seems also to have been the consequence in Amisus when the city was handed over to the tyrant Straton; and likewise in Heraclea, where another tyrant, Adiatorix, was given the non-Roman part of the city.114 In Neapolis and Pompeiopolis some sort of locally managed administration may have continued, as the Galatian rulers would have needed a form of local government to oversee the territories. Here, the cities’ political institutions could very well have carried on, not least because it was simpler. While we should make room for the idea that some kind of local government did continue, at least in some of the cities, and that citizens had some say in the decision-making process on a local level, it is also evident that Antony’s dissolution of Roman Pontus had considerable legal and social implications for all the cities involved. A number of the laws in the lex Pompeia may have carried on in some of the cities, such as those concerning minimum ages, but Pompey’s code for Pontus and Bithynia no longer applied as the legal foundation in the cities outside the empire’s borders. Some of the client rulers may have chosen to continue a locally based government, but the citizens’ right to sit on the council as they reached a certain age and to exercise influence in the political process was no longer protected by the authority of provincial law. Instead, it was the client rulers and the people around them who set the standards for civic government and the kind of influence that the citizens could expect. On a more personal level, as the city was no longer part of the Roman empire, Roman law did not apply, and Roman citizens would no longer enjoy privileged legal status. There were, no doubt, still social and political hierarchies in the cities and it is predictable that some of the members of the previous elites with Roman citizenship would have assumed a central position in the new political and social constellations. But, as in the case of political rights, the legal and social status that Roman citizens enjoyed would not be protected by law, but would have to be negotiated case by case and from person to person with the new

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rulers and their representatives. Whether the loss of legal status and the protection Roman law offered its citizens encouraged those with Roman status to leave their cities is, however, far less certain. The financial means of the local elite in the Pontic hinterland would have been tied up in landholdings and livestock, which would have been difficult to sell at market value at a time when several families were looking to sell their property in order to leave the city. Also, it would have been difficult to start a new life in another city where one could expect the land for sale to be limited and perhaps sold within the seller’s own network and prices to be high, particularly if a city experienced a migration of people who hoped to start a new life and to buy property that would allow them to maintain a certain position in their new hometowns. The best option for most members of the elite in the hinterland would have been to stay in their cities and work out an agreement with the new rulers, in whose interests it would be to maintain a level of productivity. There was no doubt space enough in most of the vast territories the cities had been assigned, but the loss of land in which labor and economic resources had been invested would have been a considerable challenge to any family’s economy, status, and future existence. As suggested by how the cities continued to exist in the imperial period, Pompey’s towns carried on as urban centers with populations of some size and a form of civic infrastructure, even after the Pontic part of the province had been dissolved. But the years under the client rulers meant that the cities developed differently—politically as well as culturally—than they would have done had they remained part of a Roman province. One of the issues at stake is what kinds of cities they were. Over the following centuries Greek influence became more and more apparent. Whether the influence of Greek culture had already started to crystallize by the time the cities were founded, during the reign of the Greek client rulers—when a king such as Polemon may have promoted Greek ways of living—or after the cities were once again part of the empire, is the focus of Chapter 3. While Pompey’s cities did not look Greek to Strabo in the early first century ce, the influence from Greek culture became more and more apparent in the years to come. Roman and Greek institutions gradually found their way into the hinterland cities in a parallel pattern over a relatively restricted period of time. Unlike in many other cities in the East, Greek culture did not dominate the cities’ institutional landscape or the way the population lived at the time Rome conquered the area. Instead, influence from Greek institutions and

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Greek culture in general was felt after, probably long after, their foundation. By that time, Roman authorities had already introduced a number of significant Roman institutions, such as citizenship, Roman laws, and the economic and legal privileges that followed Roman rights. The following chapter focuses on the institutions that formed the cities, their people, and the civic landscapes. As Roman authorities took a leading role in the cities’ early phase, it is reasonable to start with one of the most important Roman institutions: citizenship.

Chapter 3

Introducing Civic Life

Owing to the nature of the evidence, concrete information about how urban landscapes in Pontus developed is limited until well into the High Empire, when epigraphic material, coins, and material remains become more available. The types of public buildings that were being put up in the early phase and the kinds of cultural and political institutions that were in place in the first century ce when the cities were back under direct Roman rule are largely impossible to recover. As discussed in Chapter 2, public buildings with various political and cultural purposes would have been established and sanctuaries for the worship of rulers and local as well as foreign deities would have been part of the urban landscape both in the Late Republican period and in the Early Empire. Also, even if there is no concrete evidence, it is certainly to be expected that Roman baths, in one form or other, and different kinds of entertainment, such as animal hunts and gladiator games, had found a way into the cities before the moment when we start to have more solid evidence for life in the cities.1 The following discussion focuses on the institutions that formed the cities’ urban landscapes, and it considers the kinds of memberships these institutions made available to those living in the region and their ties to what might be described as Roman, Greek, and indigenous groups and communities. As discussed in the previous chapter, the civic culture in Roman Pontus was more multifaceted than that of the cities in western Asia Minor, where at the onset of Roman rule Greek culture had dominated urban life for several centuries. Furthermore, because it was Pompey who founded the cities, various kinds of Roman institutions and Anatolian languages, cults, and customs would have settled into the cities in a process parallel with Greek cults and other cultural

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institutions. Unlike in the cities in Asia and Bithynia, where the influence of Rome had to be factored into already well-established civic communities in which Greek norms and customs dominated the institutional and cultural landscape by the time the Attalid and Bithynian kings left their kingdoms to the Romans, Pompey’s settlements developed differently precisely because Roman institutions, laws, and habits were not introduced in to civic communities that were already Hellenized and where Greek norms and traditions were already well-established parts of people’s everyday lives. One important question in what follows is therefore not only whether a given institution was oriented toward Greek, Roman, or indigenous customs and values, but also what impact these institutions had on people’s lives and in what way someone’s membership or lack of membership for one of these institutions decided how that person would define himself and be perceived by others. Some of the institutions, such as the imperial cults and the organization of the koina, the supra-civic fora that represented a province or a people, were rooted in Greek political thinking. But as we shall see in the following, Rome and the emperor played a major role in deciding both the contents and functions of these institutions, which make emperor worship and the koinon just as or perhaps more Roman than Greek. It is unclear when koina were introduced in what was once Roman Pontus, but there is much to suggest that the first koinon dates to the imperial period. Emperor worship, on the other hand, was part of the religious and political landscape, at least in the city of Neapolis, from as early as the late first century bce. Whether the worship of Augustus was organized along the lines of a Hellenistic ruler cult or as an institution for which Rome showed the way in organizing emperor worship is relevant for our understanding of the cultural diversity of the cities’ institutional landscape. Other institutions, such as the theaters in Pompeiopolis and Zela, the gymnasia in Sebastopolis and Pompeiopolis, and the various cults to Greek deities, further add to the picture of a city culture in which Greek influence was strongly felt, and so lend support to the notion among scholars that Pompey’s urbanization of the region could have been a result of a deliberate attempt to found the cities on Greek traditions. But, as discussed in Chapter 2, the influence of Greek urban culture seems to have been modest in the cities’ early phase and it may well be into the imperial period before Greek institutions such as the gymnasium became a widespread part of the urban landscape. From as early as the fourth century bce the habit of offering divine honors to rulers was one of the political tools Greek elites used when a city or a group of

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cities negotiated with new powers. In the case of emperor worship, what matters in this context is not whether a ruler cult was already a well-established phenomenon across the Greek world but how it was organized under Roman rule and the impact it had on Roman politics both in the provincial communities and in relations between the cities in a province and between Rome and the emperor on the one side and the individual cities on the other.2 In that sense, even if the ruler cult was an established Greek negotiation tactic and had been for centuries before the accession of Augustus, emperor worship, as it was organized in the Pontic hinterland, was a Roman institution, not least because the inauguration of cults to the emperors seems to have predated the moment when influence from Greek culture would have had a substantial impact on life in the cities. It was not the presence of a gymnasium, the pleasure of a hot bath, or the opportunity to enjoy an exciting fight between hunters and exotic animals that alone determined whether people in a given city would define themselves as Greek, Roman, or, as in the case of Pompeiopolis, Paphlagonian. As we shall see in Chapter 4, a regular at the gymnasium in Pompeiopolis could have defined himself as Roman and so as a member of the collectivity of Romans, even if Greek norms and customs were an important part of his everyday life. But he could also, at the same time and without contradiction in terms, have been proud of his and his ancestors’ Paphlagonian origin. One institution with a particularly strong impact on the status of its members was Roman citizenship, arguably one of the most exclusive groups that people in a Roman province could belong to.

Being Roman Roman citizenship ensured holders a number of legal privileges that would distinguish the privileged few from the rest of the population. It is important not to exaggerate the number of individuals with Roman rights, particularly in the cities’ early phase. As argued by M. Lavan, it is unlikely that the number of individuals with Roman citizenship surpassed more than one-third of the population in any given province in the High Empire, and it is reasonable to assume that the number would have been considerably lower in the East.3 Furthermore, there is no evidence to indicate that communities as a whole were offered Roman rights in the eastern provinces. On one hand, local magistrates

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could still have been granted Roman citizenship in a more regular fashion on their election if the cities were raised to the rank of titular colonies.4 On the other hand, the particular circumstances surrounding the settlement of the cities and the lack of an already-existing urban tradition meant that the Roman veterans Pompey left behind, no matter whether they were few or many, would have set a distinctive mark both on how the communities were organized and on how life was lived in the cities. As pointed out by Cicero in his Pro Balbo, the law required Romans who wanted citizenship in another city to give up their Roman citizenship (Cic. Balb. 28–29). As discussed in Chapter 2, however, the law is not likely to have applied in Roman Pontus. Hirtius’s remark about how Roman citizens stood out as a group suggests that by the time Pharnaces attacked the province in 49, Pompey’s veterans and their descendants held citizenship in the cities in which they lived.5 Instead, what seems to have been the case is that the Roman veterans carried Roman citizenship together with civic rights in their new hometowns to encourage them to stay behind and commit themselves to developing the new cities. Because there was no preexisting civic culture or well-established local elite with ideas and knowledge of how to organize a local government that would meet Greco-Roman standards, the veterans and other Roman citizens in the region assumed, right from the start, a privileged position in the towns. One of the most important benefits of being a Roman citizen in the provincial communities was the rights offered under the protection of Roman law even if many Romans would have lived under non-Roman legal systems when staying in non-Roman communities.6 Roman citizens still enjoyed a number of legal and financial privileges, such as the rights to conduct legal contracts, own Roman land, marry Roman citizens, avoid torture, and appeal against death sentences. How quickly and to what extent Roman citizenship spread within the cities in Roman Pontus in the last years of the Late Republic would depend on the number of Romans in the individual cities. Where Roman veterans settled in larger groups, Roman rights would have spread when passed on from one generation to the next or when Roman masters freed their slaves, but the spread of Roman citizens among the local population in the age of the republic would have been slow. Another group of Roman citizens in Pontus consisted of individuals and families from Italy and Rome itself who for whatever reason resided in the region for periods of time. This group is mentioned both in the oath of loyalty

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to Augustus set up in Neapolis and by Cassius Dio, for whom Roman citizens were a distinct social and legal category in 29 bce when Asia and Bithynia were allowed to set up cults to the worship of Augustus.7 Judging from the way the Romans are referred to both in the oath and in Dio’s text, they may have been in Anatolia for a longer or shorter period of time and may not have enjoyed legal rights within any of Pompey’s settlements. A different category of Romans in Late Republican Pontus were the occasional locals who, on the initiative of the governor or other Roman authority, were granted Roman rights as a special token of their loyal support. They must have been few in number as the cities’ lack of Latin right prevented more regular grants of Roman status.8 As the Pontic cities were reintroduced to direct Roman rule, Roman status was once again an important legal and social marker, distinguishing those with Roman rights from the rest of the population. As is demonstrated by the epigraphic material from Pompeiopolis, men with a Roman nomen gentile were a common phenomenon at least in the second century ce, when members of the ephebian class started to hold Roman citizenship.9 The same picture seems to apply in the rest of the region, where the epigraphic evidence suggests that members of the cities’ elite were becoming Roman citizens from at least the beginning of the second century. As there were no significant numbers of Greeks living in the Pontic hinterland during the 60s bce, except, of course, for a few pockets such as in the one in Amaseia, Roman citizenship was, together with citizenship in one of the cities in the region, one group to which the population in the Pontic hinterland could feel a distinct sense of belonging.10 In the first phase, after the foundation of the cities, the Roman community in Pontus is best described as a veterans’ club, perhaps with what may have been occasional members of former village elites, who had earned the rights for their assistance in the establishment of the new cities, and members of the Greek elite—families like Strabo’s—who had assisted Rome’s progress in other ways. Later, as the region was gradually placed under direct Roman rule in the course of the first century ce, Roman citizenship spread at a higher rate and once again offered its holders a number of economic and legal benefits when they and their communities rejoined the empire. Its exclusivity was again a marker of an elevated position and of legal as well as economic privileges, even if the offer of Roman rights to freedmen and soldiers returning from the auxiliary meant that far from every Roman in the provincial community belonged to the cities’ financial or political elites.11

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By the time the influence from Greek culture was felt in the hinterland cities and the civic population started to imitate Greek ways of living, Roman citizenship and the sense of belonging to the collectivity of Romans had already shaped the way members of the elite identified themselves. Unlike in the cities in Asia, Bithynia, or the colonies on the Black Sea coast, it was Rome that supplied both the legal and the institutional framework for the hinterland cities, creating a different cultural dynamic. Even if the number of Roman veterans was limited, former soldiers in towns like Nicopolis and perhaps in Pompeiopolis would have had an impact both on organization and on everyday life. This is particularly to be expected in a region where the civic culture as a whole was largely supplied by Rome. Rome and its veterans would have had a significant impact on daily life when it involved the implementation of laws laid out in the lex Pompeia. The cultural differences between Paphlagonia in the West and Armenia Minor in the East and the way the pre-Roman villages would have followed various customary laws—likely to have found their way into the new codes in one form or another—gave each town its own particular legal characteristics. Yet the establishment of urban culture organized by Rome, a shared constitution across the double province, and standardized political rules and practices would lead to a conformity across the province that again would have been enforced and overseen by Roman authorities and their representatives in the region. As a legally privileged, wealthy, armed, and socially united group, the veterans would have benefited socially and politically from a form of local government introduced by Rome. They were the conquerors and they were the ones with the most privileges and the best understanding of the logic behind the new laws and practices. Therefore, they had the means to assume a prominent position in the new cities. Although over time the population was drawn toward a Greek way of living and came to feel a profound sense of belonging to the Greek world, the way Strabo differentiates between the Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast and the cities in the hinterland suggests that it was no easy task to be recognized as Greek—at least not in the minds of the Greeks living elsewhere in the region. The affiliation that people in one of Pompey’s cities could rightfully claim was citizenship in the town they were living in and, in the case of the lucky few, membership of the community of Roman citizens, with the rights and prestige that followed. Being Greek was a mark of cultural refinement but there was no political status attached to it and it was not, as we shall see in

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Chapter 4, contradicted by someone belonging to the collectivity of Romans. Being Greek was yet another membership that shaped who people were and how they defined themselves as well as those around them.

By Roman Standards: The Organization of the Early Imperial Cults in Anatolia Other kinds of institutions that from early on found their way to at least one but perhaps more of Pompey’s cities were the cults inaugurated in honor of the emperor Augustus. At the end of the first century bce these cults were introduced into at least the cities of Paphlagonia and Neapolis. The role these cults assumed and the impact they had on the cities’ institutional landscape are important to our understanding of how the inhabitants in the towns interacted not only with the institution of the ruler cult but also with the political reality that the cults represented. In that sense, emperor worship was a Roman institution just as much as this type of cult was deeply rooted in Greek political realism. A discussion of the cults, their purpose, and the ambition behind emperor worship is therefore relevant to the study of how the cities’ institutional landscape was organized. Members of the cities’ elites promoted and, as we shall see below, came to represent Roman rule in their local communities when they sponsored lavish rituals and festivals in honor of the emperors just as they fulfilled a crucial task on behalf of their fellow citizens, who were keen to underline their and the cities’ loyalty to the emperor in Rome and to Roman rule in broader terms. Emperor worship in Asia Minor was inspired by the Greek ruler cult previously performed to please Alexander the Great; his successors; other local rulers, such as the Attalid kings; or the people of Rome.12 These ties to Greek religious and political thinking have often led scholars to conclude that the cults to emperor worship continued as a Greek institution.13 The cults are often seen as an arrangement shaped and implemented as a Greek initiative in response to the new political reality following the civil wars, in which the East was repeatedly on the losing side.14 Yet, while scholars largely agree on how the cults to Augustus emerged as the initiative of the local elite, particularly in western Asia Minor, there are different explanations for the motives behind the cults and whether the living emperors were understood as deities with special powers or as mere mortals whose spectacular achievements deserved a form of celebration usually bestowed upon the gods alone.15 The second question is

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largely unresolvable as there is no way of telling what people believed or who and what achievements were recognized as divine. But what matters more in this context is how the population across the empire performed rituals to different emperors and how these rituals were similar to those offered in honor of the more conventional gods. Only by reconstructing the political and religious function of emperor worship and what the cities in the provinces, Rome, and the emperors themselves hoped to gain from the efforts, can it be established what kind of institution emperor worship was, the role it fulfilled locally and across the empire, and finally why emperor worship developed in the way it did. Some key questions to be discussed here are how local forces, emperors, and Roman authorities were involved in the cults, how the different parties contributed to how the cults developed, who took the initiative to establish the cults in the first place, and how and on whose authority the first cults were inaugurated. Another fundamental question is, who attended the cults? Were the cults, in the early phase, that is, largely a matter for the non-Roman part of the provincial population in the East, which would then indicate that emperor worship was essentially a Greek phenomenon, or were Romans from Italy and the city of Rome itself involved right from the beginning, and, if so, in what way? If the latter were the case, it suggests that the ruler cult had already become part of Roman political and religious thinking. It is generally accepted that Roman citizens, and also those of Italian origin, did worship living emperors, both in Italy and in the provinces. But it is also generally accepted that Roman citizens of Roman or Italian origin were not, at least in the years immediately after the civil war, expected to worship living rulers, as suggested by the writings of Suetonius and Cassius Dio (Suet. Aug. 52; Cass. Dio 51.20.6–8). Yet there is much to suggest that the distinction Dio draws between the cults, where Roman citizens worshipped Julius Caesar together with Roma, and the foreign part of the population worshipped Augustus also together with Roma (a reality he ignores), was a literary construct on his part designed to give the impression that Roman citizens were not expected by Augustus to worship the living emperor as if he were divine. What matters here, though, is not whether the idea of worshipping the living emperor as a god was inspired by a Greek way of thinking or whether ruler worship was well established in Roman politics before the inauguration of the first cults to Augustus in Asia and Bithynia. These are well-known facts. What is more interesting is how and to what extent Rome, Augustus, Roman representatives, and later emperors were involved in shaping the cults. In other

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words, was emperor worship largely a continuation of a Greek tradition, with Rome or Augustus as the passive recipient accommodating local habits, or did the cults to various emperors represent an institution in which Rome and Augustus used a well-known framework to establish a new format through which the emperor’s subjects, across legal and cultural divides, could show their loyalty in a setting that was not only approved by Rome but also overseen by Rome’s representatives in the provinces? If the latter were true, emperor worship would have been an institution heavily influenced by politics and standards formulated in Rome, with the provincial communities acting not on initiatives and strategies of their own but on expectations and dynamics that were not entirely under their control. Proposals to establish cults would still have to come from local initiatives, even if the standards and the permission to inaugurate the cults were in the hands of the emperors. If the illusion of an honest and voluntary manifestation of loyalty were not upheld, the whole arrangement would come across as orchestrated and as a sign of meaningless submission that was little short of empty flattery. How such thoughts were already shared in antiquity is underlined by Cassius Dio when he lets Maecenas remind Augustus how popular election had never made anyone divine (Cass. Dio 52.35.5). Rome and the emperors are traditionally not believed to have had much impact on how cults were organized or, for that matter, on how the worship of the imperial families developed in the first centuries ce. But to gain a more nuanced understanding of how emperor worship operated and the functions the cults were intended to fulfill, we need to include a discussion of what role emperors and those around them assumed and, in addition, consider the ways in which Roman citizens from Italy and the city of Rome engaged in the worship of the living emperor. One school of thought argues that the cults to Augustus and later emperors were a product of politicized flattery and a pragmatic manifestation of loyalty to the empire’s new sole ruler. It was a way to establish positive relations between the cities and the emperor. Emperor worship is here understood to be an essentially Greek institution, which later spread to Italy and the western provinces as the Greek practice of offering divine honors to living rulers was adopted first by the Italian elite and later in the western provinces when the cult to Augustus was promoted by members of the imperial family.16 This view finds some support in the writings of both Suetonius and Cassius Dio, where Augustus appears as someone who was reluctant to allow cults in his honor. Dio’s claim that worship of living emperors was a matter for the

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non-Roman part of the provincial population has added to the notion that the cult emerged largely as a Greek initiative and as part of a strategy to accommodate the reality of absolute rule. This approach to emperor worship ignores or disregards the fact that political institutions in Rome were already offering divine honors and cultic rituals to Roman leaders well before the cults to Augustus were established in Asia and Bithynia. The Senate’s decision to honor a cult to Caesar with priests, sacrifices, and a temple in 44 bce, the vote of both public and private libations to Octavian, and the decision to add the triumvir’s name to the Salii hymn are examples of honors normally reserved for the gods.17 The various attempts to explain how such honors did not mean that Caesar and Octavian were acknowledged as divine fail to explain how people in Rome drew the distinction between being divine and being mortal. Also, the notion that Romans in Italy and Rome did not worship the living emperors, no matter how excellent they had proved to be, rests on Cassius Dio’s account alone. In another approach to emperor worship, S. Price sees the imperial cults as a response to a genuine sentiment that men with undisputed powers did belong to the sphere of the divine.18 In his study of the imperial cult in Asia Minor, Price points out that there is a noticeable change in the language used, for instance, in the expression of gratitude for specific favors in the Hellenistic period to a choice of words that placed Augustus at the same level as the Olympian gods.19 Price sees worship of Augustus and later emperors not as flattery but as a way to come to terms with how one man was now more powerful than anyone else. By offering a cult to Augustus and later to his successors, the elites in Asia Minor were able to uphold their social position as first in their home communities and second only to the gods.20 The cults are not seen as flattery but as a way to acknowledge a new political reality after the civil war. The cults are seen as part of what Price has described as a system of exchange, where the communities in Asia Minor underlined their devotion to Augustus, who was elevated above them, and in return received support, gratitude, and protection.21 To Price the intention behind the cult was sincere and it is convincing that the followers of the cult did attribute religious content to the rituals they performed. The cult to Augustus is not seen as a continuum of previous Greek ruler worship but as the result of a dialogue between the Greek communities and Roman authorities, following the new political situation after the civil war. Still, the cult was an institution that was essentially Greek. A similar line of thinking has led to the conclusion that also the elite in the Italian cities chose to worship the living Augustus as a god, not his genius,

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as was the scholarly convention throughout most of the twentieth century.22 A cult to the emperor’s genius would resemble the rituals household slaves were expected to perform when they worshipped the genius of their pater familias, which, as pointed out by I. Gradel, would make a cult to Augustus’s genius unattractive to members of the Italian elite.23 By lifting Augustus into the sphere of the divine, the Italian elite was able to keep the social hierarchy unchanged and at the same time show their gratitude to Rome’s first citizen.24 There is little reason to question that the Greek ruler cult inspired the Augustus cults in Asia and Bithynia, and there is no reason to assume that the local elite in western Asia Minor was anything other than keen to express their devotion and unconditional loyalty to the empire’s new sole ruler. It is also expected that Octavian met with delegations from various parts of Asia Minor and that they offered him all sorts of different honors, of which several would have carried sincere divine connotations. What is less certain, and the key question for the following section, is whether the cults to Augustus and his successors were the products either of locally formulated plans for how to worship the emperors or of an institution through which Rome, the emperors, and their associates as much as possible dictated the ways in which all the emperors’ subjects displayed their loyalty and support. The following discussion focuses on who attended the cults and on the extent to which Augustus and his associates engaged in formulating the standards according to which his subjects—foreign and Roman alike—were to organize a cult to the empire’s first citizen. Sources on the early cults in the hinterland cities are scarce, and it is not until well into the High Empire that we have enough evidence to support the notion of a systematic introduction of emperor worship in Pompey’s towns. In order to better understand what role emperor worship played in the cities’ cultural and institutional landscape, we will have to turn our attention toward the better-documented cults in Bithynia and Asia. To discuss how emperor worship was organized, and who took the initiative and who held the authority, we move to Pergamum and the city of Nicomedia, the provincial capital in Bithynia.

The Worship of Augustus According to tradition, the official institutionalized worship of Augustus was first introduced when Octavian wintered in Pergamum before crossing over to Italy in the early spring of 29 bce. Even if it is admittedly short, the passage

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from Cassius Dio’s account in book 51 is the best description of how the early cult to Augustus was first introduced. Caesar meanwhile conducted his other businesses and he let sanctuaries come into being, to [Dea] Roma and to his father Caesar, calling him Divus Julius, in Ephesus and in Nicaea; for these were then the most prominent cities in Asia and Bithynia respectively. These [sc. Roma and Caesar] he assigned to the Romans who lived among these people to pay honor to. But, as you would expect, he entrusted the foreigners, for whom he used the name Hellenes, with establishing some sanctuaries for himself, the Asians in Pergamum and the Bithynians in Nicomedia. From this point onward this happened also in the case of other rulers, not only among the Greek peoples but also among all other peoples who listen to the Romans. For note that in the city itself and the rest of Italy not a single person, no matter how great a reputation he might deserve, has dared to do this. Yet even there heroia are made for those who have ruled correctly once they have passed among other honors on a par with gods which are given them. (Cass. Dio 51.20.6–8) There are several problems related to this paragraph, which complicates the traditional approach to emperor worship. As already pointed out by Gradel, there are several examples of temples and priests dedicated to the worship of the living Augustus, which underlines how a cult to the living Augustus was a well-established phenomenon across the Italian Peninsula.25 That the inhabitants in a number of Italian cities—who were for the most part Roman citizens—worshipped the living Augustus complicates the entire idea that Romans in Italy honored only deceased rulers while the worship of the living ruler was a matter for the provincial population in the East. The lack of supporting evidence for a joint Caesar-Roma cult is another considerable problem for the theory of how Octavian accommodated two separate cults. No inscriptions or coins refer to the existence of a cult to Caesar and Roma, and there are no literary references other than Dio’s account to support the claim that Octavian entrusted Nicaea and Ephesus to establish joint cults to Caesar and Roma. Creating arguments from silence is always difficult.26 Yet a lack of references to a joint Caesar-Roma cult is remarkable, particularly in the context in which Tacitus, and even more surprisingly Dio himself, discusses the inauguration of the cults to Tiberius and Caligula in Smyrna and Miletus. In

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Tacitus’s account of why Smyrna was chosen over Pergamum and Ephesus, he mentions that Pergamum had already been given the cult to Roma and Augustus and that Ephesus and Miletus were believed to have been too devoted to the worship of Artemis and Apollo, respectively, to fully appreciate the honor of a cult to the emperor.27 In a similar account, in almost a replica of Tacitus’s words, Dio claims that the official explanation as to why Caligula chose Miletus over Ephesus was that “Artemis had pre-empted Ephesus, Augustus Pergamum and Smyrna Tiberius, but the truth of the matter was that he [Caligula] desired to appropriate to his own use the large and exceedingly beautiful temple which the Milesians were building to Apollo.”28 One question concerns the lack of references in support of how two different cults were inaugurated; another difficulty is that a joint cult to Caesar and Roma was not a logical choice in the Late Republican period. As the worship of Roma traditionally symbolized a city’s loyalty to Rome, it is not clear why Octavian, after his return from Egypt, would introduce a joint cult to Caesar and Roma and then force Roman citizens in the region into the same category as their subjects. It has been suggested that the decision to add Roma to the Divus Julius cult was a way of preparing the ground for a joint cult to Roma and Augustus.29 But again this does not explain why Octavian at this very delicate moment, after having assumed full control over the empire, would risk alienating Romans living in Asia Minor, or why he would risk jeopardizing the support of the Divus Julius cult in Rome by introducing Roma into a cult that, up to that point in time, personified local submission to Roman power.30 That Roman citizens from Rome and Italy were expected, or found it natural, to worship the living Augustus is illustrated by the oath of loyalty from Neapolis in 3 bce, around the time Augustus added the land of Paphlagonia to the province of Galatia. When the emperor Caesar Augustus, son of the god [Julius Caesar] had been consul for the twelfth time, in the third year, 6 March, in Gangra . . . , the oath was taken by those who dwell in Paphlagonia and by the Romans who pursue their business among them. “I swear by Zeus, the Earth, the Sun, all the gods and goddesses and by Augustus himself that I will be favourable towards Caesar Augustus and his children and descendants all the time . . . in word, deed and intention. I will reckon as friends those whom they might reckon as friends and regard as enemies those that they might judge

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to be enemies. And in defence of their interests I will spare neither body, nor soul, nor life, nor children but take any risk, whatever kind it may be, for their interests. Whatever I might perceive or hear being said, planned or done against them, I will disclose, and I will be an enemy of one who says, plans or does any of this. Those that they judge to be enemies, I will pursue them with weapons and iron at land and sea, guarding myself against them. “If I should do anything against this oath or not precisely as I have sworn, I will raise for myself, my own body, soul and life, children, all of my family and my possession, destruction and utter ruin extending to all those that succeed me and all my descendants. The land and the sea shall neither receive the bodies of my children or descendants, nor shall they bear them fruit.” All those living in the countryside swore according to the same terms at the altars of Augustus in the sanctuaries of Augustus . . . Likewise did the Phazimonitai, who dwell in what is also called Neapolis, all swear in the sanctuary of Augustus at the altar of Augustus.31 Judging from the oath itself, the introduction, and the short epilogue, Romans from outside the region recognized the emperor’s status as divine when swearing this oath to the god Augustus at the altars in the Augustus sanctuaries. Although Augustus is not referred to explicitly as a theos, judging from the wording “I swear by Zeus, the Earth, the Sun, all the gods and goddesses and by Augustus himself,” he is placed in the same category as “the other gods and goddesses.” The oath may well have been an extraordinary manifestation of loyalty sworn when the cities in Paphlagonia were readmitted to direct Roman rule. The Romans in the region need not have worshipped Augustus as a god on a regular basis simply because they swore the same oath in the same setting as the non-Roman part of the population in the provincial community. But it should not automatically be assumed otherwise, just because a number of the empire’s intellectuals, more than a century later, questioned the emperor’s divinity. It is, however, more reasonable to assume that the religious setting did not pose problems to members of the Roman community. If swearing an oath by Augustus for some reason would have been controversial or offensive to Romans of Italian origin, it was easily accommodated, for instance, by exempting the Romans from the oath or by having them underline their loyalty in another setting.

Figure 3. The oath of loyalty to Emperor Augustus. This oath dates to 3 BCE and was sworn by the citizens of the city of Neapolis together with the Romans who were living there at the time. Judging from the text itself, similar oaths were sworn in cities across Paphlagonia. Photo Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen.

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The connection between the oath and the moment when Paphlagonia was turned into an eparchy and added to Roman Galatia raises the question of who took the initiative to inaugurate the Augustus cults in which the oath was sworn. The reference to what seem to be already-existing sanctuaries suggests that the cults and the worship of Augustus predate the moment of the reprovincialization, which in turn suggests that the cult was consecrated either on the initiative of Deiotaus Philadelphos II, son of Castor—to whom Antony gave Paphlagonia as part of his reorganization of Roman Pontus—or on the initiative of the civic elite in the towns. The example of an Augustus cult in Judaea, where Herod promoted the worship of his new patron, offers an example of how one of Antony’s former clients established a cult to Rome’s new ruler.32 As a descendant of one of Antony’s client rulers, Deiotaus Philadelphos II had every reason to be as eager as Herod to underline that he too was an undivided supporter of the new regime. 33 The reference to the Augustan sanctuaries in the plural, however, suggests a decentralized structure in which the worship of Augustus spread from city to city. There are historical reasons why the inhabitants in the region, Romans as well as non-Romans, would embrace the idea of a cult to Augustus, particularly at a time when Paphlagonia was readmitted to the empire, but also before the annexation was a reality. Less than ten years had passed between Antony’s rearrangement of Anatolia and Octavian’s victory in the civil war, and the recollection of what it meant to be part of the empire was still fresh in the minds of those in both Pompeiopolis and Neapolis. With Antony’s decision to dissolve the Pontic part of the province, political autonomy in local matters— such as the level of taxation or civic rights previously protected by the lex Pompeia—was replaced by a more autocratic form of government. As discussed in Chapter 2, members of the citizen bodies would have lost political rights and legal privileges that their fathers had obtained when Pompey founded the cities. It is reasonable to assume that the land would have been redistributed to finance the activities of the new rulers and Antony’s activities in the East. Quite possibly, the cities would have lost the opportunity to negotiate the level of taxation, introduced by Pompey, as revenues were now needed to fund both the rule of client kings and Antony’s campaign first against Parthia and Armenia and later against Octavian. The Romans in the region would have experienced the same loss of political rights and would have been exposed to the same taxation and reorganization of the land as the non-Roman part of the population. Members of the Roman communities in the Pontic hinterland would have lost the legal and

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financial privileges ensured by Roman law. They and their property were now outside the borders of the empire and could no longer expect the same protection from the governor. Other than for a privileged few favored by the new ruler, Antony’s decision to redistribute Roman Pontus between loyal dynasts must have been a highly unpopular decision both among the Romans in the region and among members of the local population accustomed to having a say in local politics. When Octavian defeated Antony, the victory is likely to have been particularly welcome in the former Roman Pontus, where the population may have seen the victorious triumvir as someone who could bring the region back under direct Roman rule. Seen in that light, the worship of Augustus would then have emerged sometime not too long after his return from Egypt. Gratitude that Antony had been removed and hope that Rome’s new first citizen would reunite the region with the rest of the empire would then—together with inspiration from the cults in Asia and Bithynia—have prepared the ground for cults and sanctuaries in the Pontic hinterland. It took Augustus more than twenty years to meet these expectations, and then only in parts of Pompey’s former province, but the ecstatic promises to protect Augustus and his house against all evil and the decision to swear the oath at the altars in the sanctuaries to Augustus show that devotion to the princeps and his house was already considerable by the time Paphlagonia was added to Galatia.34 How widespread worship of Augustus was in the rest of Pompey’s old province is more difficult to establish. There is no evidence that testifies to Augustus cults farther east than Neapolis. Yet all Pompey’s cities shared the same history as Pompeiopolis and Neapolis, even if the number of Romans living in the cities would have differed from town to town, so the population is likely to have shared the same frustrations after their loss of civic rights and political influence. Members of Roman families in the cities under the ruler of the Polemonids would have had the same motive to celebrate Augustus as their peers in Paphlagonia and Neapolis. Given that many of the Romans who were living in the region would have been descendants of Pompey’s veterans or of the few locals who had obtained Roman rights from earlier on, they may have felt an even stronger urge to underline their commitment to what would be their new leader and so prove their belonging to the collectivity of Roman citizens. The evidence that Roman citizens, even those who were in the region to do business (who at the turn of the century would have been of Italian origin), swore by the god Augustus suggests that Romans from Italy and the city of Rome were just as likely to have been involved in the cult as the

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non-Roman part of the population. Given the lack of supporting evidence for a joint Caesar-Roma cult in Nicaea and Ephesus and the evidence of a cult to the living Augustus in Beneventum from as early as 15 bce, instigated by P. Vedius Pollio, an associate of Augustus, the theory that Roman citizens did not worship the living emperor no longer stands.35 It has been suggested that the cult to Caesar and Roma was inaugurated but abandoned soon after the consecration.36 It is not difficult to imagine that many promises and good intentions were not carried through or given up when they had to be realized. Still, the failure to comply with what Dio describes as an order given to the Romans in western Asia Minor could have had severe implications, as in the case of Cyzicus, which lost its privileges as a free city. Also, what is often forgotten is that it was not the Roman citizens but the people of Nicaea and Ephesus who would have been entrusted to build the two sanctuaries. If they were honored with the right to host the provincial cults to Caesar and Roma, why then were they not keener to preserve the temples that they had been entrusted to build and why did they and the Roman community in the two cities not work harder to meet Augustus’s expectations? And even if it only later became much more fashionable to worship Augustus, for instance, in one of the many civic cults across Asia, that does not explain why Nicaea and Ephesus, two of the most thriving cities in their respective provinces, would let the cult dissolve, in both cases leaving no evidence behind, with all the negative attention that would follow. It is not only difficult to explain, but it contradicts everything we know about ruler cults. The importance of the Divus Julius cult in Augustan ideology is underlined by the decision to build the temple in the forum on his return to Rome later in 29 (Cass. Dio 51.19.2, 51.22.2–4). Finally, even if we can think of reasons why both cults disappeared and left no physical traces behind, it is still odd to require Romans in the region to worship Roma—the personification of Roman power and so a sign of their submission to Roman rule.

United in Emperor Worship Theories about how the early worship of Augustus was organized, who was behind the first cults, and how they developed over time have occupied scholars for more than a century. Based on the accounts of Tacitus and Dio, it is widely accepted that the consecration of cults to Augustus was a Greek phenomenon organized first by the koina in Bithynia and in Asia and later

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by individual cities in Asia Minor and across the empire.37 Yet to use Dio’s account as evidence that the koina in Asia and Bithynia were behind the first worship of Augustus (Cass. Dio 51.20.6–8) and that the cults in Nicomedia and Pergamum were designed by the members of the two provincial councils is problematic for a number of reasons. First, Dio never uses the word koinon in his account of how the cults were established. J. Deininger, who suggests that the term ethnos should be read as a synonym for koinon, offers one solution to the problem.38 According to Deininger, Dio refers to the Hellênikon ethnos as a way to identify those who worshipped the living emperor, which may then be read as evidence for how the koina were behind the Augustus cults. Elsewhere in his work, Dio uses the term ethnos as a synonym for “province.”39 Ethnos is used as a term for koinon in the Digest, where Asiarchs or Bithyniarchs are said to have been the high priests of an ethnos, and Dio might have had the provincial koina in mind when offering his account of how the cults were first inaugurated in 29 bce (Digest 27.1.6.14). Furthermore, it has been suggested that, in the epigraphic habit, the term Hellenes was used in the context of the provincial council and as a synonym for koina, for instance, in Asia and Bithynia.40 Dio therefore could have had the provincial councils in mind when he referred to the negotiations between Octavian and what he calls the Hellenes or foreigners in Asia and Bithynia. On the other hand, the term is also used to distinguish between the citizens in the Greek city-states, the Hellenes, and the indigenous rural population, the paraoikoi.41 When Dio talks about the Hellenes, he may have had in mind the inhabitants of the cities of Nicomedia and Pergamum, not the two koina. The discussion of who took the initiative to introduce the Roma and Augustus cults revolves around Dio’s use of the word epetrepse. One approach has been to read epetrepse as if Dio said that Octavian permitted or allowed Nicomedia and Pergamum to consecrate the cults, which suggests a scenario in which Octavian responded to local requests or local traditions of ruler cults. Octavian is then pictured, as most scholars prefer, in the role of the passive recipient or as skeptical toward a personal cult set up in his honor. When he did allow the inauguration of the cults, he did so because he decided to accommodate local traditions, responding to petitions forwarded either by the cities or by the koina acting on behalf of the entire province (Cass. Dio 51.20.6–8; Suet. Aug. 52). The other option is to interpret epetrepse in the sense of “entrust,” which does not necessarily change the interpretation much. Still, such a reading of epetrepse allows for a scenario in which Octavian exercised a

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more proactive role in the establishment of his own cults. The cities may still have met Octavian with proposals for how to organize the cult, and he might have been reluctant to allow the cults that Pergamum and Nicomedia were then entrusted to inaugurate. But epetrepse is here interpreted to mean that Dio attributed a more active role to Octavian, who took a more direct part in his own worship than often assumed, leaving the daily organization in the hands of the two cities.42 The truth is that it is difficult to know what Dio had in mind when he chose epetrepse or what role he attributed to Augustus and the local communities respectively. It seems reasonably clear that Dio went to some lengths to portray Octavian as the kind of ruler who did not commission or promote his own cult. Dio’s bias against worship of at least the living emperors and his portrait of Augustus as the ideal ruler for a state the size of Rome meant that he could not allow his ideal emperor to be too involved in the establishment of his own cults (Cass. Dio 52.35.2). When Dio emphasizes the role of the Hellenes, it is therefore either because he is trying to gloss over the fact that Octavian was involved in shaping the cults and the religious practice surrounding them, at least on the provincial level, or because he believed that local forces were behind the cults in the first place.43 As illustrated by coins from Pergamum, the koinon of Asia was in charge of the cult in Pergamum, at least from 19 bce, and Dio may have thought that the two koina met Augustus with ready proposals for how they would worship him as a god, just as the cities of Asia had done with kings, the goddess Roma, and Roman magistrates. Dio may have believed that it was the cities in Asia and Bithynia that took the initiative to approach Octavian with these proposals, or he may have wished to give the impression that Augustus played only a small part in the inauguration of the new cults to his own worship, relying on a tradition that downplayed Octavian’s role in establishing these personal cults. Another source for the early phase of emperor worship and a supplement to Dio is Tacitus’s account of the temple to Tiberius, Livia, and the Senate, which the senators decided to locate in Smyrna. According to Tacitus, the cities of Asia decided to honor Tiberius and the Senate with a temple to express their gratitude for support in two cases against governors of Asia (Tac. Ann. 4.15, 4.37). There is little reason to doubt that this proposal for a new temple was a local initiative. Tiberius was making a point of not accepting divine honors, and had already rejected a similar proposal from Hispania ulterior. It is therefore not very likely that the emperor suddenly promoted a personal cult in Asia or in any other way indicated to the elites in Asia that he would be pleased if

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such a cult were proposed. If Tacitus can be trusted here, Tiberius seems to have made an effort to convince the Senate that he saw himself as a human, not as a god, and he allowed the temple in Asia because Augustus had not prohibited the people in Asia from building a temple to Roma and himself in Pergamum. Another point that Tiberius makes is that the new cult in Asia would have included worship of the Senate, but he also feared that too many temples inaugurated in his honor would undermine the worship of Augustus (Tac. Ann. 4.37–38).44 The political elites in Asia, on the other hand, were no doubt keen to show their gratitude for the support they obtained from the senators and were determined to stay on good terms with the Senate (Tac. Ann. 4.15). In Rome, the senators listened to the Asian delegations and ended up ruling in their favor, but Tacitus’s account of how Tiberius instructed the Senate to take the complaint of malpractice seriously sounds like an instruction to try the case in a way with which not every senator would necessarily agree (Tac. Ann. 4.15.3–4). The provincial elite in Asia, or those behind the cases against Lucilius Capito and Gaius Silanus the year before, could, besides honoring Tiberius, very well have been looking for ways to repair a strained relationship with the Senate. What is worth noticing here is that it was not envoys from the koinon of Asia that represented the province of Asia with a ready proposal of where and in what form the temple and the cult were to be established. Instead, the Senate and Tiberius met with individual delegations, each presenting their own proposals and reasons for why the temple should be located in their city (Tac. Ann. 4.55–56). It is clear from Tacitus’s account that the decision to locate the temple in Smyrna was made in Rome by the Senate and Tiberius, who chose Smyrna because of the city’s early support of Rome and because Pergamum, Ephesus, and Miletus, as we saw above, were already hosting a neokoros or were devoted to the worship of Artemis and Apollo (Tac. Ann. 4.56). The negotiation in Rome has been described as the result of a disagreement within the koina, which forced the council to take the matter to Rome.45 Naturally, there must have been much debate over where to build the temple, but the account of how eleven cities went to Rome, each to present an individual proposal, questions the existence of joint proposals or even the mere notion that the council would have been able to formulate one. If the members of the koinon in Asia were making an effort to reach a common decision on where to locate the temple but in the end had to give up, one would expect that the Roman authorities were approached by embassies, which represented the proposals of different factions within the koinon. Judging from Tacitus’s

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account, there was no delegation representing the koinon or a number of the member cities. What seems to be a more convincing reconstruction is that, after it was decided to honor Tiberius, Livia, and the Senate with a new neokoros—a decision that may well have been both discussed and decided at one of the koinon meetings—the cities started to compete to secure the honor of hosting the temple for themselves. This does not mean that some of the members of the council did not try to find a consensus or some sort of a joint proposal with which they could seek Rome’s approval. There is also nothing to suggest that such efforts were able to reach an agreement. The way emperor worship worked would make it less likely that the cities, not least in Asia with its strong tradition of inter-city rivalry, would be able to agree on where to place a new provincial temple. That the koinon of Asia seemed unable to reach a joint decision on where to build the temple in the 20s ce, after emperor worship had been a reality for more than fifty years and after the cult to Roma and Augustus had been the responsibility of the koinon since at least 19 bce, further weakens the theory that the koina in Asia and Bithynia were able to meet Octavian with anything like a ready proposal in 29 bce. A more convincing scenario, particularly considering the competition between the cities and the long tradition of autonomy in western Asia Minor, is that the cities in Asia and Bithynia met Octavian with individual proposals, as in the case of Asia fifty years later. These offers of worship may well have followed previous norms of cults to kings, Roman magistrates, and Roma. But the decision to establish the joint cult to Roma and Augustus in Pergamum and Nicomedia is likely to have been made by Octavian, either in Asia Minor during the negotiations or afterward on his return to Rome. A plausible scenario of how the Augustus cult was first introduced is that Octavian let himself be inspired by the long tradition of ruler worship in the East and by the new dynamics in Rome, where the Senate voted first for Caesar and then himself honors with unmistakable divine connotations. Octavian, then, took what was a well-established institution of ruler worship, already offered both to Roma and to Roman magistrates, and changed it into something still recognizable but altogether different from the traditional Hellenic worship of hegemonic powers. To provide new content to alreadyexisting institutions was a cornerstone of Augustan strategy, but the organization of his personal cult has traditionally not been viewed as an element in his reorganization of Rome’s political framework. This may be explained by the

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fact that no state worship was ever allowed by any of the emperors in the city of Rome, not even by the more eccentric emperors, and also because commentators such as Suetonius and Cassius Dio reassure their readers that Augustus was skeptical concerning inaugurated cults in his own honor. By introducing a cult where he was worshipped together with the goddess Roma, Augustus was able to tackle some of the tension that a personal cult might provoke—not least among members of Rome’s political class. From the epigraphic record of the cults under the authority of the koina, there is much to suggest that those who attended the provincial cults prayed not to Augustus but for him, and the presence of Roma allowed for the twist that the followers worshipped Augustus as well as the city of Rome, which then may have eased some of the pressure from the senators, who could now claim that they too were being offered divine honors.46 The other aspect of a provincial cult monitored by Roman authorities was the opportunity to set certain standards as to how worship of Rome’s first citizen was to be carried out. As has been pointed out, worship of Augustus and later emperors took many forms and it is beyond any doubt that neither the emperor nor his magistrates could oversee the cult or decide how the activities were carried out in practice.47 But the consecration of official provincial cults still set some sort of boundary for the organization of emperor worship at the civic level. As the members of the provincial koina counted among the elites in their hometowns, they knew how the cult was organized on the provincial level and were therefore able to offer directions about how worship on the civic level should be organized.48 One way to influence how the cities practiced worship of the emperor was through the governors, who could promote certain cult activities and guide the cities and the provinces as a whole in bestowing their honors upon the emperor. In dialogue with the provincial communities, governors could act both as a source of inspiration and as consultants on how to design the proposals before envoys went in front of the emperor.49 When Paullus Fabius Maximus in 9 bce entered into a competition concerning how Asia was to honor Augustus in the best way possible, his proposal was to change the calendar and let the New Year begin on Augustus’s birthday. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the proposal won first prize. There are all sorts of political agendas tied to the change of Asia’s calendar. The koinon of Asia had every interest in being on good terms with the governor. Also, Maximus may well have been following a political agenda of his own. Apart from interfering in how Asia honored Augustus and the ambition

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to set his personal mark on Asia’s Augustus cult, the proposal sent a message to Rome that Maximus was vigorously promoting the notion of the emperor’s divinity.50 A later example comes from Egypt, where the prefect Lucius Aemilius Rectus promoted Claudius’s divine status in a letter to the Alexandrians. Here the emperor was referred to as a god while Claudius himself, in the letter, rejects the cities’ wish to honor him as a god on the grounds that he did not believe himself to be divine and did not want to insult those around him. The letter, which has survived on a papyrus found in Philadelphia, testifies to the double standards surrounding an emperor’s religious status. The citizens of Alexandria proposed to honor Claudius as a god by offering him priesthood and a temple, which Claudius then modestly refused in the same letter in which his prefect introduces him as a god.51 While Maximus may or may not have developed the idea of changing Asia’s calendar on his own, Rectus must have acted in an official capacity when he sent the letter to the Alexandrians. Another example of how the emperor and Rome were involved in the way new cult activities came about is the story in which Pliny asks Trajan whether a local petition from Julius Largus either to set up buildings in honor of Trajan or to organize quinquennial competitions called Trajanic in either Heraclea or Tium should be allowed. In his answer, Trajan is happy with both solutions, leaving it up to Pliny to decide what would suit the communities best (Plin. Ep. 10.75–76). What these examples attest is the delicate act of balance between local proposals and the emperor’s opportunity both to steer how emperor worship evolved and at the same time to show some element of moderation. But the communication between the local communities and Rome also demonstrates how the emperors or their representatives took the opportunities to both promote the emperor’s divine status and regulate or adapt the various honors offered to make them fit what they and ultimately also the emperor in question thought to be appropriate. Governors may well have made their decisions in consultation with the emperor. Pliny referred the question to Trajan, and Rectus carried out Claudius’s answers and must have been in some kind of dialogue with Rome before he chose to refer to Claudius as a god in the same text in which the emperor underlined that he was not. It is not clear whether Maximus consulted Augustus before he convinced Asia to change their calendar. But considering the embarrassment that Maximus would have had to face should Augustus have rejected the honor, it seems unlikely that he acted without at least knowing the emperor’s attitude to such matters.

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Another aspect of the official cult to Roma and Augustus was its ability to unite the population across its legal divides. There was no state-organized worship to any of the living emperors in Rome, where Romans never worshipped Augustus or any of his successors. Neither did the foreign part of the population who lived in the capital. As demonstrated by the oath in Neapolis, worship of the living emperor was not a matter of legal status or cultural origin but a question of context and geography. Outside Rome, in Italy and in several of the provinces, Roman citizens and foreigners worshipped the living Augustus and later emperors in public cults together on the civic and the provincial level and in the same context. Cults to Augustus in Italy were a reality from very early on, as illustrated by the cult in Beneventum, which Pollio consecrated before his death in 15 bce, a maximum of four years after the cult in Pergamum was inaugurated, but also by references to Augustus temples in Naples and Pola, where we must expect that the majority of those attending and managing the cults were Roman citizens.52 Compared to Italy, the number of Roman citizens in Asia and Bithynia would have been more modest, particularly in the early phase of the principate, but a number of priests of Augustus both with and without Roman rights from roughly the same period testify to how Romans and non-Romans worshipped and served in the same cults to the living Augustus. Apollonios, a high priest from Priene, and Philistes, the priest of Roma and Augustus from Smyrna, are examples of two foreigners serving in the Augustus cults in the last years of the first century bce.53 Yet the example of Gaius Julius Epikrates shows that Roman citizens of local origin, who presumably obtained Roman status as a courtesy from Augustus, served as priests in the Augustus cult during the same years.54 As Roman civic rights spread throughout the eastern provinces, Roman status became the norm among priests in the cult, where the worship of the emperors seems to have been placed in the hands of the civic elites. As illustrated by the oath from Neapolis, what seems to have brought the worshippers together, Romans as well as non-Romans, was a desire to show loyalty to Augustus. Everyone was subject to the emperor, as the absolute ruler, and individuals as well as entire communities, regardless of their legal status, cultural origin, or ethnicity, would have felt a pressing urge to underline their devotion to him, hoping, perhaps, that they or their city would benefit from their show of loyalty. Octavian could not have anticipated that the Augustus cult would spread to the extent and with the velocity it did or that the worship of his successors would carry on for centuries to come. Nor do we need to assume that

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Rome’s new first citizen could have predicted that Romans and foreigners would be brought together through the cults that were consecrated to him and later emperors. And he could not have anticipated that the number of Roman citizens in the provinces would rise to the level it did or that the cities in Italy would worship him as a god and so acknowledge his divine status to the degree they turned out to do. But by establishing cults to the worship of Roma and himself in Bithynia and Asia, he and Rome’s governors may well have hoped to set some standards for how the inhabitants in Asia and Bithynia, and in other parts of the empire, were to demonstrate their loyalty to Augustus and to his successors. Worship of the emperor and the related cult activities were not so much a matter of legal status or ethnic origin, where provincials felt a need or an obligation to confirm their loyalty and submission through religious rituals, while Roman citizens, depending on their origin, underlined their devotion in different settings. Instead, what needs to be acknowledged here is how entire communities showed their allegiance to the victor in the civil wars, the new sole ruler of the empire, to whom everyone, Romans as well as foreigners, was subject. The city of Rome was exempted from official emperor worship but that was a choice made by Augustus, not the city’s political institutions, which, judging from the honors they bestowed upon him in the late 30s, were ready to acknowledge him as a god (Cass. Dio 44.6.4). Local communities surely had their own ideas about how to organize the cults to Augustus and the later emperors, but as they had to go to Rome for the emperors to know about their efforts, Rome was provided with the opportunity to interfere and direct how the cult was to be organized. Augustus was probably inspired by the Greek ruler cults when they organized or took control of the worship of Augustus. It may well have been the delegations from cities in western Asia Minor that made Augustus see the potential of a cult in his honor and what made him realize the need to steer the worship of his person in a certain direction. What we know about the organization of emperor worship suggests that Rome, the emperors, and Roman representatives in the provinces played a key role in shaping the cult. The emperors themselves were involved in where the cults were to be placed, and Roman authorities intervened directly both in the setup of the cults and in how the emperors were worshipped. Ruler worship had been an integrated part of Greek civic politics since at least the fourth century bce and so had been part of the religious and political landscape in a number of Greek cities across Asia Minor and the Greek mainland. Now, where emperor worship

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would have been inspired by Greek traditions, at least in Asia Minor, it has to be remembered that it was Rome or the Romans that set the standards. It was ultimately the emperor who approved the cults and so decided which cities were allowed to worship him as a god and which cities were not given the opportunity. Tiberius decided to allow Asia a second neokoros but denied the cities in Hispania ulterior the cult they proposed; Roman authorities used their influence to promote the emperor’s divinity; and Roman citizens often of local origin acted as priests and benefactors responsible for maintaining both the cults and their activities. What people saw when they entered the cults, either to assume a role in their organization or to participate in some of the rituals, was an institution dominated by Rome and its citizens, particularly from the early first century ce. The local priests and benefactors were behind the daily upkeep and carried a considerable financial burden for which their fellow citizens would have been grateful. Members of the local elite could, and some surely would, have been involved in the cults to help with the administrative challenges and so meet the expectations of the community around them without having felt particularly strong ties to Rome or the collectivity of Romans. Yet, because no emperor ever required his subjects to set up cults in his honor, the decision to worship the emperor was in every case a deliberate choice made by the local elite as a way to materialize their support. Roman authorities may have been involved in the outline of the cults but worship of the emperors was never made compulsory and did not become a standard feature in the cities’ religious landscapes. When local elites went through the process of inaugurating cults to the emperor it was an active manifestation of loyalty to a specific emperor and at the same time a way for Roman citizens to promote the power of Rome, and of themselves, in a context in which the majority of the citizens did not hold Roman rights.

Emperor Worship in the Pontic Region The Pontic hinterland was no exception. As discussed above, members of the political elite in Pompey’s cities had several reasons to see Augustus as a savior who had removed the man who took away their political rights when he decided to redistribute Roman Pontus to client rulers. Most of Pompey’s former province, it is true, was not placed under direct Roman rule until after

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the death of Augustus. But at the time Paphlagonia was added to Galatia, no one within the region could know whether Augustus would follow through and include the rest of Pontus in either Bithynia or Galatia. When Pontus Galaticus was founded a few years later, the inhabitants in the other Pompeian settlements may have thought or at least hoped that the process would continue to include the remaining cities as well. As a still larger part of Pompey’s former province was placed under direct Roman rule, emperor worship gradually became more formalized. The evidence comes almost exclusively from the late first to third century and testifies to a form of emperor worship that was in line with how the cults developed in Asia, Bithynia, and Galatia. Apart from the cults on the civic level—such as those to Augustus in Neapolis and Paphlagonia—the existence of several neokoroi shows that provincially based cults were organized by the different koina in the region. In 226 or 227 Neokaisareia earned the privilege of founding another neokoros, this time to Alexander Severus, and started to refer to itself as “two times neokoros.”55 The city of Amaseia, which was part of the same koinon in which Neokaisareia seems to have been the center, announced its first and presumably only neokoros in 161 or 162, inaugurated to Marcus Aurelius. Another sanctuary was set up, presumably to Hadrian, in the city of Nikopolis, the metropolis and the neokoros in the eparchy of Armenia Minor, and the city was later allowed to host yet another neokoros, this time to Gordian III, as demonstrated by an inscription found southeast of the city.56 A different source for how emperor worship spread to virtually all corners of the region consists of inscriptions set up in honor of the members of the cities’ political elites. Gn. Claudius Severus from Pompeiopolis was the archpriest of the Paphlagonian koinon and Claudius Aelianus was a priest presumably in the city’s own imperial cult in the year 256 ce.57 An inscription found in the territory of Neoclaudiopolis, 17 kilometers southeast of modern Vezirköprü, testifies to two imperial priests, oi hireis tôn Sebastôn, who in all probability were related to the city’s own imperial cult.58 Other priests from the region are known from Comana Pontica, where an archpriest from the koinon of Pontus is honored by the city’s demos (REG 1895: 86,31). Imperial priests are also attested in the city of Sebastopolis in the province of Cappadocia, which was not one of the cities founded by Pompey but nonetheless was part of the eparchy Pontus Polemonianus. An example of how emperor worship was organized and of the role members of the local elite assumed in the upkeep of the cults is an important

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honorific inscription set up to a M. Antonius Rufus on one of the statue bases in the city. Antonius Rufus was celebrated by the inhabitants of Sebastopolis for his commitment to the city and for his readiness to pay for many of the expenses of games, festivals, and other everyday needs. Part of Antonius Rufus’s credentials was his role in the imperial cult, where he served as Pontarch in the metropolis Neokaisareia. From the honoree inscription it appears that Rufus had also served as archpriest: whether it was in the neokoros cult in Neokaisareia or in the cult to Sebastopolis is not entirely clear from the inscription. As the neokoros in Neokaisareia was probably dedicated to Trajan, Antonius Rufus’s commitment to the worship of Hadrian may well have been a matter for the city of Sebastopolis itself, where the inscription was set up.59 The archpriest was an integral part of the imperial cult on the provincial level, as is attested by titles such as archiereus of Pontus or archiereus of Asia. Yet, as demonstrated by G. Frija in her study of the imperial cult on the civic level in Roman Asia, the title archiereus found its way into the civic cult from as early as the age of Augustus.60 It is, of course, not to be excluded that there was a cult to Hadrian apart from the neokoros cult to Trajan in Neokaisareia or, if a cult to Hadrian existed, that it was in Neokaisareia that Antonius Rufus served as archpriest.61 The inscription does not specify the city in which he served, as, for instance, archiereus tou Pontou, or as in the case of Claudius Chareisios, who in an inscription from Sebastopolis appears as the archiereus in Caesarea, which could imply that he was either the archpriest of the Cappadocian koinon or a priest in one of the imperial cults on the civic level.62 Instead, Rufus’s service as archiereus is mentioned in relation to the other tasks he fulfilled: the opening of the gymnasium and the sponsoring of animal and gladiatorial games, or his readiness, mentioned at the beginning of the inscription, to serve as archon, and his role as host of banquets at religious festivals. The commitment as Pontarch in Neokaisareia is the only reference to a specific location, suggesting that the rest of the activities took place in his hometown. Emperor worship in Sebastopolis is also attested by another inscription set up to an L. Antonius Satorneinus in the year 104 ce, who is honored both as archpriest and as the eponymous priest.63 How the cities engaged with the emperors of the first century is underlined by the trend of renaming the cities after the emperors or their titles. Apart from Neapolis, which changed its name to Neoclaudiopolis, Diospolis became Neokaisareia, Karana became Sebastopolis, and Megalopolis became Sebasteia. This phenomenon was widespread in the Pontic eparchies but

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was also a known phenomenon in Paphlagonia and Bithynia, where Gangra became Germanicopolis and Kaisareia became Hadrianopolis. On the Bithynian side of the border, Bithynion was turned into Claudiopolis while Kreteia took the name Flaviopolis. The decision to change the city’s original name to one that related either to a specific emperor or to the emperor’s title can be seen as a solid declaration of loyalty and as a sign that the inhabitants wished to express their devotion to the man or the dynasty in power and perhaps to the institution in broader terms. Seen in this light, the idea of cults and emperor worship was hardly an alien thought to members of the political elites who were also responsible for renaming the cities in the first place. The motives behind the inauguration of imperial cults in Pontus were the same as in the rest of the region. As illustrated by the oaths from Neapolis and Paphlagonia, the worship of the emperors in the Pontic cities was also a manifestation of loyalty both to the emperors and to Roman rule in general. As illustrated by the example of Antonius Rufus, members of the elites in Pontus may be seen as benefactors who accommodated a local wish to express loyalty to the emperor. Another and often neglected aspect of emperor worship was the opportunity of those involved to stand as representatives of Roman power and so as members of what we may call the local Roman elite. It is a widespread assumption that Greeks or provincials with a Greek cultural background had little to gain from what Rome had to offer culturally and were therefore less likely to identify themselves as Romans. This has led to the assumption that members of the civic elites were first and foremost loyal to their local communities, whose interests they represented in their dealings with Roman authorities. Even though several members of the elite were Roman citizens, there is a tendency to forget that those who were Romans belonged not only to a civic elite but also to what may be defined as the local Roman elite. The elites were therefore not simply elected agents who managed the cult on behalf of the communities to accommodate whatever expectations there might have been in Rome or in the cities, for that matter. Instead, even if they did fund the cults to underline the loyalty of both themselves and their fellow citizens, priests, koina leaders, and other benefactors, we need to see them as protagonists who, apart from representing the emperors and Roman rule, also underlined their membership of the empire’s elite. There was also in the Pontic hinterland a certain expectation that members of the elite maintain a cult at a certain level. There was, as is illustrated by inscriptions set up by grateful beneficiaries, considerable political capital to be gained from taking care of the costs. It was therefore not automatically

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an undivided declaration of loyalty to the emperor or to Roman rule when members of the local elite took it upon themselves to contribute to the upkeep of the cult. That said, the competition to draw the emperors’ attention by proposing new cults, the efforts invested in securing the honor of hosting the next neokoros, and the pride shown by cities when they succeeded all suggest that the cults and emperor worship in general represented more than simply a pragmatic attempt to reassure the emperor of a city’s loyalty. When Antonius Rufus invested considerable sums both as the Pontarch of Pontus and as the archpriest of the Hadrian cult in Sebastopolis, where he was celebrated for his lavish funding of hunting and gladiatorial games, he went further than what he and the city would have been able to get away with. As emperors, governors, and other Roman representatives were rare guests outside the major cities in Asia Minor, Rome had little if any way of knowing whether the cult was maintained, let alone organized, according to the proposal once presented to the emperor. Another important audience, apart from the emperors, of course, consisted of the inhabitants of the cities where cults were inaugurated, and also those living in the region, who had their own cults to compare them with. If the main purpose of the cults was simply to assure the emperor of the cities’ loyalty, there were other less demanding options, such as the oaths of loyalty that Pliny had the inhabitants in Pontus et Bithynia swear to Trajan every year (Plin. Ep. 10.100–101). As illustrated by the oath from Neapolis and examples of priests from Asia Minor who held Roman rights, Romans—Italians as well as Romans of local origin— worshipped Augustus in the same setting from at least as early as the late first century bce. Seen in a local context, the imperial cults united the community across legal and cultural divides in a common manifestation of loyalty and acknowledgment of the emperor and of his, as well as Rome’s, right to rule. Priests and other benefactors represented their hometowns in dealings with Rome, but as the provincial cults in particular needed Rome’s approval, those responsible represented an institution in which the emperors were not only honored, but also involved in whether and, if so, how the cults were to be organized. Therefore, even if emperor worship did build on Hellenic traditions and depend on local proposals, the entire framework of the cult from the first century bce was Roman. New cults had to be submitted to the emperors for them to know about the efforts being made, Roman magistrates supervised and tried to steer how cults were organized, and a large number of those in charge of the cults were recently enfranchised Romans of local origin.

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The Koina Another institution in the Pontic hinterland that revolved around Rome, the emperor, and Roman power in broader terms were the koina. Members of the councils were representatives of the cities and often recruited from the high end of the social scale.64 What was discussed in these settings and the kind of authority the council enjoyed, apart from matters relating to the imperial cult, is still an open question. It is also still uncertain how many different koina there were in Asia Minor during the imperial period or when exactly and on whose initiative the koina that we know of were introduced; we also do not know how many koina were in session at the same time. As discussed above, the koinon of Asia was responsible for the organization and upkeep of the Roma and Augustus cult in Pergamum. Judging from the festivals voted in honor of Roman generals and magistrates in the Republican period, the koinon in Asia was a reality sometime in the first half of the first century bce, and maybe even shortly after the province of Asia was established in the late 130s.65 Since the archaic period, Greek cities had gathered in federations and leagues in which member cities belonged to the same ethnic orientation. Yet, as pointed out by B. Edelmann-Singer, the provincial koina in Asia Minor mirrored a specific Greek prototype, but the koina in the Roman provinces were not in general modeled on one of these federations. Still, there are obvious parallels between the pre-Roman koina and the koina that were established as part of the provincial organization. This supports the notion that the institution of the koinon was a relic from Greek inter-civic politics. One aspect that both types of koina had in common was the organization of the ruler cult and the way both represent the interests of their members in dealings with hegemonic powers.66 The Ionian koinon is one example of a federation that may have served as a source of inspiration when the provincial koinon of Asia was organized. The league of Ionian cities dates back to the archaic period but the most obvious parallels to the koinon in Asia date to Alexander’s invasion of Asia Minor, where a group of thirteen cities honored the king with games that were held every year afterward.67 As pointed out by Edelmann-Singer, the koinon of the Ionian cities had an important religious function in organizing ruler cults and at the same time a political role as the institution that communicated the cities’ loyalty to the current ruler.68 Another element suggesting a significant degree of continuation between the pre-Roman and provincial koina is the

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way the title archiereus appears both in the cults to the Seleucid and Attalid kings and in the cults to the emperors.69 The link between the foundation of a province and the establishment of a koinon is not always as clear-cut as seems to be the case for Asia, and the continuity between a Hellenic past—in the Greek civic communities—and Roman rule was not always as obvious as it may have been to the political elite in Late Republican Asia. In Lycia, the koinon of the Lycians predates Claudius’s provincialization and the federation of cities dates back to the Hellenistic period,70 while the first reliable reference to a Bithynian koinon dates to the reign of Nero—sometime around the year 60 ce. Shortly thereafter, Bithyniarchs start to appear in the epigraphic record, but it was not until the reign of Hadrian that we have the first coins with references to a Bithynian koinon.71 The first evidence for a Pontic koinon is from the city of Amastris and dates to the early second century ce; references to imperial high priests and Pontarchs follow soon after in a number of cities across the province of Pontus et Bithynia.72 While a Republican koinon would be plausible in the case of Bithynia, it is less obvious that one large koinon represents all or most of the cities in the Pontic part of the province. Despite the lack of evidence to tie the koina to the early phase of the new provinces, it is no doubt too rash simply to conclude, as W. Metcalf did, that the koinon of Bithynia was not established before the Hadrianic period, or as J. Dalaison has, that the lack of pre-Trajanic references to a koinon in Pontus suggests that the institution was not established until the early second century ce.73 Apart from Nicaea, Prusa, and Prusias ad Hypium, the epigraphic material from Bithynia is sparse and the available inscriptions generally date to the imperial period. In the Pontic region the picture is much the same, both in the hinterland and along the coast. Apart from a few inscriptions, such as the oath of Neapolis, almost all the inscriptions date to the High Empire and most coins struck by the cities in the hinterland date to the second and early third centuries, after the cities had been “freed” from the rule of local dynasts and placed under direct Roman rule. Without specific references, any attempt to decide when a given institution was first established will depend on the earliest available evidence and to a considerable degree on an argument e silentio. There is a consensus among scholars that two koina, one for each part of the double province, were already established by the time Pompey reorganized Bithynia and Pontus. The argument rests largely on the assumption that Cassius Dio was indeed referring to a koinon in Bithynia when he described how the cult to Augustus was first introduced in western Asia Minor, and also on

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the assumption that Pompey’s reorganization of Bithynia and Pontus would follow the same standards as applied in Asia.74 In Bithynia the level of urban development was high. The cities were relatively close to each other and the influence from Greek culture meant that the idea of gathering in a confederation of cities was not unrealistic, even if there are no signs of a pre-Roman koinon in Bithynia. It is less obvious that a koinon covering the entire Pontic part of the province was introduced by the time Pompey reorganized the Pontic kingdom. Compared to Bithynia, the cities in the hinterland were still in a very early phase with a newly established political culture and new citizen bodies that could have been ill equipped to sit on a council together with members from the Bithynian elite or the elites from the colonies on the Black Sea coast. Other obstacles that would challenge the attempt to establish one koinon to represent the entire province were the distances and physical hurdles between the cities in Roman Pontus, in particular the mountains that separated the coastal region from the hinterland and constituted considerable natural barriers, complicating the line of communication between the cities of, say, Amastris and Nicopolis, or Sinope and Pompeiopolis. Traveling long distances was therefore a very demanding task for the average traveler and particularly unsustainable for shorter visits. Taking into consideration that the Digest operates on the basis that 30 kilometers is a day trip, it is worth noticing that the distance between Nicopolis and Amastris would involve more than sixteen days of continuous traveling by land and sea, which would have made a round trip well over thirty days.75 That sort of distance makes it unlikely that the member cities would have been able to participate in the different meetings or various festivals and therefore were unable to offer their manifestation of loyalty to the emperor. Another reason why a Pontic koinon in the Republican period makes less sense is that Pompey’s organization did not seem to take ethnic differences into account when Mithridates’ kingdom was turned into one large province. Apart from the people in the Pontic heartland, the new province included the old colonies on the coasts, Paphlagonia in the West, and Armenia Minor far to the East. At that time Rome had not yet begun to divide the region into smaller entities defined by their ethnic orientations, a practice that started when Caesar, or perhaps Agrippa, as part of the reorganization of Gaul, divided the Gallic people into three parts (Strabo 4.1.1). A final argument against a large koinon that would have included all of Pompey’s settlements is that Rome or Pompey had no reason to offer what were still some of their former enemies a new reason or a formal forum to meet and draw up a common

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Figure 4. The Isfendiyar mountain chain near the city of Boyabat in the modern province of Sinop. The mountains stood as a barrier separating the Pontic hinterland from the coastal area and plains leading on to ancient Sinope. Photo Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen.

view against the new political organization in the area, which would still have been very fragile indeed. Even if Pompey, some of the early governors in the province, or local forces in the region did manage to establish a provincial koinon, which would have included all or most of the region’s city-states, the institution is unlikely to have continued after Antony dissolved the province. There was no reason for the new client rulers to maintain a form of organization in which the cities they obtained from Antony were in a league with other cities and even less reason for them to allow their cities to form alliances with cities outside their kingdoms. Nor is a large koinon, if it ever existed, likely to have been reestablished in its earlier form when territories and cities were added to Galatia or Cappadocia. Instead, evidence from the imperial period seems to suggest that several koina covered the area of Pompey’s former province. A koinon of Paphlagonia is attested by the coinage of the koinon in the time of Domitian and from the few inscriptions that referred to the koinon itself, to the priests and Paphlagoniarchs, and to games held by the koinon of Paphlagonia.76

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Another koinon was established in Armenia Minor as early as the late first century ce, presumably after the year 71 or 72, when the eparchy of Armenia Minor was added to Roman Cappadocia.77 In Armenia, the koinon is attested by the inscription set up to Julius Patruinus who was honored as Armeniarch and as first among the Hellenes—the first among the citizens in Nicopolis— and by inscriptions that testify to the city’s status as having two neokoroi.78 The regional organization of the Pontic heartland is still a matter of much debate. Scholars are mainly divided into two schools. One approach, the unitarian theory, argues that in the imperial period Pontus (here understood as the largely Pontic part of Pompey’s double province) was represented by one single koinon.79 The other approach, the analytical tradition, argues that the former province was divided into several different koina that were simultaneously active.80 Each school of thought, most noticeably the analytical tradition, is again divided in different attempts to reconstruct the different koina: the relationship between cities and the different councils, and which cities functioned as the centers or main seats of the council activities.81 The arguments in favor of one large koinon for all of the Pontic heartland in the imperial period are threefold. First, there are no specific geographical or ethnic designations to distinguish different Pontic koina from each other, and the leaders, no matter where they came from, are all referred to as Pontarchs. Had there been more than one Pontic koinon one could reasonably expect that some form of regional differentiation was needed or desired. Second, the appointment as both Pontarch and Bithynarch was quite common, suggesting a connection to Pompey’s province. Third, the use of the term ponticus suggests a common Pontic identity or sense of “ponticness,” which was essentially a Roman invention and therefore once more related to the coming of Rome and Pompey’s organization of the region.82 The lack of geographical specifications to distinguish one Pontic koinon from the others is no doubt remarkable, and even if it is acknowledged that these entities had a very local orientation, it is still odd from an administrative point of view that so little effort is made to specify the individual koina or clarify which koina the various Pontarchs represented. On the other hand, the theory that appointments as both Bithynarch and Pontarch testify to a tight connection between a Pontic koinon and the province is not without problems. As recently pointed out by S. L. Sørensen, all examples where members of the local elites served as both Bithynarch and Pontarch are from cities within the province of Pontus et Bithynia.83 That no one from, say, Neapolis, Neokaisareia, or one of the other cities in the hinterland was both

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Bithynarch and Pontarch suggests that a Pontic koinon at the Black Sea coast had a tight connection to Bithynia and the provincial organization of Pontus et Bithynia, while other koina in the hinterland had less or no connection with Bithynia, to which the hinterland had no formal affiliation after Antony’s reorganization in 30s bce. One attractive theory is that the word Pontici—invented by the Romans as an ethnic term for the people living in Roman Pontus—could suggest that the entire region was represented by a single koinon across the provincial borders.84 S. Mitchell has pointed out that the inhabitants in the kingdom of Mithridates never used the term Pontikoi but were known as Cappadocians, for instance, in the writings of later Greek historians, such as Appian, who used the term in his account of the Mithridatic wars.85 Rome’s invention of a collective ethnic term for what corresponded to the core of the Mithridatic kingdom and its people, and for administrative entities such as Pontus Polemonianus or Pontus Galaticus, could therefore suggest that there was a link between a koinon in the hinterland and Pompey’s provincial organization in the 60s bce. The analytical approach and the theory of how several koina operated in the Pontic hinterland rest essentially on circumstantial evidence. One of the arguments against the unitarian theory is that not every reference to a Pontic koinon can have referred to the same institution. References to Pontarchs in Moesia Inferior on the western Black Sea coast, which never formed a part of the Pompey’s province, suggest that at least two koina used the name Pontus and existed simultaneously.86 Another part of the argument against the unitarian theory is that there is evidence that Pompey’s former province was divided between different koina in the imperial period. A coin series struck in the reign of Septimius Severus by the city of Neokaisareia—the metropolis of the eparchy Pontus Mediterraneus—has an image with six tychai on the reverse. Based on the image and the legend “KOIN PONT NEOKAI METRO,” it has been argued that the seated tyche was the metropolis with the other member states standing around her.87 The image on the coin has led to much debate among scholars and a vivid discussion as to whether the six figures represented the exact number of member cities of the koinon or whether the number of tychai should be read as an abbreviation, due to the lack of space, of a larger number of cities and could then refer to a koinon with more than six member cities.88 If the six tychai refer to the exact number of member states, this would mean that the koinon represented only a part of the cities in the region. The many references

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Figure 5. Coin from Neokaisareia, the metropolis of Pontus Mediterraneus. The image shows six tychai, five standing and one seated in the middle. This has has led scholars to assume that the seated tyche represents the city of Neokaisareia. Photo: Gorny & Mosch Giessener Münzhandlung GmbH auction 229, 2015, lot 1527 (photography: Lübke & Wiedemann KG, Stuttgart).

to Pontarchs and koina in other parts of the former province would then have to refer to other koina. In his analysis of the North Anatolian koina, Marek points to the koina in Armenia Minor and Paphlagonia and introduces the theory that the koina in imperial Pontus were related not to Pompey’s double province or any of the provinces established in the imperial period but to the different eparchies that were introduced as part of the imperial reorganization. Based on the two koina on the edges of Pompey’s province, Marek develops a theory that the two Pontic eparchies, Pontus Galaticus and Pontus Polemonianus, had their own koina until sometime in the first half of the second century when they were merged into one eparchy, Pontus Mediterraneus, and added to Cappadocia.89 The main objection to a large overreaching Pontic koinon in the imperial period is once again the geographical and logistic implications of an administrative entity of that size. Even if the lines of communication had improved considerably between the 60s and 50s bce and from the first century into the second century ce, the distances between the member cities were still considerable. The distance between the cities Neapolis and Megalopolis was three days, and journeys from Amastris to Amaseia or from Sinope to Neokaisareia would require more than a week of traveling through unfriendly mountainous terrain and large deserted areas, where cities were few and far between. It is also true that some of the council members of the koinon of Asia would have traveled over long distances to participate in the meetings, but the opportunity to go by sea along the coast, the close web of cities in the thoroughly urbanized Asia, where one could spend the night with friends, and the relative proximity of the major cities made such a journey less demanding and considerably less dangerous. In order to be truly influential, both as a host of

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the imperial cult and as a channel of communication between the Roman authorities and local communities, the councils had to represent the entire entity, at least in some form or other. If a considerable number of the member cities were prevented from participating, the institution would lose both its legitimacy and its value locally, as the cities would not feel represented by the council and so would be less likely to contribute to its activities. In the eyes of the Roman authorities, such a scenario would be unattractive, as the activities in the koinon, for instance, in regard to the imperial cult, would not represent the entire koinon. Following the analytical approach, the entities were smaller and the distances were therefore easier to overcome. In such a setup, the council members were more likely to attend the meetings, which would ensure the council wider authority when it performed rituals or spoke on behalf of the cities it represented. It is odd, though, that none of the Pontic koina refer to the eparchy that they would have belonged to, and this raises the question why, for example, the koinon mentioned on the coin from Neokaisareia is not referred to as the koinon of Pontus Mediterraneus. If the analytical theory is correct, there was another Pontic koinon representing the cities on the coast. The populations in Neokaisareia, Sebastopolis, and Amaseia may not have given a lot of thought to the fact that another koinon met hundreds of miles away and went under the name Pontus. What made the different koina in Pontus stand out from each other were the names of the cities, which hosted the temples to the imperial cult. Seen in that light, it is convincing that in the imperial period there was more than one koinon representing the cities in the former Roman Pontus and also in the Pontic heartland, and that the first koina were established as the region was gradually brought back under direct Roman control. That the koina assumed a prominent role in the neokoroi cults is a wellestablished fact, as attested by various coin series and a considerable amount of epigraphic material. Yet the role performed by the koina, apart from activities related to the imperial cult, and the authority or responsibility assigned to the councilors, is far less obvious, and it is still an open question what sort of administrative or political functions the councils fulfilled in relation to Roman authorities. The attempt to decide the functions of the councils is complicated by the nature of the available evidence, which mostly refers to decisions made by the councils: decisions to honor priests and emperors, or activities related to festivals and the performance of rituals in the imperial cults.90 Much of what we know about the koina originates from passing remarks in historic accounts, such as the one offered by Tacitus on the temple in Smyrna, or from coins and

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inscriptions that draw attention to certain neokoroi or commemorate different priests and Pontarchs for their commitment either to the cults or to the koina. From the available coins and inscriptions, one gets the impression of an institution that took a leading role in the planning and upkeep of the neokoroi cults with all the activities and rituals involved. But how was such upkeep of the cults and temples, which seems to have been assigned to specific cities, funded? Apart from individual donations and the costs that priests and koinon leaders were expected to cover, councils may have been able to collect funds both from the member cities and from landholdings that at least some of the neokoroi encompassed.91 It is difficult to say how much the individual cities and the land that belonged to the neokoroi could contribute, and it must have differed considerably from one koinon to another. Koina with a large number of wealthy cities were no doubt able to generate larger sums from their member states or from interested individuals than smaller koina, such as the koinon in Armenia where Nicopolis was essentially the only city to cover the cost.92 In reality, the upkeep of the cult and the activities that followed came from wealthy individuals such as Antonius Rufus, who contributed substantially to the imperial cult both on the level of the koina and in his hometown. It is therefore reasonable to assume that most of the funds, at least in the smaller koina, came from the cities’ own elites either as “gifts” or as regular donations. Antonius Rufus is one example of a very generous citizen who handsomely paid for all kinds of public expenditures.93 If the funds necessary to organize festivals and other cult activities rested on the generosity of wealthy individuals, the koina, or at least the smaller ones, were relatively weak and vulnerable to the agendas of these benefactors. In other words, the social class with the necessary resources to take on the expenses as koina leaders were essentially the urban elite.94 Their role as the ones who guaranteed that the worship of the emperors met a certain standard gave those involved considerable power both on the regional level and in the cities they represented. In the Pontic eparchies, such wealthy families were fewer in number than in Asia or Bithynia and therefore able to use a lower level of competition to acquire an even stronger degree of influence. The fewer alternatives that the council members could turn to allowed men like Antonius Rufus to have considerable influence over communication with emperors and other Roman representatives, and also over any new proposal of cults or festivals in honor of the emperor, as they were the ones who were to fund the events if such proposals were approved.

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The role and the influence that the koina could require varied from region to region. To a large extent, it depended on the number of individuals with funds large enough to invest in activities of the koina. In Asia and in Bithynia, where there were numerous member cities and families with considerable wealth, the koina were less dependent on the generosity of a few individuals. The competition among members of the Asian elite and the economic means of cities such as Ephesus, Pergamum, Miletus, and Smyrna provided the koinon of Asia with alternatives if some of the council members were asking too high a price to lead the koinon, did not organize the cult activities to the expected standard, or proved too eager to promote their own political agenda or that of their hometown. Also, the competition between and within the member cities and among the koinon members on the council meant that the koinon of Asia would have more financial means, simply because a numerically larger elite, in order to position themselves at home as well as on the council, had to compete more vigorously to secure a leading role in the cult and on the koina. As a result, the council as a whole was able to put stronger pressure on certain individuals and on certain cities, which, for whatever reason, went against the common course. The circumstances in the smaller eparchies are likely to have been different. Here, the koina would have had to settle for what they could get and be grateful to those who took it upon themselves to fund festivals and other activities related to the imperial cults. As demonstrated by the inscription that the people of Sebastopolis set up to Antonius Rufus, he was very much involved in running the city and served both as magistrate and as a very considerable benefactor on whom the city heavily relied. Consequently, these koina were less able to challenge the plans and the conduct of priests and koinon leaders, simply because the number of individuals with power and resources was smaller. Where a few individual koinon members would have been unable or considerably less likely to dictate the course of events in Asia, this was more likely the reality in smaller entities such as Pontus Galaticus or Pontus Polemonianus, where the pool of men with the necessary wealth to represent the eparchies was much smaller. Another question is the kinds of dealings that the different koina and their leaders had with the Roman authorities. Once again the available evidence is both limited and indecisive. There are few obvious references to instances where a koinon was negotiating directly with the emperors or other Roman authorities and, as has been pointed out recently, the koina had no practice of displaying letters from the emperors publicly—for instance, by

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setting inscriptions with answers to petitions or other requests in the city centers.95 It is also worth noting that Pliny did not refer to a single petition from the koina in Pontus et Bithynia to Trajan, and there is no letter addressing the lack of payments from cities or individuals, which at least questions the notion that the cities in Pontus et Bithynia would have paid a fixed sum yearly to be part of the koinon.96 There is, of course, no reason to assume that book 10 contains the entire correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, and the lack of references to dealings with koina may mean that Pliny was able to solve dealings with the koina without consulting Trajan. Yet the complete absence of any reference to the koina still suggests that Pliny had very few dealings with the two koina in his province, which then would mean that the council did not raise issues with the governor on behalf of their member cities, except, again, when it came to matters concerning the neokoroi cults or related activities. One of the functions allocated to the koina was the right to prosecute governors after their time in office had expired.97 Once again the evidence is not conclusive. The term koinon or concilium in Latin appears only once in the context of a repetundae case when Pliny, in a letter to Caecilius Macrinus, describes how the representatives of the Bithynian concilium arrived in Rome with a decree to terminate a case against Bithynia’s former governor (Plin. Ep. 7.6). Instead of referring explicitly to the koinon or concilium, those who instigated the repetundae case appear under the terms Bithynians, Lycians, or the people of Asia. Cases against the governor could be filed by individuals, or single cities, or on behalf of the province, and scholars generally interpret the provincial designation as evidence that it was the koina or concilium which, as an overarching institution, took the lead in cases where the province came together to prosecute a governor. The few explicit references to the koina in relation to repetundae cases are remarkable and raise the question whether the koina did indeed assume a leading role when such cases were tried.98 Yet there is evidence to indicate that the koina sometimes played a central role when governors were prosecuted, even if it was far from always the case. As everyone had the right to prosecute the governor without any institutional help, the koinon was in no way indispensable.99 One example in which a koinon seems to have been involved in the prosecution of governors or other Roman officials is when Tiberius instructed the Senate to hear the complaint filed against the emperor’s own procurator Lucilius Capito, put forward by the provincials of Asia. The Asians won the case and Capito was presumably convicted for having wrongfully acquired the

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powers of a governor.100 It is here that the cities in Asia, Asiae urbes, voted for the temple in honor of the emperor, his mother, and the Senate as a sign of gratitude for support in the case against Capito and against Gaius Silanus the year before. In his account of the case against Silanus, Tacitus uses the word socii when he refers to how the Asians filed the complaint (Tac. Ann. 3.66). Tacitus offers no explicit reference to the council of Asia. The reference to how the cities in Asia voted a new neokoros temple is the closest we get to a reference to the koinon of Asia. Yet it should be noted that just because the koinon decided to offer a temple in honor of the Senate, Tiberius, and Livia, it does not automatically mean that the council was behind the two repetundae cases in the first place. Instead, the koinon may have proposed the cult and included the Senate as a way to repair whatever damage these repetundae cases might have done to the relationship between Asia and the Senate. Even if leading men in the Senate worked for his conviction, Silanus was still a governor appointed by the Senate. It would by no means be surprising if the political elite in Rome did not welcome cases against their peers, as illustrated by Pliny’s sneering remark about how the ungrateful Bithynians had instigated a new repetundae case, this time against his friend Varenus Rufus, who, as Bithynia’s former proconsul, had helped the Bithynians organize a previous case against Julius Bassus (Plin. Ep. 5.20). However, because the council seems to be the only institution in which the Asian cities could make a joint decision, and particularly as it involved the vote for a new cult, this time to Tiberius, it may well have been the koinon of Asia that filed the complaints against Capito and Silanus on behalf of the entire province. The case instigated against Varenus Rufus is one incident that involved the koinon. In his letter to Macrinus, Pliny describes how the Bithynians had now decided to drop the case against Varenus. In his account of events, Pliny describes how an envoy from Bithynia had just arrived with a decree from the concilium to stop the case against Varenus. That the koinon made an effort to abandon the trial has led to the conclusion that the koinon had not instigated the case in the first place. Instead, the council had the power to stop the procedure by sending a decree, presumably with some sort of support for Varenus, to Rome.101 The question is not an easy one to resolve. From Pliny’s account it is reasonable to conclude that it was not the koinon that filed the case against Varenus in the first place. Why then would they send a decree to Rome in support of the accused, which in effect sabotaged the case Fonteius Magnus led on behalf of other Bithynian plaintiffs? It cannot, of course, be discounted that there was a disagreement in the koinon on whether to accuse Varenus

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or not, which then caused some of the cities to file the complaint on their own initiative and other cities to formulate support for the governor. Such disagreement as to whether to prosecute the governors is discussed by Dio Chrysostom, who warns the citizens in Nicomedia that their dispute with the Nicaeans could weaken their chances of having corrupt governors convicted if the accused were able to play the leading cities off against one another. If, on the other hand, Nicaea and Nicomedia worked together they would be able to dominate the other cities and allow future trials a better chance.102 It is altogether convincing that the koinon of Bithynia was not behind the case against Varenus, but that does not mean that the councils were excluded or refrained from instigating repetundae cases against the governors. What it means is that the koinon of Bithynia was not behind this particular case. That the term Bithyni, or any other provincial or ethnical designation, should not be read simply as a synonym for the koinon is an important correction to the general trend among scholars to see the prosecution of governors as one of the koinon’s main tasks.103 Yet there is evidence to suggest that the koinon could and did file cases against corrupt governors on behalf of the entire province. In the letters where he describes the case against Varenus, Pliny uses the word Bithyni as a term to describe both the koinon and the Bithynians who filed the case in the first place, which suggests that Pliny did not draw a distinction between the koinon or its members and other Bithynians acting on their own initiative. When Pliny refers to the Bithyni in the case against Julius Bassus, it may therefore have been the koinon that filed this complaint (Plin. Ep. 5.20). Another element to suggest that the koina instigated repetundae cases is how provinciae appears as a synonym for concilium, such as when Avidius Nigrinus, the advocate of the Bithynian plaintiffs, refers to the koinon and its envoys as veri legati provinciae, the real representatives of the province, just as he refers to the decree from the koinon as the decree from the province “decretum provinciae.” That Pliny saw a parallel between provinciae and koinon therefore further suggests that he saw the koina as the institutions that represented the province—such as, for instance, when the council decided, on behalf of the province, to instigate procedures against governors. It is true, as argued by Bekker-Nielsen, that not all provinces had a concilium but were able, nonetheless, to instigate repetundae cases.104 Yet, in provinces where the koina constituted a supra-civic structure, the council would be the institution to file a joint case against a governor as no other political organ that we know of had the authority to speak or act on behalf of the entire province.

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It is one thing that the koina had the right to instigate repetundae cases against a former governor but quite another how often a council was able to find common grounds among its members or gather enough of the cities to get behind the trial. The case filed against Varenus may testify to how there were different interests within the koinon. Pliny’s account of the case and how it develops gives the impression of a divided provincial community, where some forces within the province, or in the koinon, wished to file a case against the governor, while another part of the council, perhaps the majority or the most influential members, acted to stop the case by sending a decree in support of Varenus. As in the case of the neokoroi cults, the authority of the koina depended largely on the cooperation of member cities and on individual council members. There was no centrally organized tax collection to fund the activities of the koina; the councils would only have had the funds that the member cities could agree to supply, plus any means made available by individual benefactors, and perhaps a surplus from landholdings. Without sufficient funds, the council’s ability to proceed against governors and other Roman representatives depended therefore largely on the efforts of individuals or on individual cities and their readiness to lead these activities or cover expenses in Rome. If no one offered to go to Rome, there was no case and the governors would avoid prosecution: that reality left the koina, particularly those in the small eparchies with fewer cities, in a vulnerable position. Because cities and individuals could prosecute governors without including the koinon and because the councils may not always have had enough financial means to prosecute the governors, repetundae cases instigated by the decision of a koinon needed support from wealthy individuals and some sort of agreement between at least the most influential cities in order to be filed, let alone carried through, to the legal procedures in Rome. In eparchies or provinces with few cities and fewer wealthy individuals with the resources or the political capital required to lead a case against a corrupt governor (who might well be a respectable and influential senator) in Rome, the koina may often have been unable to instigate the cases, particularly if the governor managed to secure support from one of the leading member cities or among some of the most influential citizens there. What obligations the koinon had other than activities related to the imperial cults and occasional dealings with repetundae cases remains unclear. The koina sent embassies to the emperor either to congratulate him on his accession, or to ensure him of the region’s loyalty and support, or to show their gratitude for favors, or to ask for permission, for instance, to honor him with

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some kind of cultic activity.105 Another task in which some koina engaged was generating coins. Such an activity required the necessary funds to supply the metal and a decision-making process to decide the motifs and the size of the series that were to be put in circulation.106 Issuing series on behalf of all the member cities was another way of honoring emperors and assuring Rome’s first citizen that the whole entity was loyal to him. Coins that tied the emperor or emperor worship together with the koina and the people in the region, as, for instance, in the case of the Macedonians, are a manifestation of the loyalty of those involved, their particular identity as an ethnos, and their rightful place within the empire.107 Again, the effect of such series or the extent to which they were able to influence the views of the average population or those outside the region who might come into possession of one or two of these coins should not be overemphasized. What was important was the message that the local elites hoped to send by issuing the series that commemorated that the cities or the people had agreed to honor the emperor across the entire entity.108 When seen collectively, the koinon as an institution stands out as a body in which representatives from the member cities discussed various matters related to dealings with the Roman authorities. Therefore it was an institution that served as a channel of communication between the provincial community, the emperor, and the imperial administration. Members of the koina met with the emperor either as he passed through the region or when individuals from the koina took it upon themselves to fund a delegation to visit the emperor in Rome or wherever he was residing at the time. Another task was to negotiate with Roman authorities, as in the case where Maximus made the koinon change Asia’s calendar. The koinon of Asia negotiated with representatives from Rome when Valerius Naso was sent by the Senate to oversee the construction of the temple to Tiberius, Livia, and the Senate in Smyrna. It was Smyrna that won the honor of the temple, but because the temple was a neokoros, it is only logical that the koinon must have been involved, at least by the time the temple was being finished. At that moment the koinon leadership would have negotiated with the Roman authorities on how to organize the cult and then assumed the religious responsibility for the temple and the new cult. The organization of the koina in the eastern provinces was inspired by an already-existing practice among Greek cities of gathering in leagues or confederations, often with a common ethnic origin. Despite the obvious parallels, the organization of the Roman koina was not a replica of existing Greek confederations. First of all, the provincial koina were not only a cluster of cities

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of shared ethnic origin but included all or most of the cities in a province or eparchy.109 In Republican Asia, members of the civic elites may have been able to recognize the outline of existing Greek practice and the traditions of organizing cities in leagues. But the decision to include all the cities of Asia in the same koinon is most likely something that the Roman authorities in the region would have encouraged. If the koinon in Bithynia dated back to the Republican period, the Greek tradition behind the introduction of civic confederations may also have been recognized. Yet, as there seems to have been no tradition of leagues of autonomous cities in royal Bithynia, the knowledge of the koinon institution would have been less evident to the Bithynians in the 70s and 60s than it was to the inhabitants in, for example, Ephesus and Miletus by the end of the second century bce. A koinon in Bithynia is therefore likely to have been a measure introduced or encouraged by the Romans, who hoped to establish the same form of organization as that in Asia. If the Bithynian koinon, instead, dates to the imperial period, either from as early as the reign of Augustus or later on in the Julio-Claudian period, it was certainly a Roman institution that was introduced as part of a provincewide cult to the emperor. To the council member from Prusa and the archpriest from the city of Nicaea—who were ready to spend considerable sums of money on the neokoros cult—it mattered little that the Ionian cities had also joined forces to worship Alexander. What was important to them was the contemporary significance of the cult and their part in it. How a koinon was inspired by Greek traditions of supra-civic organization would have been even less familiar to the population in the Pontic hinterland, where both the number of Greek settlers and the influence of Greek culture in general were modest. If Pompey founded a koinon that included all the cities in the Pontic part of the new province, only a few in the hinterland would have known that the institution rested on a Greek tradition. As argued above, it is more likely that the various koina in the hinterland were established sometime between the reign of Augustus and the Flavians when Pompey’s old province was reintroduced to the empire piece by piece. Again, if that were the case, the main purposes of the koina were oriented toward the emperors or toward Roman rule in broader terms. With no previous experience of Greek civic culture and very little actual knowledge of how the Ionian cities or other Greek cities organized ruler cults or tried to strengthen their political potential, the koina in the Pontic hinterland, Paphlagonia, or Lesser Armenia are likely to have come across as institutions that were closely associated to Roman power, because all the activities of the koina that we know of

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relate to the Romans. In that sense, the Greek tradition behind the provincial councils may have been just as recognizable to the inhabitants of Pompeiopolis, Neapolis, and Nicopolis as it was to the inhabitants of the Three Gauls. As in the case of emperor worship, it is reasonable to assume that the decision to establish formal federations of cities, eparchies, and different ethnoi found inspiration in the way some Greek cities had formed leagues in order to strengthen their position against the pressure from hegemonic powers. Yet, while the Ionian koinon was a foundation of thirteen autonomous Ionian cities, the koinon in Roman Asia and the other koina established as part of the provincial organization were all communities that included distant and ethnically diverse cities with very little in common apart from a shared Greek heritage and their submission to Rome. The notion that the cities in Asia, or Bithynia for that matter, were able suddenly to establish working federations of cities across the entire province is challenged by the lack of proof that the provincial koina were established on the cities’ own initiative. Apart from their Greek heritage and the fact that they were now part of the same administrative entity, the cities had very little in common.110 How, for instance, would Ephesus and Pergamum have been able to gather all the cities in the province of Asia and have them join a common federation that would represent them all in Asia’s dealings with Rome, if Rome had not played an active role in setting it up? That does not mean that governors in the late second and early first centuries had to force the cities in Asia to establish provincial communities or that Rome introduced a supra-civic level against the will of the cities. Yet in a climate dominated by generations of inter-city rivalry, envy, and mistrust, the establishment of provincial councils that embraced every city in the province required a strong political force to cut through everyday disputes—something Rome would have been better equipped to do. Another course of consideration is how the cities in the Pontic hinterland would have come up with the idea of forming communities of cities on their own without interference from the Roman authorities. In a Republican setting it is unrealistic that the population in Pompey’s newly founded cities would have had the knowledge or the resources to establish supra-civic institutions in a region that size. One would expect that the newly established citizen bodies were busy enough meeting the challenges of organizing political life in their hometowns, and it is difficult to see why cities on the Black Sea coast would have felt better represented or in any way politically stronger had they formed a community that included the people in Pompey’s hinterland settlements. By the time the Pontic hinterland was back under direct Roman rule, provincial

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councils and the organization of an inter-civic institution were well-established administrative phenomena, which Rome provided when a new part of the old Pontic province was added to one of the provinces in the region. Another issue is how the koina and the activities they organized influenced life in the regions they represented. Unlike the pre-Roman koina, the provincial councils seem to have been established with the sole purpose of serving as a link between Rome and the cities within the koinon. The attention of the koinon was, at least as far as we can tell, oriented toward matters that, in one form or another, related either to the emperor or more broadly to Roman rule. Not all members of the koinon were Roman citizens, but many of them were and even if council membership was not as exclusive as the college of imperial archpriests or the koinon leadership, the councils still offered the privileged few membership of an institution in which the region’s elites, often the local Roman elite, gathered to discuss how they were to negotiate with the Roman authorities. Although the council members represented their cities and their administrative entity in their dealings with the emperors and other Roman representatives, they also represented Roman power when deciding how to organize the imperial cults, whether to instigate a case against the governor, or what sort of message they would try to convey on the coin series they had just decided to mint. Not only were many council members Roman citizens and members of the political class—privileges that already made them stand out from their fellow citizens—but they also invested considerable sums in the promotion and celebration of Roman power, funds that could have been spent on the worship of other, perhaps more local, gods or on other projects in the cities. All these activities were funded out of their own pockets or by funds they and their peers had agreed to transfer from the cities to the councils. As Roman citizens, members of the councils shared the same legal status as the governors and other Roman representatives, at least from the end of the first century ce into the beginning of the second, when Roman citizenship was becoming more widespread across Asia Minor. Therefore, when council members could not agree to prosecute a governor or decided not to, they may well have been seen to be protecting one of their own and as such were out of touch with the rest of the population in the cities, including the part of the political elite that was unable to make it further than local politics. It might well have been a disagreement between the koinon of Bithynia and forces outside the council that caused the koinon in Bithynia to work against the prosecution of Varenus Rufus. According to Pliny, Varenus had helped Bithynians organize the case against Julius Bassus, something that may have

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earned Varenus enough backing from the council in general to secure the needed support that would then weaken the case against him, however justified it may have been (Plin. Ep. 5.20). What the koina provided, at least after the point at which the majority of the provincial elite were Roman citizens, was a framework in which the predominantly local Roman elite accommodated Roman power and the rule of the emperor in the setting of the local and regional context. This would not mean that the councils or the members accepted everything that came from Rome or always protected their governors against prosecutions from parties outside the councils. The remarks by Dio Chrysostom and the many examples of local Romans behind the case against governors suggest otherwise.111 As Romans themselves and members of the provincial elite, those who made it onto the councils had little reason not to speak up if they felt they had been wronged. It was a demanding and expensive task to prosecute a governor or make a formal complaint against one of Rome’s representatives, but the evidence shows that it was done on a regular basis. It is too often ignored that being Roman and a member of the elite in a system dominated by a political agenda formulated by Rome was much admired in provincial communities across the empire, including provinces in the East where the influence of Greek culture dominated everyday life.112 As a membership available to the privileged few, being part of the provincial council, a Roman citizen, and a member of the provincial elite added new layers to the identity of those who had the means to join what was essentially a very exclusive club. The fortunate few members were not only allowed to join the empire’s ruling elite, but were also offered yet another opportunity to distance themselves further from the average inhabitants in the city and the politically active part of the cities who sat on the councils or held some of the less prestigious magistracies on the civic cursus honorum. In that light, the provincial koinon, despite its origin in Greek political thinking, was an institution where members of the Roman elite negotiated how to both accommodate and promote the rule of Rome within their home communities.

The Influence of the Greeks Another part of the cities’ frameworks consisted of cultural and religious institutions, of which some were Greek while others were Anatolian or Iranian, reaching Pontus either from Armenia or from the court of the Pontic kings.

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Any attempt to decide when the different institutions were first set up and how long it took for them to be established is complicated by the lack of evidence up to the late first century and early second century ce. Yet the picture that emerges from the epigraphic and numismatic evidence is of a civic culture in which the influence of Greek culture was becoming more prominent. Just as it is unclear when exactly the civic landscape and public buildings started to materialize, the lack of systematic surveys and excavations in the region mean that there is little available evidence to determine how the cities developed architecturally or, for that matter, the kinds of institutions that were introduced. One exception is Pompeiopolis, where a combination of geophysical analysis and strategic excavation offers a solid understanding of how the cities were laid out and enough evidence to support the hypothesis that the monumentalization of the city took place sometime during the second century.113 The boom in the city’s architecture might have been tied to the activities of Claudius Severus, Pompeiopolis’s patron in the mid-second century, who married the daughter of Marcus Aurelius and pursued a successful career in the imperial administration.114 The evidence of considerable building activity in a location with few prior activities and no detectable settlement pattern may be read as evidence that a new part was added to the old city in the second century. As discussed in Chapter 2, the cities’ turbulent history from the moment Antony dissolved the province in the 30s bce to the moment the cities were once again back under Roman rule suggests that the process may well have been slow. On the other hand, the influence of Greek culture was surely felt long before the second century ce. As suggested by the oath from Neapolis, by the end of the first century bce Greek was the administrative language in the cities, which then seemed to follow the pattern from Galatia, where the epigraphic language was Greek. Yet, as pointed out by Mitchell, the habit of setting up inscriptions in Greek should not too readily be interpreted as a sign that local tongues died out or that Greek, for that matter, was the only or the dominant language in the region, perhaps not even in the cities. Inscriptions in Greek were part of the epigraphic practice, and in the case of Galatia there is evidence to suggest that Celtic continued as an active language throughout the imperial period.115 What the inscriptions in Greek show is that the political elite in the cities were familiar with Greek up to the point that they were expected to be able to read it and to set up texts in Greek conveying a high level of information, as, for instance, the Res Gestae on the neokoros in Ancyra

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or the imperial oath in Neapolis. As Deiotaus and other members of the Anatolian aristocracy read and enjoyed Greek in the second and first centuries bce, so would families in the new Pontic cities over time have acquired the language skills, and the texts, to read Greek and familiarize themselves with Greek literary classics, making Greek a key element in some people’s everyday lives and a marker of cultural and intellectual skills.116 The gymnasium is an example of one institution introduced into the cities’ urban landscapes. As has been pointed out by J. König, the gymnasium was one of the most important Greek institutions in the Roman empire.117 Here the cities’ men and ephebes met to exercise, discuss politics, and listen to readings and lectures that would prepare the youth for public life.118 As the Greek cities lost their political independence and consequently the “right” or the “need” to wage war on their own account, military training was no longer as essential as when the survival of the state had depended on its citizens’ ability to fight together in the phalanx. Still, military training together with athletic exercise continued as key elements in the education of the youth, of which the best could represent their cities at festivals and contests either in the region or across the empire.119 The gymnasium offered a link to pre-Roman Hellas and was a space where Greek traditions and values were rehearsed. It served to underline the ties that the inhabitants had to the Greek world.120 Apart from offering a link to a Greek cultural heritage, in the imperial period the gymnasium became an even more elitist community, where the elites sent their sons to prepare them intellectually for life in local politics. Here in these settings, members of the elite spent their time on physical exercise or studying music, literature, or other academic topics to embrace the virtues of Greek culture.121 As military training was no longer a prerequisite for the survival of the state, the gymnasium was to an even greater degree an institution where members of the elite could display their social and economic status by spending their resources and time on activities that were not essential for the upkeep of daily life.122 From the Pontic hinterland we know of two gymnasia, one in Pompeiopolis and one in Sebastopolis, where the inscription to Antonius Rufus mentions his commitment to the institution and suggests that he may have been the one who opened the gymnasium for the first time (IGR 3.115). There is no way of knowing whether other cities in the region all had gymnasia of their own or, if they did, whether ephebeia were attached to them. A gymnasium was one of the Greek institutions that most cities would have been able to afford. Depending on the ambition and the resources available, gymnasia required little more than an open space for exercise and few

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buildings for changing and teaching and were therefore less demanding than theaters, temples, or baths. The costs of teachers and trainers and of oil for lamps and rubbing, on the other hand, were more difficult to obtain, particularly in regions with no olive production. In order to have a gymnasium, cities therefore needed men like Antonius Rufus or the Severi in Pompeiopolis to cover the costs, and it is telling that Sebastopolis had to wait until the middle of the second century before it seemingly got its first gymnasium—if indeed Antonius Rufus was the one to open the city’s first gymnasium.123 Another part of Greek culture that assumed a leading role in Pompey’s settlements consisted of the cults to the traditional Greek gods and heroes. With a lack of architectural remains to draw on, coins issued by the cities in the course of the High Empire, mostly between the reign of Trajan and the Severi, offer at least an idea of how the religious landscapes were organized.124 One of the more popular Greek gods in the region was Tyche of the city, the goddess of civic organization, who, judging by the coins, was worshipped or honored in most cities in the region.125 The importance of Tyche is particularly apparent in the city of Zela, where an image of Tyche is depicted as a statue in a tetrastyle temple, suggesting that the worship of Tyche in Zela took place in a temple either alone or in a joined cult with Anaïtis, Zela’s main deity.126 Another coin with an image of an altar with a snake on top suggests that Asclepius was another Greek deity worshipped in the city.127 The coins from Pompeiopolis and Neoclaudiopolis also attest that in the second century several Greek deities or heroes, such as Asclepius, Demeter, Dionysus, Heracles, Nemesis, Nike, and Athena, were part of the religious landscape in the cities.128 Whether this meant that the cities worshipped all the gods they put on coins is, of course, a matter of speculation, and there is no way of knowing under what form the worship took place. Some of the gods, like Tyche in Zela, were presumably worshipped in temples or at rituals or festivals that involved the entire city on the official level, while others again were worshipped in more modest settings or not at all. It is, however, a fair assumption that the decision to mint coins with certain deities on the reverse testifies to how the cities wished to underline their ties to the gods depicted there. This again suggests that several Greek deities in one form or another had become an integral part of the cities’ existing religious landscapes. When exactly Greek deities became part of the cities’ religious landscapes is more difficult to establish. But the different gods or most of them must have been well established or at least familiar to people in the region for the

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iconography to make sense. There is, of course, no need to imagine that every inhabitant in the region would have recognized all the different images or would have known all of the gods depicted on the coins. But the gods and the images must have been at least common enough to the politically active parts of the citizenry for them to select these specific deities in the first place. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that the deities on the coins were featured somehow in the cities’ religious landscape. Judging from what we know of the institutional organization in the hinterland, the cities in the region followed a different pattern of development from the Greek cities in Asia and Bithynia. One difference was that there were no preexisting civic traditions to which Roman institutions had to adapt. Because there was no developed urban organization in the region, Roman governors, or the veterans left behind, were able to set Roman political and legal standards right from the moment the cities were established. Another difference between the Pontic hinterland and the cities in Bithynia, the colonies on the Black Sea coast, or the cities in Asia is that, in the early phase, there were no established Greek communities large enough to dominate how the cities developed. There were Greeks in the region, as in Amaseia, but it should be remembered that in the reign of Mithridates VI the court had long since moved to Sinope. The size of the Greek community in Amaseia may well have been rather modest and perhaps not very culturally or politically influential by the time Pompey began reorganizing the kingdom. Roman institutions, such as Roman citizenship, Roman political thinking, and various forms of Roman-sanctioned manifestations of loyalty, would have become an established part of urban life around the time influence from Greek ways of living was still finding a way into people’s everyday lives. Still, elements of Greek culture were introduced into the cities’ cultural and administrative organization from relatively early on. Together with Latin in cities where the numbers of veterans were noticeable, Greek was the official language, and eventually Greek or Hellenized migrants—no matter whether they were few or many—brought their own gods with them when they moved to one of the cities in the region. But it should be remembered that the largest part of the population consisted of people from the region who were either members of the rural population, Mithridates’ former trustees, or Pompey’s veterans settled in the region. Also, there is no evidence to support the idea that Greeks migrated to the region in great numbers. Instead, people of local origin and descendants of the veterans adopted Greek norms and ways of

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living, adding a sense of belonging to the Greek world to the other influences that formed how they were perceived by themselves and others. The institutional landscape in the hinterland towns was therefore more mixed when compared with the cities in Bithynia, in Asia, or on the Black Sea coast, where urban life was based on Greek norms. Cities such as Zela and Amaseia, and probably also Diospolis and Magnopolis, hosted Iranian and Anatolian cultural institutions—such as the cults to Iranian or Anatolian deities—together with other elements of Persian culture, as well as Roman institutions such as Roman law, citizenship, and political and social norms. Cities with larger veteran communities may also from early on have hosted various forms of traditional Roman entertainment, such as animal hunts, gladiator games, and public baths.129 In some of the other cities farther to the west, the influence of Iranian and Anatolian culture seems less pronounced, but the local languages would probably still have flourished for a considerable period of time. This will be discussed further in Chapter 4. When exactly Greek cults or cultural institutions such as the gymnasium were first introduced in the Pontic cities remains a matter for speculation. Greek cults and deities may well have found a way into the new cities from reasonably early on, and the introduction of Greek as the administrative language would have been introduced as part of Pompey’s organization, which would have raised an awareness of Greek culture among members of the region’s elites. As in the rest of the East, the cities in the Pontic hinterland were gradually Hellenized. By the time there is enough evidence to show how urban landscapes were organized, the influence from Greek urban culture was already well established and must have been so for quite some time. The strong influence of Greek culture and the way different Greek institutions came to play a dominant role in Pompey’s settlements have been interpreted as proof that Pompey chose a Greek model when the former Mithridatic kingdom was urbanized. That the population in Pontus felt a strong influence from Greek culture is beyond dispute: judging from the epigraphic record, the coins minted by the cities, and the institutions that can be identified, the inhabitants came to embrace Greek norms and customs. Yet, despite the influence of Greek culture, Anatolian, Iranian, and Roman institutions continued to offer collectivities that were not easily accessible. These institutions defined groups that set their members apart from the rest of the population, and many of them would have been in place by the time the influence of Greek culture was felt strongly enough in the hinterland cities for them to change how they lived their lives. Any attempt to establish

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how the people in Pontus identified themselves would have to factor in that cultural complexity and recognize that the inhabitants would have belonged to a number of culturally diverse groups all at the same time. A citizen in Amaseia could, without contradiction, have been a man of Persian descent, a Roman citizen, and someone who worshipped a number of cults—including Asclepius and Zeus Stratios as well as the emperor. He may have attended the gymnasium, if Amaseia had one, or sent his son to study with the other ephebes, just as he himself may have been well versed in Greek and Greek literature. As will be discussed in the next chapter, he would have felt the influence of Greek culture but he was at the same time also a Roman with Persian roots, cultural or ethnical. It was the number of institutions and groups he belonged to, not a single membership alone, that decided how he would define himself and his surroundings.

Chapter 4

Eager to Be Both Greek and Roman

This chapter focuses on the diversity of people’s identities in the hinterland cities. It considers the indigenous population’s response to the coming of Rome and the impact Greek culture had on the cities in the region later on. One of the key questions to be discussed is whether or not people in the region developed a sense of interconnectedness with Rome—defined broadly as the communities of Roman citizens across the empire—and so felt they were an integrated part of the people that ruled the empire. Another question to be considered is the way and the extent to which people in the cities embraced Greek culture (defined as Greek institutions, Greek as a language of culture, literature, history, cults, and customs) and in what way Greek cultural values and customs became a part of people’s lives. In the High Empire, by the time epigraphic and numismatic material is available, various Greek institutions were a well-established part of the urban landscape. By the late first and second centuries ce, the inhabitants had embraced Greek cultural values and a considerable part of the population lived lives in which Greek norms and customs were an important part of their self-definition. It is worth remembering that many of the Greek intellectuals that we know of defined Greekness by cultural criteria: Greek religion, and living an orderly and well-organized life in respect to the laws.1 Also to be factored in are the ties people in the region felt to their indigenous backgrounds as either Paphlagonian, Cappadocian, or Armenian, and in what ways indigenous religious and cultural institutions, local norms, and customs added another layer to personal identity, or, for that matter, how they came across in the eyes of others. Unlike cities in Western Asia Minor or in the colonies on Anatolia’s Black Sea shores, where people’s everyday lives were dominated by Greek norms and

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cultural values when Rome took control, from the outset Pompey’s cities were influenced by the culture of the local population that was settled in the new communities and therefore to a considerable degree by the norms and customs they brought with them into their new homes. In the early phase after the cities were founded, people from Rome and Italy or Greeks from the coast, Bithynia, or elsewhere in Greek Anatolia would not have been numerous enough to assume the role of the host culture or dominant enough to set the standards for how the newly established citizen bodies were to live their lives—except politically through the constitutional standards supplied in the lex Pompeia and by other Roman laws that would have applied in the new province. As a result of the modest level of urbanization before the coming of Rome and the newly established citizen bodies having little political experience, it was Rome and the veterans Pompey left behind who set the legislative framework in the new cities. It may be assumed that pre-Roman legislation would have been added to the new cities’ codes and that already-existing laws would have continued to regulate how people in the different cities organized their lives. In a number of his letters to Trajan that expressly concern legal issues in second-century Pontus et Bithynia, Pliny refers to local laws. However, given the lack of urban traditions in the region, even if sets of customary laws existed there, Pompey is unlikely to have encountered a developed legal framework such as the one that faced L. Aemilius Paullus when he reorganized Macedonia a century earlier. As discussed in Chapter 2, the lex Pompeia supplied the cities with a shared constitution, and Pompey introduced laws that divided the region into territories and regulated public office, council membership, local citizenship, and civic rights for sons of Pontic mothers. Unlike in the cities in Asia, Bithynia, or the colonies on the Black Sea coast, from the outset these codes were dictated by Rome. The practice of leaving the decision-making process essentially in the hands of elites was, of course, not a novelty in Greek political thinking. But the difference in the case of Pontus is that Roman citizens—the veterans, their descendants, and the few locals who obtained Roman rights from early on—were granted exclusive privileges that elevated them socially and legally above the rest of the population from the moment the cities were founded. From the start, being Roman was a matter of prestige and a mark of higher political and social standing. Men of ambition could aspire to this. On the other hand, Rome may have provided the cities’ legal and political institutions but the people Pompey settled were families from Armenia Minor, Paphlagonia, and the kingdom of Pontus.2 They brought their own social norms and

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hierarchies and customs, cults, languages, and myths with them into the cities. Therefore, even if the sway of the Iranian Mithridatic kings was felt across the region, there continued to be considerable cultural and ethnic differences between the populations in the Paphlagonian hinterland, Armenia Minor, the Pontic hinterland, and around the temple communities at Zela and Comana.3 Cultural influence from the indigenous population would have been significant from the moment they settled in and continued to play a considerable role throughout the imperial period, as is illustrated by the way Persian or Anatolian cults carried on as an essential part of some of the cities’ religious landscapes. The influence from Persia is most recognizable in the royal centers of Amaseia, Zela, and Comana, where Persian names were more common than in the rest of the region and where Iranian and Anatolian cults were a crucial element in religious life.4 In other parts of the region, the influence of Persian culture seems to have been less pronounced. Even if the material is limited, the cities and their inhabitants in Paphlagonia or Armenia Minor appear less drawn toward Persian deities and, compared to parts of Pontus, less inspired by names such as Mithridates and Pharnaces.5 As discussed in Chapter 2, at the outset the influence of Greek culture in the new cities would have been modest. Pompey did not bring Greek settlers into any of the towns, and there is no evidence to suggest that Greeks migrated to the region after the settlement, as Antony handed over the cities to trusted clients, or after the region was back under Roman rule. The kings had employed a number of Greek military and political advisors at their courts since at least the second century bce and, judging from what we know of Strabo’s family, Amaseia might well have hosted a community of Greek experts by the time Mithridates fled the region.6 As was established by E. Olshausen, the most noticeable increase in the number of Greeks at the court dates to the second half of the second century as the capital moved from Amaseia to Sinope. From the reign of Mithridates V onward, the court continued to strengthen its ties to the Greek world, which culminated when, in the course of the First Mithridatic War, Mithridates VI was welcomed as the savior king from the East who liberated the Greek cities from Roman suppression. In the hinterland outside Amaseia, the number of Greeks other than the king’s advisors and military experts was still too insignificant for the population to have been much influenced by Greek culture. Consequently, from the outset Roman Pontus was divided between a Greek population in the old colonies on the coast and a population in the hinterland. Judging from what Strabo tells us, the average inhabitants in the

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new cities were neither Roman citizens of Italian origin nor Greek settlers, but men of local origin. Together with the veterans Pompey left behind and the few Greek families living in the region, local families formed the new citizen bodies.7 None of the cities were given colonial status, which would have been the obvious choice had the veterans made up the majority or a considerable part of the population, and Strabo felt no need to mention the settlement of any veteran community, which again suggests that the number of soldiers in the cities would have been modest or significantly lower when compared to the inhabitants of local origin. As a result, the influence of Anatolian and, to some extent, Persian culture would have continued to be a fundamental element for how the civic landscapes were organized and how people in the cities lived their lives. One example of how people’s indigenous origin continued to play a vital role long after the fall of Mithridates is provided by the Augustus oath in Neapolis, where the inscription refers to the Phazimonians some sixty years after Pompey first founded the city at the village of Phazemon, the site’s pre-Roman name. As the inscription was set up by the locals themselves, the reference to Phazemon testifies to how pre-Roman ties continued to matter two generations after Pompey conquered the region.8 Disentangling cultural encounters and establishing how individuals and groups defined themselves and others are complicated endeavors even today, where personal records, public debates, interviews, and electronic platforms provide a fuller picture of how a person hopes to appear in the eyes of their intended audience. A considerable challenge to the study of identity in antiquity is the poor survival record of personal documents that offer glimpses into people’s private thoughts. Another obstacle to the study of identity is the gap between how people chose to appear in public and how they would have described themselves in more private settings.9 Shared conventions, peer pressure, and expectations of other people ensure that individuals and groups are encouraged to comply with certain norms and values without much sense of belonging to the community of which they are a part. In that sense, one could easily have been a Roman without having felt much (or any) connection with the community of Roman citizens, even if one held Roman rights. But the same person could just as easily have been a devoted member of the Roman community, proud of his citizen status and the role he played, for instance, in the upkeep of the imperial cult. Attempts to decide which aspect of an individual’s self-identity was dominant can generally only be speculative. When it comes to the study of identity

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in the Roman empire, we are left with what is essentially how individuals chose to appear in public, almost always without any reliable information on people’s private thoughts. What we can do, instead, is consider what seems to have been socially acceptable in the communities in which people chose to display their ties to different groups and memberships. It may not be possible to decide whether someone felt a sense of belonging to the community of Roman Italians or being a member of the empirewide collectivity of Roman citizens, but we are able to determine whether it was socially acceptable or even admirable to display one’s Roman status or commitment to Roman institutions in contexts where the local public was the intended audience, the majority of whom would not have been Roman citizens themselves. Similar mechanisms apply in terms of becoming Greek. Because the populations of the cities were not Greek at the time the cities were founded, the adoption of Greek norms and customs was the result of a gradual process by which active decisions were made to embrace Greek deities, cultural institutions—such as the gymnasium, the theater, and various religious festivals— and the adoption of Greek as the language of culture.10 Again, whether people in Zela or Neoclaudiopolis believed themselves to be Greek in the same way as the inhabitants in Sinope or Heraclea is difficult to say with any kind of certainty, but it might very well have been the case for some. The choice of personal names, the decision to embrace Greek gods, and the efforts to introduce Greek cultural institutions into the civic landscapes testify to how people in the hinterland did adopt Greek culture over time and developed a sense of belonging to the Greek world.11 One useful approach to the question of identity is offered by J. Lieu. In her study of Christian communities, Lieu defines identity as ideas of sameness, boundedness, and differences of continuity, homogeneity, and recognition by oneself and by others.12 In other words, what determines someone’s identity is to a large extent the groups and communities to which one belongs or from which one is excluded. Another key element of the study is how individual identity is not decided by membership of one specific group but by the sum of groups and communities of which people were part. Members of the civic elite across the Roman empire would have belonged to several separate groups simultaneously: ethnic groups, a cultural collectivity, certain tribes, and the community they lived in. This would also have applied to the rest of the citizen body. But members of the elite would have belonged to a number of other groups that the average population would have been excluded from—one of the leading families in the city or in the region, which

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meant they were part of the social group from which magistrates, priests, and other members of the political establishment were recruited, locally, regionally, and on an imperial level. At some stage in the course of the High Empire, most members of the civic elites in the provinces, including the East, became Roman citizens and so part of the privileged few who could hope to join the exclusive club that enabled them to pursue careers in Roman politics, in the imperial administration, or in the army.13 As the population in the Pontic hinterland were not Greeks from the outset, the question of how the people in the region responded to the coming of Rome and how they came to define their relationship to Rome and the people living there should not be studied through the usual lens of Greek versus Roman cultural identity. But because Greek culture became a dominant part of people’s lives in the Pontic hinterland, it is still relevant to consider how people in the region would have navigated between the different groups and communities. It is worth noticing that studies of the epigraphic record from Termessos in Pisidia in Anatolia show that the elite chose to present themselves as both Greek and Roman and as descendants of the region’s indigenous warrior community.14 Even if it has been modified in recent years, the orthodoxy still remains that the empire’s Greek population was more devoted to a Greek cultural background and more keen on being Greek than people in the western part of the empire, who were more open to becoming Roman.15 It is now generally agreed that Greeks were an integral part of Roman politics and that members of the Greek elite held magistracies in Rome and appointments in the imperial administration as well as in the army. There are plenty of examples of Greek men of letters serving at the imperial courts as secretaries, advisors, teachers, or muchvalued intellectual entertainment, particularly from the late first and second centuries onward.16 But it is still a dominant view among scholars that cultural orientation was more important to how the Greeks identified themselves than their ties to Roman institutions, such as, for instance, their status as a Roman citizen or their career in Roman politics.17 S. Swain has suggested that ethnic or cultural affiliations were more essential to how Greeks identified themselves than their ties to Rome or Roman institutions: “for it hardly needs to be said that personal identity is not a homogeneous mass. It is quite wrong to assume the priority of one area of one man’s life—such as his Roman career—without at least asking whether other areas may not have been more important.”18 In his study of the Greek intellectual elite and Greek response to the influence from Roman culture in general, Swain argues that the empire’s Greek

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inhabitants would have felt little sense of belonging to the community of Romans from Italy and the part of the empire where the influence of Rome and Italy was particularly pronounced, even, that is, if many Greek elites were involved in Roman politics with successful careers in the center of Roman politics and the imperial administration.19 According to this line of thought, someone’s origin as Greek overshadowed every other determinant of identity. Members of the Greek elite are believed to have recognized themselves as Romans but only in the legal meaning of the word, as Roman citizens with political and military ambitions, and are generally not believed to have seen themselves as Romans or felt an interconnectedness with Romans from Italy or the western part of the empire.20 Swain and others are right to underline that individuals with a Greek cultural background continued to define themselves as Greek after they became Roman citizens and after they initiated their careers in Roman politics or joined the emperor’s court. It is also no doubt true that the population in the Greek part of the empire would have felt just as Greek after they involved themselves in various Roman institutions as they would have done before, just as it is likely that that they would have been even more attentive to their cultural background now as they engaged with people from different parts of the empire.21 But whether someone’s ethnic affiliations or cultural background were more important to how people would have defined themselves than memberships of other collectivities may not be the best question to pose to address the wider issue. Maalouf in Les identités meurtrières (1998) and Sen in Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) have challenged the one-sided approach to the question of identity. Both argue that it was never one sense of belonging or the membership of one group that defined how people identified themselves, but the sum of memberships of which people claimed to be part.22 What Maalouf ’s and Sen’s models bring to the study of identity in the Roman empire are not a relativistic approach, where all groups and memberships were equally important. What they offer, instead, is a model of how people belong to several groups and collectivities at the same time; these memberships were not necessarily ranked in a hierarchy where, for instance, someone’s Greek cultural background or Roman citizenship was more important than that person’s belonging to the community of Roman citizens or his indigenous roots as a man from Paphlagonia. In Rome’s Cultural Revolution (2008), a study of the impact that Rome’s conquest of Italy had on people across the peninsula, A. Wallace-Hadrill agrees that someone’s cultural identity is best understood as a sum of different

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competing identities that may have intersected without coinciding.23 Instead of seeing cultural identity in the Roman empire as a fusion or a hybrid of one or more cultures, where components from each culture blend together into a new form that is no longer Roman, Greek, or indigenous but a mixed version of the three, Wallace-Hadrill understands cultural identity in light of code-switching, a term taken from linguistics. Code-switching occurs when a bilingual person switches between two different languages instead of creating a new language with elements of both.24 To stay within linguistic terminology, cultural identity and how the coming of Rome changed people’s lives in the regions they conquered have been described as part of a process of “creolization.” The idea here is that Roman and indigenous cultures merged into a new form to which both Rome and the conquered people actively contributed. This term comes from the processes of encounter between different African cultures and the slave-owning communities on the Caribbean islands in America, resulting in a new culture with African, English, and French elements.25 Creolization is interesting as a tool to analyze cultural interaction in ancient communities, since the theory offers an opportunity to see the changes from the perspective of the conquered population.26 Furthermore, the ideas behind creolization as a theoretical framework for cultural interaction in the Roman empire also allow us to examine how the host culture felt the influence of the colonized or enslaved people and the subdued communities.27 However, the problem with creolization as an analytical tool in the case of Roman Pontus lies in the numerous local differences that characterized life across the region. People would have felt the influence of Rome or other cultures differently depending on the time and location, and on the knowledge they had about how people in Rome or the inhabitants of Greek cities organized their lives. Another problem with creolization as a theoretical framework to explain cultural interaction in the Roman empire is the difference between how members of the local elite, in already well-established communities, experienced and responded to the coming of Rome than would have been the reality for the enslaved Africans in the Americas. While the elite in Rome’s new provinces were less threatened on their cultural values, Africans on the plantations had undergone the traumatic experience of being forcefully removed from their home communities and shipped overseas to be exploited in what was a new and entirely different world.28 On arrival at the plantations, they were forced to interact with the culture, language, religion, food habits, dress codes, norms, and values of their masters, and to adapt to lives that were being lived

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by other slaves who were already there. They could and did resist elements of the host cultures, but they could not ignore the language of their masters or the norms and laws of society that were imposed on them; nor could they dress, eat, or worship as their families did back home.29 Wallace-Hadrill is right in stating that the Romans and people they conquered often did not merge into new cultures in ways similar to what happened when African slaves were brought to the Caribbean or to the slaveowning parts of North America. But it is still worth remembering that people in the Greek cities of Magna Graecia held on to their Greek identity long after the cities were conquered by the Romans. They were strongly influenced by Greek ways of living, and were for the most part just as Greek as they had been before they felt any influence from Rome. As the population in the Greek colonies in Italy acquired Roman citizenship and as Latin became more common in the southern part of the Italian Peninsula, the population in the cities was effectively both Greek and Roman, able to switch between the two groups without feeling any less Roman or less Greek. 30 As with any other theory, the danger lies in generalization. WallaceHadrill may very well be right that the Greeks in Roman Italy continued to see themselves and their cities as Greek, where Greek norms and values set the standards for how people organized their lives. But it is worth noticing that Strabo questioned the Greekness of the people living in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, pointing out that the population had become Roman and adopted Latin as their first language (Strabo 6.1.2). In Strabo’s view, the populations in many of the colonies were no longer Greeks but had been what he calls “barbarized,” and it is no doubt true that the somewhat self-righteous geographer uses the example of Magna Graecia to warn his readers in the Greek part of the empire of what might happen if they were too eager to embrace what Rome had to offer. Yet the way different Greek, Roman, and indigenous institutions came together to form the cultural and institutional landscape in cities across the East suggests that some sort of cultural blend did occur. When a man in Pompeiopolis went to the gymnasium one day and enjoyed an afternoon at the public bath on the next, he did not switch between different cultures or different culture identities, not even if one of these events took place in a city other than his hometown. Also, he would not need to switch between memberships if he went to the Asclepius cult to pray for his recovery one evening and the next morning took part in the festival to the emperor or if, as part of the festival, he went to the gladiatorial games.

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The use of code-switching should not, of course, be taken too literally. People would not necessarily need to have been aware that they moved between cultural identities for the model to work. But the problem with codeswitching is that it still separates the different groups and communities into Roman, Greek, and indigenous categories, which makes sense in some contexts but not in others. Some men such as Herodes Atticus or Arrian of Nicomedia, who were deeply rooted in both Greek and Roman groups, would have been well aware when they operated in a Roman or Greek context.31 When Herodes served as consul or as senator in Rome, he was a Roman of Greek origin with a strong devotion to his Greek cultural heritage, a gifted speaker, and a learned man well versed in Greek literature. When he was in Athens, he was Greek and an influential local politician and a greatly respected sophist who was happy to bring in his friendship with Marcus Aurelius when he needed that kind of support.32 For people in the provinces who traveled less often or did not meet people from Italy or mainland Greece on a regular basis, if at all, the boundaries between being Greek and Roman would have been considerably more blurred. This is particularly true in the case of the Pontic hinterland, where the locals who settled in the cities were neither Greek nor Roman at the time the cities were founded and seemingly not devoted to Greek culture until the cities were brought back under direct Roman rule sometime in the course of the first century ce. Instead, the concept of code-switching reminds us that being Roman, Greek, Paphlagonian, a citizen of Pompeiopolis, and a loyal supporter of Trajan represent different memberships that people could belong to simultaneously. People in the Pontic hinterland would have emphasized the groups and communities they were part of differently, depending on the context they had to navigate. In some instances, they would have drawn attention to their Roman status, their role as one of the cities’ leading figures, with responsibility to oversee the imperial cult or fund the next gladiatorial games. It was in that capacity that they felt the need to remind their fellow citizens that they were behind festivals, sacrifices, and the introduction or maintenance of different cultural institutions. On other occasions, it was their devotion to a specific cult, such as the one to Asclepius, their knowledge of Greek literature or philosophy (as in the case of Arrian from Nicomedia who is celebrated for his philosophical work), or their ties to one of the indigenous cults in Zela, Comana, or Amaseia that took precedence. That someone worshipped Anaïtis in the city of Zela made him no less Roman, but when standing at the altar

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or participating in the celebration of the god, it was not his status as Roman that mattered most. An example of how code-switching offers a better understanding of the mechanism involved when people in the Pontic hinterland felt they were part of both Greek and Roman communities takes us to Pompeiopolis. On a list of ephebes set up in the gymnasium sometime in the reign of Trajan, we hear of a Poplios Klaudianos, a young member of the citizen body from a family with Roman citizenship. Unlike some of the other ephebes—men such as Lanios, son of Longos, or Kaikilios, son of Poublikolos—Poplios appears with Roman praenomen and nomen gentile and no patronymic reference such as in the other examples.33 As we saw in Chapter 3, the gymnasium lost its military significance in the course of the imperial period and became an institution in which Greek education, culture, and the memory of what it meant to be Greek were cherished and kept alive for future generations.34 As one of the city’s ephebes, Poplios and his family belonged to the group of people who embraced the intellectual and athletic values of what it meant to be Greek. The family had the means and the will to offer Poplios the kind of training that gave him a better knowledge of Greek, Greek literature, history, and the physical exercise that allowed him to join the community of Greeks in a more qualified way, with a better understanding of Greek cults, customs, and intellectual values, than other young men of his generation whose families did not have the same resources or the same cultural interests. In all likelihood, Poplios and his family would have defined themselves as Greek (how could they not?) and would have been seen as such by most people both in the city and in the region. But what the inscription also reveals is that Poplios and his family were proud of belonging to the city’s Roman community. Like other Roman citizens on the list, Poplios appears with his praenomen and nomen gentile, which suggests that reference to the family’s Roman status was more important than it was to mention his father’s name. The Claudianii may have chosen simply to follow the tradition and appear on the inscription in the same way as the other Romans in the city, and it may have been the case that the authorities who set up the inscription followed the standard practice for naming Roman citizens, leaving little room for personal statements or individual choices. What the reference to the ephebes’ Roman citizenship also reveals, however, is that being a Roman citizen was something that both the families themselves and society around them held in great esteem. It was natural to include it in an inscription set up in one of the most distinctively Greek institutions in the

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imperial period. If at the gymnasium in Pompeiopolis, people thought that being Roman would somehow overshadow the focus on Greek values or their Greekness, they could have chosen to follow a different practice when listing the names of the ephebes and let men such as Poplios appear with one name followed by his father’s name in the genitive. Poplios did not switch between being Greek and Roman when he went in or out of the gymnasium—he was clearly Roman when he was honored on the inscription—but he belonged to two different groups of people who were very much aware of their Greek cultural background and of the community of Roman citizens in Pompeiopolis, and in the province of Galatia. It was belonging to both groups simultaneously that made them stand out also when they trained in the gymnasium, honored the emperor, watched a gladiatorial game, or celebrated when their son came of age for full membership within the Roman community. In the following we consider the multiplicity of ways people felt the impact of both Greek and Roman culture. One of the essential factors is the question of time. How strong were the influences from Rome and from the Greek cities in the region at different moments in time and how did what it meant to be either Greek or Roman change from the mid-60s bce when Pompey founded the cities to the time of the High Empire, when more solid evidence is available?

Ways of Becoming Roman It is generally agreed that members of the provincial population followed many different routes on their way to becoming Roman, both in the different provinces and between them. In his definition of what it meant to be Roman, G. Woolf suggested that someone would be Roman if they considered themselves as such and accordingly lived a life that otherwise was recognized as Roman. Becoming Roman therefore required that people in the provinces should surround themselves with a material culture and institutions that were regarded as Roman. They would need to live lives in which Roman cultural institutions such as baths, gladiatorial games, and cults played an integral part.35 Another way of becoming Roman was by obtaining Roman civic rights. If someone acquired Roman citizenship, which meant that he became Roman legally, he is likely to have been proud of his new status and viewed it as defining who he was, but it would not necessarily have been something that made him develop a sense of belonging to the communities of Romans in Italy or in provinces where the influence of Roman culture dominated the cultural

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landscape. In his article “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek,” Woolf argues that Greeks might have been Roman in the legal sense of the word but unlikely to have seen themselves as a part of the empirewide community of Romans, at least not in a cultural sense.36 As a consequence, one could be Roman without much attachment to the community of other Romans within the empire, and one could feel a strong sense of interconnectedness to people in Rome or to the community of Romans in the provinces without being Roman in the legal sense of the word. When considering the question whether and in what ways individuals across the provincial communities became Roman, time and place are two fundamental factors, particularly in the case of the Pontic hinterland. One of the key issues here was the knowledge people had about Rome and Roman culture, which in hinterland cities as elsewhere would depend on the ties they had with Rome and with Romans from Italy or other parts of the empire.37 As in the rest of the empire, in the Pontic hinterland there were various categories of Romans. One group of Roman citizens were the veterans from the legions or auxiliary forces that Pompey left behind on his return to Italy. This first generation of Roman immigrants has left no epigraphic or archaeological material. Their presence in early Roman Pontus is therefore known only from the accounts of Cassius Dio and Hirtius (Cass. Dio 36.50.1).38 These retired soldiers would have brought their own customs and cultural values with them into the new communities, and their ways of living would have had a considerable impact on the cities in which they settled. The new neighbors they had recently subdued would have feared them, and their status as Roman citizens offered them privileges that their fellow local citizens would not have fully understood, just as their reputation as soldiers and their knowledge of how to live organized lives in city cultures offered them an edge in local politics. This was particularly true for Pompey’s veterans who came from Rome or Italy, at least until their fellow citizens found their own legs to stand on. In his studies of how people in antiquity acquired different languages and on how Latin or other languages were spoken with regional differences, J. Adams points to how, in colonial communities, different dialects emerged when people were brought together to communicate in the same tongue. As he points out, the language spoken by first-generation migrants would change significantly after just a few generations. According to Adams, the way a language is spoken would already have changed considerably from the first to the second generation and again more noticeably to the third generation, when the language of the first immigrants would have transformed into a new

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dialect.39 Adams focuses on how different dialects develop, but the model is also helpful to explain linguistic development in a region where Latin, Greek, and local languages were spoken simultaneously. In Pontus, veterans would soon have been exposed to the customs of their fellow local citizens and the local women that some of them would have married. Their wives would have brought their own language, norms, and customs with them into their new families. As they were the ones in charge of the households, the next generation of Romans would have been given their mothers’ cultural background together with their fathers’ Roman heritage. They would have spoken both local tongues and Latin, if their fathers taught them, and they would have heard stories of the Mithridatic kings and learned about Anatolian and Persian mythologies from their mothers and their mothers’ family, just as their fathers may have taught them about Jupiter, Mars, and the other members of the Roman pantheon.40 They would have heard about their fathers’ deeds in the battles they fought with Pompey, about the conquest of the region, and about the city of Rome in all its might and beauty. Furthermore, they would have spoken Greek; as Greek was the administrative language in the cities, they had to if they were to pursue a career in local politics. Their sons and daughters, on the other hand, the third generation of Romans, would have been born sometime between the late 40s to the late 30s, right around the time Antony decided to dissolve Roman Pontus. How well they would have known Latin is difficult to say and would have differed from one family to the next. But they would probably not have known Latin as well as their parents, and as Rome and Roman political institutions became a thing of the past the incentive to learn the language would have been purely cultural. Instead, they would have spoken the local language as well as Greek. In most cities Greek would have been more established and the teaching of the language is likely to have been more systematized. The third generation of Romans in the Pontic hinterland is therefore also likely to have been better versed in Greek literature than the previous generations and so better informed about Greek mythology, literature, and history than their parents and grandfathers had been. It is important to note that study of Greek that went beyond the reading of simple inscriptions was essentially something that was reserved for those with the means to organize an education for their children by bringing in slaves to oversee the children’s training in the family home. Veterans and their descendants would have had the kinds of resources from Pompey’s campaigns in the East to make education available,

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but it needs to be remembered that it is far from certain that they did. It is less likely still that schooling was available outside the elite families. From Pliny’s letters we know that the funding of schools was still an issue in Italy in the late first and early second centuries, which suggests that schools would have been even less common in Republican Pontus.41 Another substantial challenge to the study of Greek and Latin literature was the availability of texts outside cities with good libraries. How written texts were highly valued as late as the fourth century ce is illustrated by a private letter from Libanius to Gregory of Nysa, which was circulated among the general public for them to be given the opportunity to copy it.42 Now, despite the many challenges, there is every reason to assume that third-generation Romans in the Pontic cities would have felt just as Roman as their parents and grandfathers did. Their knowledge or memory of Rome, Roman history, and the stories of great Roman generals would have changed over time and slowly faded away just as Latin would have been heard less often as the elders passed away. But they would not have liked the way Antony handed over their cities to local regents, which so dramatically changed the status of the communities their ancestors had built from the ground, and they would have resented how their status as Roman citizens lost its significance in their hometowns. Another group of Romans in the cities’ early phase consisted of families of local origin who had managed to obtain Roman rights from military service or as a reward for their commitment to Rome. Strabo’s grandfather may have been an example of someone who obtained Roman rights as a token for his support in the wars against Mithridates VI, and there would have been others like him. Other local families to have acquired Roman rights from early on could have been officers in Mithridates’ army who managed to change sides before it was too late, and influential individuals who became Romans after assisting the governors or other Roman officials in the difficult tasks of establishing seven new city-states in a region with no urban tradition or organizing the dissolution of the province without causing long-lasting turmoil. A third category of Romans in Pompey’s cities were people from outside the region who were not among the veterans. This group would have been more numerous in the Early and High Empire and would have increased as Roman citizenship became more common outside the Italian Peninsula. Depending on who they were and where they came from, this group need not have shared much common ground culturally with Romans of Italian origin. Their first language was not necessarily Latin, nor would they automatically

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have lived in the same way as people in Italy or in the cities in Spain and Gaul. But there would also have been men of Italian origin who were in Pontus to do business with the locals, the kind of Roman people mentioned in the oath to Augustus in Neapolis. The customs and values of some of these Romans would have been more Greek or Galatian than Italian, and their presence would have had a different impact on life in the hinterland than that of the veteran communities from Italy when the cities were established. As time went on and as the cities in the Pontic hinterland were gradually brought back under Roman rule, the number of locals with Roman citizenship went up gradually to outnumber those families with an Italian heritage. What it meant to be Roman would, at least in the late first and early second centuries ce, have changed from an ethnic and cultural category, tied to the veteran families and other individuals of Italian origin, to a legal and social definition, where members of the local elite—across ethnic and cultural divides—enjoyed the same legal and social privileges as their fellow Romans in Italy or in the western part of the empire.43 As Romans of local origin became still more numerous, it was now these groups that set the standards for what it implied to be Roman in the cities. Depending on the city and the moment in time, the influence of Roman culture and the communities of Romans of Italian origin would have differed considerably, which meant that awareness of Roman culture would have varied accordingly. Members of the civic elite in some cities obtained Roman rights and would have become members of the community of Romans with a distinct role to play in the promotion of Roman power and in the upkeep of Roman institutions, without much idea of how life was lived in Italy or in Rome. Even if they were in contact with Roman authorities or had to serve as envoys to Rome or to the governor, they did not need the same knowledge of Latin as long as they spoke Greek, and they would have been less familiar with Roman literature or the history of Rome. They would also have been less familiar with Roman cultural institutions, such as public bathing, gladiatorial games (even if that would have been easy enough to follow), or different cults. Similarly, they would not necessarily have cared much about Roman virtues or about Roman norms and values, or, for that matter, shared much interest in the search for new technologies to challenge infrastructural obstacles to the improvement of daily life in the cities or communications between them, which Strabo saw as one of the features of being Roman.44 Being Roman was an important part of these peoples’ lives, and, as pointed out by Wallace-Hadrill, it has to be acknowledged not only that Roman

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institutions found a way into the civic communities across the East but also that the spread of Greek culture to the isolated part of Anatolia was possible only as a result of the communications and infrastructure made available by Rome, even if it was the local population that made the effort to fund and build gymnasia or temples to Greek gods.45 It is thought-provoking that Greek institutions such as the gymnasium or the theater in Pompeiopolis seemingly date to the second century ce—that is, after the cities were back under Roman rule. Romans of provincial background may well have felt a loose tie to the people in the city of Rome. They would have found it difficult to understand the Latin they spoke in the capital, and the Roman public would have behaved in ways that were very different from the norms and customs in their hometowns. But being a part of the community of Romans that defined the empire’s ruling people would have mattered to them just as it did to Aristides, Arrian, Cassius Dio, and even to Dio Chrysostom, who used a lot of energy in reassuring his readers of his own Greekness.46 When Antonius Rufus from Sebastopolis decided to fund the city’s imperial cult and paid for gladiatorial games, or when members of the elite in Pompeiopolis chose to pay for a bath building, they promoted Roman culture and ways of living, and facilitated Roman values in their home communities— even if it is evident that being Roman was more than simply enjoying a warm bath or appreciating the art of the perfect kill in the arena. Being Roman was now a kind of status available to the privileged few and yet another but more exclusive membership that people in the region were either born into or able to join; it was a kind of membership that was added to the many other groups and communities that a person was part of, simultaneously. Roman, Greek, and Paphlagonian were groups and communities between which people within the cities could switch, depending on the context. They were also different elements that in combination determined who people were, how they defined themselves, and how they were perceived by others.47

The Emergence of the Pontic Greeks Becoming Greek was in many ways a state of mind that was just as fluid and interchangeable as it was to become Roman. When Pompey reorganized the kingdom of Mithridates VI, the definition of Greekness had already changed from a matter of specific ethnic affiliation to a question of cultural criteria, where Greek norms and customs were essential to people’s everyday lives.48

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An illuminating example of how one could study to become Greek is the case of Favorinus from modern Arles. In what is believed to be Favorinus’s speech to the Corinthians, he presents the argument that it was possible for someone from Gaul to study Greek and Greek culture up to the point where he would surpass any other Greek of his own day. Favorinus is referring to himself in an argument designed to convince the audience in Corinth that he at the very least was just as Greek and just as learned as any other Greek man of letters and that he was entitled to the bust that the city may have removed when Favorinus was denounced by Hadrian for sleeping with the wife of one of the consuls.49 Favorinus’s indiscretion and the way cities like Athens and Corinth chose to act upon Hadrian’s punishment of one of his esteemed sophists are trivial details, but it is interesting to observe how aggressively Favorinus felt he needed to underline his Greekness. His bust was probably not moved because he was originally from Arles but because the cities in Greece chose to follow the emperor in his punishment of what was surely an obnoxious character. What is perhaps the most interesting part of the story is Favorinus’s premise that Greekness could be studied and acquired and so extend across the wider empire. Becoming Greek or Greekness as a phenomenon was not bound to a specific geographic context or, for that matter, to a particular cultural context such as a Greek colony like the one in Massalia, but could just as well be obtained in the library or from studying with the right teachers. The same would apply to people in the Pontic hinterland. They too could study or, perhaps more accurately in their case, acquire the knowledge and skills needed to live a life according to some of the cultural criteria that various Greek thinkers since Herodotus had regarded as Greek. As in the case of becoming Roman, there were a number of different ways people became Greek and we should expect considerable differences between how people in Zela and Prusa became Greek, if for no other reason than because the influence of several well-established Greek cities was more pronounced in Bithynia than it would have been in and around the city of Zela. One category of Greeks in the Pontic hinterland would have been individuals and families originating from one of the old Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast, families like Strabo’s with roots in the city of Amisus. To this group, ethnicity, as it was to Strabo, would no doubt have been an important criterion, and their origin as Greeks would have been one of the elements that distinguished them culturally from the other ethnic groups in the region— men of Paphlagonian, Pontic, Cappadocian, Galatian, or Persian origin—or,

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for that matter, from Romans, Italians, or men from the western part of the empire who lived in the region.50 Their heritage as ethnic Greeks and the ties they would feel, perhaps to one of the old colonies on the Black Sea coast, might also have been one of the criteria that distinguished ethnic Greeks from members of the indigenous population who had become Greeks and now saw themselves as such. Depending on where they lived and the moment in time, this group of Greeks would have spoken Greek, worshipped Greek gods, and lived according to Greek norms; depending on how well they met the cultural criteria, they would have been Greeks in the eyes of several Greek thinkers. According to that line of thought, what being Greek boils down to is the ability to imitate what was considered a Greek way of life: to master the language, to worship the gods of the Greek pantheon, and to live according to Greek norms and customs. For people to meet that definition of what it meant to live life as a Greek, Greek institutions had to be an integral part of their community and people needed to understand what Greek norms and customs were. Being able to get by in Greek or read a Greek inscription would not have been enough to be considered Greek. As discussed in Chapter 2, the influence of Greek culture was gradual and followed different patterns in different cities. With the lack of evidence for how the urban landscape developed from the settlement to the end of the first century and beginning of the second century ce, it is difficult to say when Greek institutions were first introduced or when they became an established part of the urban landscapes. The complexity of the cities’ cultural landscape is illustrated in the case of Amaseia, where Mithridates’ Greek advisors and military officials lived next to the indigenous population, who continued to treasure their local and neo-Iranian heritage. The representation of Greek migrants and the influence of their culture would have been more pronounced here than in any of the other cities in early Roman Pontus, but Persian culture continued to play a key role in Amaseia, as is illustrated in the way the cult and altar to the Iranian war god Zeus Stratios continued as an important element of the city’s religious landscape throughout the imperial period.51 In Amaseia, the non-ethnic Greeks would have been familiar with Greek ways of living, Greek religious practice, and different Greek institutions. Some would have imitated the life of Strabo’s family and lived a life according to cultural criteria that at least some Greek intellectuals would define as Greek, and they would have seen themselves as belonging to the Greek community in Amaseia. But Amaseia was also the city in early Roman Pontus where the previously neo-Iranian community maintained a dominant role, as is underlined

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Figure 6. Cult area for the worship of Zeus Stratios at modern Büyük Evliya near Yassıçal, Turkey. According to tradition it was here in 82 that Mithridates lit a large bonfire in honor of the war god to celebrate his victory against the Roman general Lucius Licinius Murena in the Second Mithridatic War. Photo Marit Jensen.

by the continuous importance attributed to worship of Zeus Stratios, Zeus the warrior. As has been pointed out by J. Dalaison, the cult of Zeus Stratios, the supreme deity for the Mithridatid dynasty, emerged as a syncretism between a local Anatolian-Iranian tradition inspired by the worship of Ahura Mazda and elements of the Greek pantheon with Zeus as the supreme god.52 Whether we are to see the cult of Zeus Stratios as a Hellenization of a local deity or as a warrior cult that the Mithridatid dynasty took over from the Greeks is difficult to determine. As noted by both Dalaison and B. McGing, the deity carried the name Zeus, which tied into a Greek religious context in alignment with the other Hellenic elements at the Mithridatid court, particularly from the moment the royal residence moved from Amaseia to Sinope on the Black Sea coast.53 The Hellenic element was, therefore, more than just a name or a varnish on an otherwise Iranian cult. But it should also be remembered that the cult and the rituals involved were very much a part of the court’s Iranian ruler ideology. According to the account Appian offers of the Mithridatic War, Mithridates VI followed the traditions both of his forefathers and of the Persian kings when

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he celebrated his victory against Murena in the Second Mithridatic War with a bonfire in honor of Zeus Stratios (App. Mithr. 66). As the inhabitants in Roman Amaseia gathered at the cult site at Yassıçal to take part in the worship of the god and when the city chose bonfires and other images from the cult for their coins, they remembered and commemorated their pre-Roman past and their Iranian heritage, which continued to define both the city and its inhabitants. As discussed in Chapter 2, for an increase in the number of people whose lifestyle was recognizably Greek, there needed to be either an influx of Greek immigrants to the region or a conversion by some of the local elite to various Greek institutions, and so an introduction of some Greek norms and customs in the colonies on the Black Sea coast or in cities in Bithynia. King Polemon and his successors in the new Pontic dynasty were of Greek origin, and although there is no evidence that they did so, it is possible that they promoted Greek ways of living in the cities under their control.54 Other client rulers would have been less keen to promote Greek customs or, for that matter, Greek ways of political thinking: free speech, criticism of authorities, equality under the law, and ideas of a broader inclusion of citizens in the decision-making process. It is worth repeating that the Greek institutions we know of date to the period after the cities were back under Roman rule and after they had resumed their former political autonomy. This suggests that there was a connection between the introduction of Greek institutions and the moment the cities were once again part of the empire. Even if there were local benefactors who would have profited personally from funding public buildings in the reign of the client kings, the incentives to channel vast resources into the community would have been still larger if the effort could be converted into gratitude from their fellow citizens or even concrete political influence or other economic privileges.55 A. Zuiderhoek has argued that the elite foundation of public buildings was part of a political negotiation that legitimatized the elite’s right to almost absolute power in the cities.56 If that was not an option, there was much more to be gained from spending the resources on flattering the dynasts or funding the construction of new sanctuaries that would please the gods. In the light of what we are able to extract from the years between the foundation of the cities and the point at which various emperors brought different parts of Mithridates’ former kingdom back under Roman rule, it seems reasonable to conclude that the number of Greeks, both from within the region and from outside, is likely to have been modest. The local population

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would have known Greek, spoken it, and communicated in Greek with other cities’ inhabitants and with the Roman authorities. It is also very likely that some Greek settlers would have migrated to the region to try their luck or to fulfill various tasks on behalf of Rome or of Antony’s client rulers, like Strabo’s forefathers and the other Greek advisors at the court of Mithridates VI. But there is no evidence, written, epigraphic, or otherwise, to support the idea that Greeks in significant numbers moved to the cities. Likewise, there is no evidence that Greek institutions were an established part of the cities’ urban or cultural landscapes before the second century ce. What this suggests is that the influence of Greek culture in the Pontic hinterland is likely to have intensified sometime in the first century ce, perhaps as late as the period when the cities passed from the rule of the client dynasties to the jurisdiction of the provinces of Cappadocia and Galatia. This is not to say that the influence of Greek culture was not felt before that moment, but it seems not to have made a considerable or decisive impact on urban cultural life or landscapes before the late first and early second centuries. Another point to be made here is that those who would have defined themselves as Greeks in Pontus were for the most part people of local origin who lived a life inspired by Greek norms and customs, just as the efforts to make the cities look more like Greek cities elsewhere were, for the most part, initiated by members of the local elite. For members of the local elite, becoming Greek was a way of showing their fellow inhabitants a cultural superiority and one more membership to which they could claim to belong, which together with the many other layers defined who they were. Outside the circles of the elites, the average population would also have felt the influence of Greek culture. They would have known some form of Greek and been able to read inscriptions at least to some degree, and they would have worshipped Greek gods, just as they lived lives that Polybius and other Greek intellectuals would have recognized as Greek. Whether these non-ethnic Greeks were accepted as Greeks by Strabo and men like him who were able to trace their ancestors back to mainland Greece or one of the old colonies on the coast is perhaps less likely—at least in the early phase when the indigenous population learned about Greek culture for the first time. Later, as more and more generations lived with Greek cultural criteria as an important part of their everyday lives, and as the number of nonethnic Greeks surpassed that of families like Strabo’s, the definition of what it meant to be Greek would have changed accordingly.

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Switching Between Memberships The following section focuses on the different groups and communities of people in Pontus and how these memberships determined the identity of each individual specifically. Here identity is not seen as a zero-sum game. A person’s community background, defined as belonging to a certain city or ethnic group (Macedonians, Galatians, or Paphlagonians), or someone’s cultural affiliation, such as the feeling of being Greek, were not necessarily more important than any of the other memberships that people were part of. There is also the hypothesis that someone’s indigenous heritage would not lose its significance when they became a Roman citizen or developed a sense of belonging to the community of Romans, or, for that matter, when the population in the hinterland came to consider themselves as Greeks. The question is therefore not whether the people saw themselves as Greek, Roman, Paphlagonian, Armenian, or from a family of Persian origin, but how the different memberships interacted with each other. Did the population, most noticeably the local elites, come to see themselves as Romans, not only in the legal sense of the word but as members of the Roman people? And, if so, how did they demonstrate that they were indeed to be recognized as members of the group that, in Aristides’ words, were the people who ruled the empire? (Arist. To Rome 59). People’s stress on career patterns, ties to different cultural and political institutions, and manifestations of social or legal status not only offer glimpses into how they identified themselves as Romans and as Greeks but also testify to how these individuals chose to appear in public, particularly in the eyes of their fellow citizens. The evidence comes predominantly from inscriptions set up as honoree decrees and grave inscriptions to magistrates and family members. The messages that these texts were meant to convey were first and foremost aimed at a local audience in the cities in which they appeared.57 Representatives from Rome such as the governor and his staff, Roman officers, and other travelers from Rome and other parts of the Roman west would occasionally have come through the cities, and the inscriptions would from time to time have caught their eyes. But the inscriptions were primarily set up as a way to communicate with the people in the cities or perhaps in the region who visited the towns more frequently and whom it was more important to impress. There are a number of limitations to how the material could be used as evidence for how people identified themselves. One problem is whether or not the people in the epigraphic material were representative of a silent majority

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who were not honored or remembered by wordy inscriptions. Another issue is how epigraphy as a medium limits how people could reasonably express themselves. As inscriptions were set up to draw the public’s attention to markers such as legal status, political career, priesthoods, generous donations, or different roles in the different institutions, they tell the stories of what was essentially the success of the civic elites, who were the only group privileged enough to live that kind of life. We never hear of the unsuccessful ones who had to step down from office because they could not meet the task or of those who were removed because they were unable or unfit to meet the expectations of the public or their peers, or of those who, for whatever reason, chose not to pursue political careers or involve themselves in the upkeep of the different cultural institutions. No one would volunteer the information on stone that they had never contributed to the upkeep of a temple or to the organization of various festivals. If they were quite unsympathetic to Romans or found the whole idea of emperor worship ridiculous to begin with, they would have kept quiet about it. Such positions would have been common enough; people in the cities would have known who shared these kinds of views, who contributed to public life, and who did not. The criticism Dio Chrysostom faced when he did not help to lower the corn prices in Prusa by sponsoring cheap corn or the pressure that both he and Aristides felt when they hesitated to take office testify to how any attempt to sidestep one’s obligation as a member of the elite was criticized.58 Furthermore, as inscriptions, particularly lengthy ones, were expensive and mostly a medium used by the elites, they largely offer information about the cities’ higher social layers. Families who did not belong to the civic elite or to the level immediately below had much less to share and no public career or donations to advertise. Their sense of belonging to different groups and collectivities is therefore less accessible and often limited to the choice of names or references to certain deities. It is, however, no doubt significant that the number of Romans was lower in the sub-elite part of the population than it was among members of the elite. Also, there is no way of knowing what sort of significance the average population attributed to public bathing, to festivals and games of various kinds, or to the talks given by sophists and philosophers at the bath or in one of the stoas. Finally, it is also apparent that there were limits to how much energy average members of the population were able to invest in thoughts about their own role in the empire or whether they shared the same cultural values as people in Athens, in Ephesus, or, for that matter, in Sinope.

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Any attempt to understand how people in provincial communities responded to the coming of Rome should consider the community as a whole, not solely the elite.59 Even if families at the top of the cities’ hierarchies shared many of the same customs and values as the rest of the population and belonged to many of the same groups as those with more modest means, the access to various Roman institutions such as citizenship, and the role members of the elite played in the upkeep of, for instance, the imperial cult, meant that members of the elite would have experienced the coming of Rome and the influence of Roman and Greek cultures differently from the rest of the population. Ideally, the study of how people in the provinces responded to the coming of Rome or the influence of Greek culture needs to go further than the elite and consider what sort of impact Roman rule had on people’s lives more generally. In North Central Anatolia, where systematic excavations are few and where knowledge of the civic landscapes, except in the case of Pompeiopolis, is modest, the study of cultural interaction rests essentially on evidence generated on the initiative of the civic elites. We may expect that the urban populations in the hinterland were for the most part unaware of how life was lived in Italy and were generally unfamiliar with Roman customs and values, even as late as the High Empire, just as they would have had a rather vague idea about life in Ephesus or, for that matter, in the colonies on the Black Sea coast. But judging from references to Roman civic rights and to memberships of and appointments to different Roman institutions, it can be deduced that the elite instigated dialogues with Rome and Roman power in an attempt to appeal to at least the politically active part of the population (those who turned up when the assemblies were in session and those eligible for a seat on the city council but without the resources to run for office or hold one of the priesthoods in the cities). That people in the region responded differently to the coming of Rome and to the influence of Greek culture is illustrated by examples of three representatives of the local elite. The first example is Strabo from Amaseia. As a historian and geographer, Strabo offers a rare insight into how a member of the intellectual elite experienced Rome and Roman power well before the civic elites in the East obtained Roman civic rights on a more regular basis and so became an integrated part of the empire’s political establishment. The second example is Marcus Antonius Rufus from Sebastopolis. In the second century he was an essential figure both in his hometown and in the eparchy of Pontus Polemonianus, where he served as the priest and benefactor of the neokoros cult to Hadrian. M. Antonius Rufus represents an example of someone who

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proudly advertises his commitment to both Greek and Roman institutions and who, judging from the way he chose to come across in public, felt a strong interconnectedness with both Greek and Roman collectivities. The last example is Gn. Claudius Severus from Pompeiopolis. He married Annia Galeria, the daughter of Marcus Aurelius. It is difficult to say how much of his time Gn. Claudius Severus spent in Pompeiopolis. His father and grandfather, Gn. Claudius Severus and C. Claudius Severus, were both appointed to the Senate and served in the imperial administration, and Gn. Claudius Severus the younger would have lived in Rome and perhaps in one of the provinces to which his father was appointed before he himself embarked on his own political career. Still, the epigraphic record from Pompeiopolis testifies to Gn. Claudius Severus’s elevated position in the city. What the three examples demonstrate is how time and the development of social and political relationships between Rome, or Roman authorities, and the provincial population played a significant role in people’s attitude toward different groups and memberships, just as people’s individual experiences with Roman authorities had a considerable impact on how they responded to Rome, to Roman power, and to the people of Rome. Equally important was whether or not that person or that group of persons felt interconnectedness with Rome and the Roman people. This is to be expected, but it is often forgotten in an attempt to draw more general conclusions about how being Greek was more important to someone’s identity than being a Roman citizen, a priest in the imperial cult, or one of the emperor’s legates in one of the important provinces. We turn to Amaseia in the mid-first century bce when, having finished the first part of his education, Strabo left his home in the Pontic heartland to see the world.60

A Devoted Greek Strabo’s Geography offers an early testimony as to how a member of the Greek elite in the kingdom of Mithridates may have experienced Rome and Roman rule after the Romans had exposed their empire to two major civil wars and finally found political stability. His grandfather lived through the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, which in the aftermath brought the war to Pontus when Pharnaces II used Rome’s internal quarrels to try to regain control over his father’s kingdom, and Strabo was a young man when the civil war following the assassination of Caesar broke out in the mid-40s. Both wars

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brought fighting to Anatolia, which placed the region under considerable military and financial pressure. Antony’s decision to dissolve the Pontic part of the double province was to Strabo a destabilizing factor, for instance, in the case of Heraclea, where Adiatorix ordered the killing of the city’s Roman colony, or when it came to Amisus, where the triumvir is said to have handed a free city over to the new Pontic kingdom (Strabo 12.3.6, 12.3.14). The geographer’s view of Romans and their culture in broader terms is nuanced, divided between, on the one hand, a sincere admiration of Augustus and his ability to civilize what Strabo saw as culturally inferior people in the West, and, on the other, a more general skepticism concerning the people of Rome. One of the key questions for how Strabo saw Rome and the significance of Roman world domination is whether he himself was a Roman citizen. Strabo’s text offers little concrete information, so any attempt to establish whether he was a Roman citizen rests on the name Strabo, “cross-eyed” in Latin—a Roman cognomen in use around the time he was born.61 Strabo could have obtained Roman citizenship from a number of different sources. One option is that he inherited his Roman citizenship from the maternal side of his family, where his grandfather could have received Roman citizenship for his support for Lucullus in the war against Mithridates VI. The name Strabo would relate not to Lucullus but to Pompey’s father. As the one to defeat Mithridates, it was Pompey who had to settle Rome’s acts in the East when he returned to Rome, including the promises and decisions made by his predecessor. Strabo’s criticism of Pompey and the Senate for failing to recognize the danger his family had faced and for not keeping the promises Lucullus made suggests that he and the family felt let down (Strabo 12.3.33). Another way Strabo could have obtained Roman rights was through his friendship with Aelius Gallus, the governor of Egypt, whom the geographer followed on a trip down the Nile. Gallus had adopted Seianus, whose father was Seius Strabo. It has been suggested that the name Strabo could have been inspired by the name of Gallus’s adopted son and that it was given to Strabo at the time he became a Roman citizen.62 Another option is that Strabo secured Roman rights through his assistance of Servilius Strabo, whom he knew from Rome and perhaps from the city of Nysa in Asia Minor, where Strabo stayed for a period of time in the 50s bce.63 As has been pointed out by D. Dueck, there are several elements to suggest that Strabo was the geographer’s cognomen and that he or one of his male relatives obtained Roman citizenship through their connections to Roman men of power; but it is equally clear that there is no way of being sure.64

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What Strabo does write about is his journeys to Rome. His first time in the capital dates to the mid-40s bce, when he describes how he met with Servilius Isauricus, who died in the year 44 bce. Whether Strabo left or remained in Italy until the year 35 when he saw the execution of Selurus, a captured leader of robbers from Aetna in Sicily, is uncertain.65 Strabo was probably in Rome in 31 when the temple of Ceres burned down and again around 29, when he passed Octavian at Corinth as the triumvir was on his way back from Egypt to celebrate his victory in the civil war (Strabo 8.6.23, 10.5.3). It has been suggested that Strabo spent much of his time between the years 20 and 7 bce in Rome as he mentions some of the buildings Augustus and his family erected. Strabo may have stayed on either in Rome or in Italy to the end of his life, sometime after Germanicus celebrated his triumph for the wars against the Germans, another event that Strabo describes as an eyewitness.66 Again, there is no way to be sure how long Strabo stayed on in Rome or in Italy. But what is important here is that he did spend a considerable part of his adult life in the capital, which gave him well-informed ideas not only of Rome and the Romans who lived their lives in the city but also of the political life in general, the political crises, the civil wars, and the form of government Augustus introduced when he took control of the empire. Strabo’s opinions of Rome and of Augustus were therefore to a considerable degree influenced by the political situation in Rome between Caesar’s death and the death of Augustus, a period with a significant impact on the Greek world. The chaos and instability following Caesar’s death showed the worst side of the Romans and may have been at least one of the reasons why Strabo drew a hard distinction between what he saw as the less-civilized Romans in the years of the civil war and those in the age of Augustus.67 Judging from Strabo’s text, it was not just the turmoil of the civil wars that led to his overall negative portrayal of the Romans and their culture. What Strabo offers is a tale of how the people of Rome were inferior to the Greeks, even if Romans lived a life that was ordered by the law and the respect of the gods. Strabo’s disapproval of the Romans comes across in the section where he discusses Eratosthenes’ argument in favor of a more nuanced attitude to the idea of Greek cultural superiority.68 “Near the end of his treaties he [Eratosthenes] refuses to praise those who separate all the number of humanity into two groups, Hellenes and barbarians, as well as those who advised Alexander to consider the Hellenes as friends but the barbarians as enemies. He says that it is better to make such a distinction between good and bad characteristics, for there are many bad Hellenes or urban barbarians, such as the Indians and

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Arians (or, moreover, the Romans and Karchedonians), who administer their governments so marvellously” (Strabo 1.4.9).69 After stating Eratosthenes’ point of view, Strabo rejects the idea entirely. He objects to the view that other people could be just as sophisticated as the Greeks, just as he maintains that the distinction between Greeks and barbarians was widely acknowledged as a way of categorizing, on one hand, people who obeyed laws, had a flair for politics, and valued education and, on the other hand, those who did not share that kind of insight. Strabo further underlines his notion of Greek cultural superiority by emphasizing how the Romans either copied or stole Greek works of art because they were unable to produce at a similar standard themselves—the reader is given examples of how Roman soldiers handled Greek masterpieces in the most despicable way when Greek paintings were used as tables for playing dice.70 Strabo operates with two opposing definitions of what it meant to be a barbarian. First, it is used to define people who either did not speak Greek at all or spoke it with difficulty. Here there seems to be no obvious cultural hierarchy attached to the definition and Strabo seems in this case more in accordance with Eratosthenes than he was in book 1 (Strabo 14.2.28). The other definition of barbarian invites a clear distinction between Greeks and other kinds of people who were more or less civilized but nonetheless culturally inferior to the Greeks (1.4.9). It is the second definition Strabo generally uses when he compares how civilized people were. For example, he, as we saw in Chapter 2, discusses how Greek communities were barbarized by Roman influence after Rome’s conquest, as in the case of Magna Graecia.71 One exception to the general picture of South Italy as culturally impoverished after falling under the sway of Rome is found in the description of Naples, which Strabo describes as a city that managed to remain Greek, even though the inhabitants had become Roman citizens (Strabo 5.4.7). What prevented the city from being barbarized was the way of life there and the fact that Greek institutions, such as the gymnasium and the ephebeia, remained an integral part of the civic landscape even after the inhabitants became Roman citizens in the legal sense. Strabo leaves little doubt that the Romans were culturally inferior to the more-developed and sophisticated Greeks, and his account of the more practically minded Romans, who were more devoted to infrastructural solutions than to the beauty of their cities, may be read as his reminder to his Greek audience of how the coming of Rome had little to offer the more culturally developed Greek communities. Seen in this light, there is not much to suggest

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that Strabo defined himself as Roman or for that matter saw himself as someone who belonged to the community of Roman citizens, even if he did hold Roman civic rights. Instead, the Romans are presented as crude and unsophisticated, and the term “barbarian” is used to underline how Romans ranked lower than the Greeks in his cultural hierarchy. Strabo’s criticisms of the Roman people and their culture, and the distinction he draws between the underdeveloped Romans and the culturally superior Greeks, correspond with how later Greek intellectuals describe similar divides between the Romans (defined as the people living in Rome, Italy, and the western part of the empire), and the Greeks (defined broadly as those who lived a life according to Greek norms). Authors writing between the late first century and mid-third century ce often go to some lengths to show that Romans were culturally less sophisticated than the Greeks and that Greek culture, arts, and ways of thinking were not only superior but also an important source of inspiration to the Romans and their leaders.72 At the end of the first century ce, Plutarch touches upon Roman barbarity when he describes Rome’s wars in the East and advises the Greek civic elites that they would be better off at home, where they should invest their resources in the upkeep of their hometown, rather than pursuing careers in Rome (Plut. Prae. ger. reip. 813 E, 814 D). Similar views on how Greeks were culturally superior to the Romans are readily found in the writings of other Greek intellectuals across the empire. Pausanias offers his readers the same gloomy accounts of how Roman troops and their commanders robbed or mishandled Greek masterpieces of art or of how Roman generals destroyed Greek communities when they founded new cities (as Octavian did in Nicopolis) or colonized existing ones (Paus. 5.22.3, 7.18.8, 8.24.11). That Greek culture was superior to every other culture is also the point made by Philostratus, whose books on Apollonius of Tyana and the lives of the Sophists convey the message that Greek culture was indispensable to the empire. The author makes every effort to reassure his audience that Greek civilization would remain an active force within the empire both politically at the court and as an integral part of the empire’s cultural landscape.73 Strabo expresses the same thoughts in his work, but he differs from later Greek intellectuals in how he emphasizes that it was the Romans, or rather Augustus, who led the tribes in the West toward what he saw as a higher level of cultural development—an idea that is essentially absent from the writing of later Greek intellectuals. Strabo offers his readers a series of examples of how, under the leadership of Augustus, the Romans led people in the West toward a

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more civilized life in peace and harmony both with themselves and with their neighbors. In a comment on how Rome was an important force for civilization, Strabo credited the Romans with having played a decisive role in joining tribes that had previously lived in isolation to the rest of the imperial community, and he celebrates how Augustus taught what he describes as savage people how to live with respect for laws and with political order (Strabo 2.5.26). One example is Augustus’s efforts to bring order to the tribes in Spain and, more importantly perhaps, to win them over to the Roman cause. “Cantabrians . . . and their neighbours, have been put down by Sebastos Caesar; and now instead of ravaging the allies of the Romans, they fight for the Romans” (Strabo 3.3.8).74 Similar accounts of how the tribes in the West reached a higher level of civilization are offered in the description of the western provinces. The Turdetanians were, by the time Strabo wrote, so devoted to Roman ways of living that they were now practically Romans (Strabo 3.2.15). The barbarians who lived near the Massiliotes had been gradually subdued and lived in peace, more focused on farming and civil life than on warfare (Strabo 4.1.5). And the Cavaris were no longer barbarians but Romans in speech and ways of living, and in how they organized their public life.75 As Strabo never set foot in Spain and Gaul, he did not see with his own eyes the communities that Rome allegedly civilized in the early imperial period. Instead, the geographer would have relied on what were essentially pro-Roman sources and their notion of how it was Rome’s role in history to civilize the world. As a consequence, Strabo would have been exposed to Augustus’s own version of how he—as the rightful ruler of the empire— invested a lot of effort into helping people achieve a new level of civilization. His many visits to Rome and what may have been longer stays in the capital would have tied Strabo to the intellectual environment in the city. Here, he would have been part of the discussions about how Roman rule improved the way of life in the provinces, what kinds of rulers the Romans were, and what sort of impact the reign of Augustus had on the West and in the empire in general. That Strabo accepted the version of how the reign of Augustus brought peace and stability to the entire empire is underlined by the account of how he introduced Roman norms and ways of living to people in Gaul and Spain. In addition, Augustus comes across as the just ruler who returned the treasures Antony stole during the civil war and looked out for the people in the capital whose everyday life he improved. Despite Strabo’s favorable attitude toward Augustus and the monarchy that he saw as the only form of government for a state the size of Rome, he

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seems not to have seen himself as a Roman, nor is there anything to suggest that he felt an interconnectedness with the people in Rome. The critique of Eratosthenes and the more relativistic approach to cultural superiority suggest that Strabo firmly believed that Greeks were culturally superior—even if some people such as the Romans or Indians were more sophisticated than the population in Gaul or Spain. Even if Strabo praised the Romans for their ability to civilize the West, he seems not to think that it was Rome that civilized the Pontic hinterland. As discussed in Chapter 2, Strabo was generally unimpressed by the cities Pompey founded, and he offers essentially no information about the civic landscape, how people there lived, the institutions that would have been part of the cities’ urban landscapes, the languages they spoke, or the customs they followed, as he did when he discussed how the coming of Rome improved life in the West.76 How well Strabo knew Pompey’s cities would have varied from town to town and it is unnecessary to expect that he visited all of them. Also, architectural development in the individual cities would have varied considerably and would have been generally modest when Strabo started to travel the world. To Strabo’s eyes, therefore, there may not have been much to suggest that Rome had anything to offer people in the Pontic hinterland; he may have felt that the population there was already living a more sophisticated life by the time Rome conquered Pontus than what he imagined was the case in the western provinces. Unlike the later Greek intellectuals, there are reasons why Strabo felt no particular interconnectedness with the people of Rome or, if he did hold Roman rights, no sense of belonging to the group that defined themselves as Romans. The political chaos he experienced following the death of Caesar, the stress Rome’s civil war brought on the provincial communities in the East, and the way he felt his family had been ignored by Pompey may serve as an explanation for why Strabo felt he had little in common with the people he met in Rome and Italy. Another reason why Strabo felt no connection to the Roman people may be found in the fact that, like most other provincials in the late first century bce and early first century ce, he was excluded from the political process in Rome. Members of the provincial elite and individuals who had shown an extraordinary sense of loyalty to Rome had been awarded Roman citizenship. But Rome’s political elite was still largely Roman or Italian in origin, and it was mostly men from Italy that pursued careers in Roman politics. This continued

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into the reign of Tiberius.77 Augustus and Tiberius did open the Senate up to members of the elite in the Roman colonies and allowed a privileged few careers in Roman politics, but the provincial elite were not appointed to the Senate in any systematic way until sometime in the second half of the first century ce, and the Greek elite did not follow suit until the first half of the second century.78 When Strabo wrote the Geography, members of the provincial elite with Roman rights were still, at least politically, Rome’s subjects—even if some of them enjoyed the same legal status as Romans with Italian backgrounds. Unlike the Greek intellectuals who were active between the late first century and mid-third century, when members of the provincial elite were becoming Roman citizens on a more regular basis, Strabo and most other men from the provinces of the early first century ce were still political outsiders with essentially no access to the Senate or to posts in the imperial administration. When the population in the provinces met representatives from Rome at the end of the first century bce and beginning of the first century ce they were, with few exceptions, men of Italian origin representing what was essentially an Italian elite. Later in the High Empire, Greek intellectuals were still much devoted to their Greek cultural background and, like Strabo, confident that Greeks were culturally more sophisticated and superior to Romans from Italy and the West. But while Strabo and other members of the provincial elite in the late first century bce and early first century ce watched Roman politics and provincial administration from the sidelines, Greek intellectuals writing in the time of the High Empire lived to see Greeks finding their way into the inner circles of Roman politics to the extent that half of the non-Italian members of the Senate were of eastern origin. As a result, the Greek elite was now much more integrated in the imperial administration, and the population in the eastern part of the empire would have answered to men like themselves in their dealings with Roman authorities.79 Furthermore, Greek men of letters were now part of the emperor’s court, serving as advisors, secretaries, and teachers under emperors such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, who admired the Greeks for their culture and intellectual ideals. Apart from writers such as Pausanias, who did admit that things were much better under the current emperors, Greek intellectuals now felt a stronger sense of belonging to Rome, Roman power, and the empire in general than Strabo did, despite their skepticism. Citizen or not, Strabo was no

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Roman Greek but others were. A century later Marcus Antonius Rufus left little doubt that he was keen to be counted among the Romans in Sebastopolis.

Roman Greeks In the inscription set up by his family after his death, Marcus Antonius Rufus is depicted as an active and very generous member of the elite in Sebastopolis, devoted to both Greek and Roman institutions. Marcus Antonius Rufus of the tribe of Sergia, most esteemed from his ancestors and most glorious on account of his own spending. He undertook all the public expenditures; he distinguished himself in every spending; he often served as archon and headed the religious banquets. On several occasions he was the inspector of the market; he served as pontarch in Neokaisareia, the metropolis of Pontos. He took care to procure many great things, mostly by paying for them himself. He was the first to open the gymnasion, and he served as high priest for life of the most divine emperor Hadrian together with his most distinguished wife Antonia Stratonike. He provided for hunting games and continuous gladiatorial contests. He guaranteed annual spectacles and lavish spending forever after his own death, and what is most magnificent, he procured a successor for his family as well as for his lavish spending in his own daughter Antonia Maxima and in his homonymous grandson, whom she has begotten with Cornelianus Capito, a man ranking first in the metropolis Amaseia as well as among us. When alive, and also now, Sebastopolis has often honoured Marcus Antonius Rufus with the erection of statues among the various tribes of the city. His daughter Antonia Maxima has paid for the erection of these statues.80 From the text on what would have been the base of his honorary statue, this portrait by Rufus, or by the family he left behind, presents him as a highly placed member of the elite in Sebastopolis who was dedicated to the worship of the emperor both in his city and in the koinon, and also as a conscientious local politician who used large funds to ensure that Sebastopolis stayed vibrant. The tria nomina suggest that his family had obtained Roman citizenship from

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Mark Antony, in all likelihood when the triumvir campaigned in the East. Like the Cassii in Nicaea or the Domitii in Prusias ad Hypium, Rufus’s families had acquired Roman rights in the first century bce, well before various emperors started to distribute Roman citizenship at a steadier pace, and were therefore counted among the local families who would have been the first to become Roman citizens. How much we are to read into the fact that Rufus’s cognomen was Roman is difficult to say. By choosing Roman names for its sons and daughters, the family may have wanted to underline its Roman status and belonging to the group of people who defined themselves as Romans—also in the cultural sense of the word—but then again that might not have been the case. Apart from underlining someone’s legal status as a Roman and one’s family relations, in imperial Rome the choice of names would have been exposed to influence from trends, and some names would have been inspired by strong and charismatic characters whom the family admired, hoping that their children might take on some of that person’s qualities. There need therefore not have been a particular message or motive behind the name Rufus, but what the decision to give a Roman cognomen to sons in the family does indicate is that the family felt no need to distance themselves from the Roman people or underline the family’s Greek cultural background by adding a Greek name to the tria nomina. It has been suggested that the Antonii and the other members of the elite in the hinterland cities were not of local origin.81 Compared to Galatia, where Gallic names continued to be a well-integrated part of tria nomina, Persian names were not as common in second-century Pontus. It has been argued, therefore, that the few examples of indigenous names in combination with Greek names or Roman tria nominae could suggest that a local elite was somehow missing, perhaps because the indigenous aristocracy was either removed or killed by a foreign elite. A similar pattern has been suggested in the case of Bithynia, where indigenous Bithynian names in combination with Greek and Roman names are rare, and where the local elite is said to have been replaced by an elite that came from outside the region.82 To use Galatia and its aristocracy as a parallel to the Pontic hinterland, or for that matter to Bithynia, is a straightforward choice, but there are differences that need to be considered. Unlike in the case of Galatia, where large Celtic communities migrated to Anatolia and settled into tribes, there was never an ethnic aristocracy in the Mithridatic kingdoms to assume the role of an elite with ties across the entire kingdom. As was pointed out by Sørensen,

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Persian names were part of the onomastic material in Amaseia and Comana, where the memory of the Mithridatic kingdom would have been particularly strong. Outside the royal centers, memory of the kings would have been less dominant, particularly in the imperial period. Furthermore, the Mithridatic kingdom was a neo-Iranian dynasty that came from outside the region at the beginning of the third century bce and suppressed the indigenous population in the land of Cappadocia at Pontus.83 It is an open question whether people outside the courts felt any particular link to the kings or their Iranian ties. Unlike in Galatia, where the aristocracy maintained its leading role after becoming part of the Roman empire, the Mithridatic dynasty and its inner circle lost the war and were replaced by the city culture Pompey introduced. The history of the kings would have had some nostalgic appeal in Amaseia and in Comana, which Pompey interestingly enough allowed an independent status, and it is not all that surprising that the kings would have been an inspiration when local families there named their sons. It is, however, less likely that the same would have been the case in cities where the first population was drawn in from the local villages. Why, for instance, would the name Pharnaces have been particularly appealing in the cities that fell victim to the attack of Pharnaces II in 47 bce, and why would the name Mithridates be popular in Armenia Minor, where the king definitively lost control over his kingdom or, for that matter, in Nicopolis, a city that, more than any of the other settlements, symbolized the fall of the Mithridatic dynasty? While members of the Galatian aristocracy were winners and leaders of their local communities throughout the imperial period, Mithridates VI lost, fled Anatolia, and died a less than glorious death by the hand of his slave when his son, the same Pharnaces II, revolted against him. We cannot know with certainty where Rufus’s ancestors were from, but the lack of Persian names in his tria nomina or in the names of other members of the elite offers little ground to dismiss the local origin of the civic elite in the imperial Pontic hinterland. For all we know, Rufus’s family could just as easily have obtained their Roman status as a token of gratitude for having assisted Antony, perhaps when he planned his invasion of Parthia or later when he took control over Armenia and converted the kingdom into a province. Even if names, magistracies, commitments to the imperial cult, or memberships of different Roman institutions offer no definitive proof of someone’s sense of belonging to the community of Romans or to how the status of Roman citizen was particularly important to someone’s identity, the case of Rufus seems to suggest that he was proud of being Roman.

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Apart from his commitment to the imperial cult, Rufus chose Maxima, a very Roman name, for his daughter, to go with Antonia and, judging from the last part of the inscription, he was a member of the Roman elite network in the region that included his son-in-law, Cornelianus Capito, a man of considerable status in Amaseia. Rufus was an established part of the region’s collectivity of Romans and a man committed to the upkeep of Roman institutions of power, but he was also someone who actively promoted Greek institutions and cultural values, such as when he funded the opening of the first gymnasium in Sebastopolis. Rufus was politically active about a century after Strabo watched Germanicus celebrate his triumph in Rome. Roman citizenship had now spread more systematically in the East, and men with a Greek background were now a regular part of the imperial administration. Half of the non-Italian members of the Senate came from one of the Greek-speaking provinces. It is no doubt essential not to overestimate the effect that the increasing number of Greeks in Roman politics had on the population in the eastern provinces. Many, perhaps most, of the inhabitants of Roman Anatolia—including members of the elite—would have been unaware that men with Greek cultural backgrounds were becoming an increasingly integral part of Roman politics and of the imperial administration. It should therefore not be too readily assumed that Roman citizens of provincial background in Anatolia would have felt a stronger sense of belonging to the community of Rome simply because a higher number of Greeks obtained seats in the Senate: they need not have been aware or given it much thought that men from the East, perhaps from their own region, held influential posts in the imperial administration. But they would have noticed a more pronounced attention from Rome and from the imperial house, and most of the elite and a larger part of the community (in some provinces up to about a third) would have been Roman citizens. Being Roman and part of the people that ruled the empire was a more natural and shared feeling in mid-second-century Sebastopolis than it had been to Strabo a century earlier. Whether Rufus felt he was more Greek than Roman or felt a closer tie to his Greek background than to the community of Romans is impossible to answer. From the evidence made available by his family, Rufus and his descendants were keen members of both Greek and Roman collectivities and if asked they would presumably say that they belonged to the collectivity of Roman families of Greek background, perhaps with Cappadocian ancestors. To Rufus, his status as a citizen of Sebastopolis seems to have been particularly

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important, as is testified by his strong commitment to the city’s many needs. But he was also proud of his role in the imperial cult in both Sebastopolis and in the koinon, just as he was keen to remind his fellow citizens that he was the sole beneficiary of the city’s first gymnasium. Gn. Claudius Severus the younger from the city of Pompeiopolis was a man whose belonging to the community of Romans is undisputable. He was the third consul in his family and the emperor’s son-in-law. C. Claudius Severus, his grandfather, was appointed to the Senate as inter quaestorios around the year 98 and became praetore urbanus and legatus pro praetor in Arabia before he reached his consulship in c. 112. His son, Gn. Claudius Severus Arabianus, the father of Gn. Claudius Severus the younger, was also appointed consul and had a respectable career in the imperial administration. It is doubtful that the Severi would have spent much time in Pompeiopolis after C. Claudius Severus left Pompeiopolis to assume his seat in the Senate. With Claudius as nomen gentile, the three Severi from Pompeiopolis would have assumed Roman rights under Claudius or perhaps in the reign of Nero. C. Claudius Severus, who was probably a second-generation Roman, reached the top level of the imperial administration and so laid the ground for the family’s remarkable social mobility from being members of the local Roman elite in Pompeiopolis to the inner circle at the court of Marcus Aurelius, all in just three generations. As members of the elite in Pompeiopolis, the Severi would have been well versed in Greek and, despite being Roman, the family is likely to have lived a life influenced by Greek norms and customs. As in the case of Marcus Antonius Rufus, the Severi would have been members of both Greek and Roman communities and are likely to have seen themselves as both Greeks and Romans, and as citizens of Pompeiopolis, as is underlined by how Gn. Claudius Severus at least kept his ties to Pompeiopolis. As men who lived a considerable part of their lives in Rome and elsewhere in the empire, the Severi would have been well aware of their own value to the Roman administration and the influence enjoyed by their fellow provincials in the East. Also, living in Rome in the mid-second century ce, when half of the non-Italian members of the Senate were men of Greek or eastern origin, Gn. Claudius Severus knew that ethnic diversity had become less and less of an obstacle, at least politically, if men from the East wanted a career in Rome or a post at the court. Emperors were now welcoming Greek culture and intellectuals with open arms and Greeks were no longer outsiders looking in at a political elite from which they were excluded. To the Severi,

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there was nothing to prevent them seeing themselves as Greeks, Romans, or Paphlagonians. They were just as Roman and carried the same rights as any other member of the empire’s elite community and would have had no reason to feel any less important or any less influential than other members of the political establishment in Rome. That people responded differently to Rome, the Romans, and Roman power depending on the circumstances is only to be expected. What the three cases show is how attitudes toward becoming both Greek and Roman depended on a number of factors that people could not always control: access to political rights, personal experiences with representatives of a particular group, experiences with Roman authorities, or the attitude toward Rome, the current emperor, or Roman power in the local communities. The number of groups and memberships people joined depended also on the political and cultural institutions present in the cities or in the region in which they lived. If there was no gymnasium in a city, the inhabitants would have been unable to train and educate themselves in the same organized way as in cities where such facilities were available. That does not mean, of course, that inhabitants would have felt less Greek than the populations in Pompeiopolis or Sebastopolis, where we know gymnasia were established, but that the cities’ young elite were less likely to get the same intellectual schooling than their peers elsewhere.

Eager to Be Roman and Greek Judging from the epigraphic material, people in the Pontic region were keen to show many aspects of who they were and also the sense of interconnectedness many of them felt to Greek, Roman, and indigenous communities. The focus in this section is on how people chose to advertise the many different sides of who they were in the local context of their home cities. It is beyond doubt that only a minority of the population were Roman citizens and so Romans in the legal sense of the word. Furthermore, it is not difficult to imagine that several of the non-Roman inhabitants felt distanced from the community of Romans, even if they would have belonged to many of the same collectivities as those with Roman rights. Also, the criticism of Rome and Roman power readily found in the writing of some Greek intellectuals in the age of the High Empire would have thrived outside the learned conversation and lectures in stoas or in the

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gymnasia. One is here wise to remember that Rome was often met with considerable opposition, particularly in the early phase after a new province was established. The Pontic hinterland was no exception, as was recently demonstrated by Sørensen, who convincingly points to how Pharnaces’ invasion of Pontus in the mid-40s bce may have tied in with layers of resistance to Roman rule and have been a symptom of how far from everyone welcomed Pompey’s reorganization of the region.84 What the non-Roman part of the population could do was to feel a sense of belonging to the empire and the people that lived within its borders. One way to demonstrate this sense of belonging was by imitating the Romans, both those of local origin and those from outside the region, who were either passing through or settling for a period of time. Here, the use of Roman names among the non-Roman part of the population was one way to demonstrate interconnectedness with the empire’s leading people.85 Participation in cultic activities to the imperial family was another way to demonstrate a connection to the imperial power, just as the commitment to Roman institutions, such as gladiatorial games or public bathing, was a way people without Roman rights could establish a connection to the empire or to the community of Romans in the towns or region. One could not just join the community of Roman citizens, but everyone was free to act Roman and live in ways where Roman customs were an integral part of their everyday life. In the following it is assumed that an individual’s Roman status was a matter of prestige in that person’s hometown, in the region, and in visits to other parts of the empire. Had that not been the case, members of the elite would not have paraded their status as Roman citizens as explicitly as they did. With its legions and auxiliary forces, the army was one unmistakable Roman institution and a strong symbol of Roman power within provincial communities. References to careers in the army were therefore a manifestation of an individual’s belonging to the Roman community and also of a commitment to Rome. One man who advertised his career in the army was Ailius Pulker from the city of Neoclaudiopolis. Apart from his seat on the city council, Pulker mentions his status as an army veteran who, judging from the name, is likely to have obtained Roman rights in the reign of Hadrian (SP III 41). If Pulker was originally from Neoclaudiopolis and not someone who chose to come there, perhaps after discharge from an army in the East, he is an example of a man of local origin keen to underline both his and his family’s Roman status and belonging to the community of Romans in the region. Julia Pulkra, perhaps his daughter, appears in the inscription with two

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Roman names, which testifies to how Ailius Pulker chose to name Pulkra after the Roman fashion. Honored in a bilingual inscription set up in Zela, the centurion Ulpios Karistos, or Ulpius Carinnus in the Latin version of the text, is another example of a proud military man from the region. Karistos’s origin is not clear. Zela was situated on the road that connected western Anatolia with the eastern borders and was a center used by the army when soldiers moved to and from the eastern borders. Karisto may have been recruited outside the region but what could suggest a local origin is that the legion XXX Ulpia Victrix, in which he served, was founded in the year 100 to fight in the Dacian war and was later stationed at the Rhine until the fifth century. That Karistos ends up in Zela could therefore suggest that he returned as a veteran rather than just ending up in the city when on his way to or from the East (SP III 269). In any case Karistos’s example underlines how individuals belonged to several groups simultaneously, and it also shows how people would communicate differently, depending on the audience they wished to address. With the Latin text, Karistos spoke directly to the group of Latin-speaking Romans, most likely fellow soldiers like C. Julius Rufus who was from Zela himself and a member of the Pontic cohort. Rufus is commemorated with an inscription in Latin set up by his heir C. Ignatius Maximus.86 To them he advertised his status as a Roman citizen and his appointment as centurion in the XXX Ulpia Victrix. To these readers, Karistos came across as someone to whom it was important to communicate in Latin, and as a member of the group of Romans who spoke Latin and was an army officer, and as an integral part of one of Rome’s most essential institutions. On the other hand, Karistos was not just a member of a club of officers or army veterans in Zela with little or no interest in the community around him. As testified by the Greek version of the text, Karistos was reaching out to the people of Zela, underlining that he was also to be counted among the members of the city’s Greek community and that he anticipated that people in Zela would admire or at least recognize as noteworthy his career in the army and his rank as centurion. Similar expectations would have informed the decisions of the likes of Ailius Pulker when they commemorated their military careers with inscriptions that were set up only in Greek. Here, the audience was predominantly the people living in Neoclaudiopolis. Even if some of the soldiers and officers who passed through the city would know Greek well enough to read Pulker’s account of how he was both an army veteran and a member of the city

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council, they were not the intended audience. Had that been the case, Pulker would have given them a Latin version or set up the inscription in Latin only. Naturally, some of the inhabitants in Zela and Neoclaudiopolis would have been unimpressed by army careers and it would probably not have taken long to find someone who would openly criticize those who pursued them. But what matters here is how Pulker and his fellow soldiers were sure that people in general would admire their careers in the army, at least to a degree that would cast a positive light on them and those who set up the inscriptions after they had passed away. Another soldier who died in the region was the beneficiarius Julius Heliodorus, a Roman citizen from the late second or early third century with a Greek cognomen. Heliodorus was stationarius in Andrapa—a non-Greek reference to Neapolis or Neoclaudiopolis that is likely to have been the preRoman name for the village that Strabo refers to as katoikía.87 A Julia Zmaragdis, who may have been either the wife or the niece of Heliodorus and his brother Severianus who appears in the inscription without a nomen gentile, set up the inscription to him. Whether Heliodorus was from Neoclaudiopolis or the city’s territory cannot be established, but there are elements that point in that direction. Apart from his Greek cognomen, which suggests his eastern origin, his brother was apparently living close enough to Neoclaudiopolis to make sure the inscription was raised. In any case, Heliodorus, his brother, and Julia were all keen to advertise Heliodorus’s appointment to the statio at Neoclaudiopolis. A stationarius was a lower-ranking soldier assigned to police and protect areas with little military presence. In other parts of the empire, people came to the stationarii for protection or to seek help when robbed or when exposed to other kinds of crime.88 As a military force with means to intervene in local disputes and the power to police the area, the stationarii were men of authority who would have enjoyed the respect of their neighborhoods. The inscription is in Greek and there is no attempt to interact with a Latin audience of either serving or veteran soldiers. Yet as stationarius Heliodorus still comes across as a Roman citizen with a career in the army, and with the appointment to the statio of Neoclaudiopolis he was an unmistakable representative of Roman power in the region, whose task it was to police and protect the public—a job that would have required that he represent Rome’s interests against his fellow citizens. To a local audience, Heliodorus and his family, particularly Zmaragdis, would have appeared as Romans proud of their citizenship and of Heliodorus’s appointment as stationarius, but there are elements to suggest

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Figure 7. Epitaph of the beneficiarius Julius Heliodorus, stationed at Neoclaudiopolis. Photo Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen.

that the family felt a sense of belonging both to the city’s Greek community and to the area’s pre-Roman past. Apart from the references to Andrapa, which at the time of Heliodorus must have been used along with the more official name Neoclaudiopolis, the Greek names Heliodorus and Zmaragdis suggest that the family felt they were Greeks. Julius Heliodorus was not the first in the family to obtain Roman rights but would have inherited both the nomen gentile Julius and status as a Roman citizen from a distant member of his family who is likely to have earned the right sometime in the first half of

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the first century ce. And names such as Heliodorus and Zmaragdis, on the other hand, show that both Heliodorus and his family chose a Greek name to go with Julius and that they, like many other families in second- and third-century Neoclaudiopolis, felt a sense of belonging to the region’s Greek communities, living a life in which Greek norms and customs were a central part of how they saw themselves. Men such as Julius Heliodorus, Ulpius Carinnus, and Antonius Rufus were particularly vocal about their ties to Roman institutions and their belonging to the empire’s community of Romans. The reality is that the majority of Roman citizens had much less exciting careers. They were not all wealthy, influential, or adventurous enough to pursue careers in the army or to participate in the upkeep of the imperial cults and other Roman institutions. But the epigraphic practice from the region suggests that they too were keen to show their ties to the communities of Romans in their surroundings, or perhaps more broadly across the empire. An inscription from Neoclaudiopolis offers an example of how the influence from Rome was important. The text is set up on a limestone stele to commemorate Meliboia, the excellent wife of Candidus, whom she left behind with their young children. It is Candidus who sets up the inscription. Whether he was a Roman citizen is not entirely clear as he only appears with his cognomen, but his status as Roman may be suggested from how others in the region with full tria nomina are known to have had Candidus as their cognomen.89 The inscription is written in hexameters and Candidus’s literary ambitions are illustrated by reference to the mythological figure Momos, the personification of satire and blame. The high literary level is further indicated by how the word oikouría, found in the writing of Pindar and Euripides, fits one of the gaps in the damaged part of the text.90 Even if one keeps in mind that Candidus’s status as a Roman citizen is uncertain or that the word oikouría is part of the reconstruction, the inscription is still an example of a man who carried a Roman cognomen and was well versed in Greek mythology and literary writing. If Candidus was a Roman citizen, he then offers another example of how people advertised their ties to different groups simultaneously. Apart from being a learned man who appreciated Greek literature, and a man of some means to have the work done, Candidus may well have been a Roman citizen or a man who went under the name Candidus, a name that was not uncommon among Romans in the area, in an inscription set up to offer respect to his young wife. In any case, Candidus was happy to appear publicly as a man with a Roman name and Greek cultural pretensions.

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Another example, also from the territory of Neoclaudiopolis, is Aemilius Pollio, a man honored by his wife, Aemilia Lucilla, who set up the inscription to commemorate him and his orderly life.91 Apart from their alleged affection for each other, the Aemilii had not much to show for themselves other than their Roman citizenship. Here, the double Latin name Aemilia Lucilla testifies to how they followed Roman practice. Where these people came from is difficult to say. The name Aemilius suggests that they did not obtain Roman status from one of the emperors. Pollio’s forefathers may have been manumitted by Roman masters, serving as soldiers either in the army of Pompey or Antony and then settling in the region; they may have descended from some of the Romans from Italy who chose to migrate to the region; or they may have acquired their Roman status as a token for their service to one of the governors in the region.92 In any case Pollio and Lucilla set up the inscription in Greek, which testifies to how they wanted people from Neoclaudiopolis to know their story. Again, it would have been clear to anyone who took the time to read the text that the family was Roman, but also that Lucilla wanted the people in Neoclaudiopolis to know about her husband, his status as Roman, and the life they had lived together. The pre-Roman age and the kings that once made the region great enough to challenge Rome inspired other locals. As has been pointed out by Sørensen, examples of people carrying Persian names or names that were related to the Pontic court or to the neo-Iranian communities are few and mainly found at the old pre-Roman centers. One exception is Aurelius Pharnaces, who set up an inscription to his wife K[l]audia and offers an example of how someone or someone’s family still felt a sense of connection to the kingdom of Mithridates and a past where the region and its kings controlled a considerable part of North Central Anatolia (SP III 57). Aurelius Pharnaces advertised his Roman citizenship to the people of Neoclaudiopolis and he may have been an example of a man with ties to Roman and Greek communities who, judging by the name alone, felt some sense of belonging to the pre-Roman past. The cities in the Pontic hinterland should not be depicted as multicultural in the sense that people with different cultural backgrounds lived side by side. Greek ways of living dominated in the age of the High Empire up to the point that the majority of the population would have felt they were Greek. The vast majority of inscriptions were set up in Greek; there are only a few in Latin apart from milestones and the few military records. As we have seen, Greek institutions such as the gymnasia in Pompeiopolis and Sebastopolis or the theater in Pompeiopolis testify to how Greek cultural institutions became an

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essential part of the cities’ urban landscapes; and the coin material documents how Greek deities had become a natural part of the religious scene across the region from the late first century onward. Many of the people with Roman citizenship in Neoclaudiopolis, Nicopolis, or Zela would have felt foreign if they ever made it as far as to Rome, to one of the Italian cities, or to the large cities in Gaul, Spain, or Africa, where the influence of Roman urban culture was stronger and considerably more pronounced than in the eastern part of the empire. They would not have spoken Latin, or only with difficulty, and they would not have been familiar with Roman literature, the history of Rome, Roman gods, or its values and virtues that were so important to the people living in Rome. When traveling to the capital or to the western part of the empire, people from the Pontic hinterland would have encountered religious practices and deities they were unfamiliar with and, just as importantly, they would have been looked upon as different or foreign by people not just in Rome and Italy but also across the western part of the empire. What people in the Pontic hinterland shared with the population in Rome and in the West was not a cultural collectivity, even if they all enjoyed the pleasure of hot baths or the fascination of a fight between gladiators. Being Roman in an Anatolian province, such as those in the Pontic hinterland, was not a matter of living, speaking, or thinking like the Romans in Rome or Italy. It was the ability to share a number of legal and economic privileges that elevated them above the rest of the population in their local community. They enjoyed the opportunity to share a political and cultural community with other Romans throughout the empire. More importantly, Rome equaled power and world domination, and judging from Aristides in his speech To Rome, being Roman symbolized an individual’s belonging to the privileged group of people who ruled the empire. When people in Pontus decided to advertise their Roman citizenship, give their girls Roman names, or pursue and later commemorate careers in the army or their role in the upkeep of the imperial cult, they did so to underline their belonging to a community of people that ruled the rest of the empire and large parts of the world outside the borders. In Pontus, being Roman coexisted with the sense of being Greek. People’s commitment to living a life in accordance with Greek cultural norms was important to who they were, just as some part of the population, such as Aurelius Pharnaces in Neoclaudiopolis, felt a sense of belonging to the pre-Roman past when the region was the center of one of the strongest kingdoms in Hellenistic Anatolia.

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The attempt to pin down what membership was most important to who people were and how they perceived themselves or were perceived by others is difficult and in any case not the most productive use of the information these people volunteered. Coming back to the thoughts of Sen and Maalouf, what defined who people were and how they came across in the eyes of their surroundings was the combination of the groups and memberships they were part of, or that they were prevented from joining. Being a Roman citizen from Sebastopolis, a priest in the imperial cult and dedicated to the well-being of the city’s Greek cultural institutions; or a Roman citizen in Neoclaudiopolis with a career in the army; or a family with Roman rights and the legal, economic, and symbolic status that followed, would have been more prestigious, surely also in the eyes of others, than being an average citizen, perhaps with a seat on the council, but without Roman rights, who happened to live a life— like most others in the town—according to Greek norms and customs.

Conclusion

With his victory against Mithridates and Tigranes in 66, Pompey finally brought the two kingdoms to a fall. Mithridates got away and so robbed Pompey of the opportunity to display the king in the triumph he was to celebrate at his return to Italy. But apart from the missing king, the campaign was an immense success. As a war of expansion, with its victory over the two kingdoms and the subsequent conquest of the Caucasus and large parts of the Near East, it superseded the achievements of any Roman general before him. Pompey had averted what had been developing into a critical situation, where Roman forces under the command of Lucullus were losing ground and were no longer in control of central and eastern Anatolia. The area under Roman control in the East had been considerably expanded, and large parts of Anatolia and the Near East were now under direct Roman rule. With his victory in the East, Pompey could reasonably claim to be one of Rome’s most successful generals. This sent a clear message to the Senate and the people in Rome— Pompey was to be taken seriously as a key figure in Roman politics. He was no longer the young ambitious warlord that first Sulla and later the Senate had used to solve an immediate crisis, but a man of considerable military ability who demanded not only recognition from his peers but also a leading role in Roman politics. The choices Pompey made for Pontus and the East in broader terms are here seen in relation to his strengthened relationship with the senatorial elite and so as a politically motivated attempt to underline his own military success as the first and only general able to bring the rebellious kings to their knees. The urbanization of the Pontic hinterland followed the decision to organize the kingdom into an area with few urban centers. At the same time, urbanization was also a means to emphasize that the region had been pacified up to a point where it was possible to organize the previously hostile people along Roman standards, and the new settlement served as a commemoration of Pompey’s complete success in the Third Mithridatic War. The arrangement

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was bold and risky. If the provinces proved too difficult to defend or if the cities had to be abandoned because they were unable to thrive, Pompey would have faced considerable criticism and lawsuits. He risked political ignominy. Another, less demanding option would have been to leave the region in the hands of client kings, either as one large entity, which could easily prove too much of a risk, or as Antony later did, to split the region into smaller units, which would reduce resources for individual local rulers and so render them less of a threat to stability in the region. When Pompey turned Mithridates’ kingdom into a province, it certainly mattered that Lucullus had already asked a commission of senators to verify that the region was sufficiently pacified for this to happen. To give up the idea of a province could lead to criticism in Rome, particularly because Pompey’s many enemies would argue that the solution offered by Pompey was less attractive and so less admirable than the plans of his predecessor. Another of Pompey’s concerns was the expectations of the equites who were looking for more land to farm. Yet, judging by the strategy in Syria, Pompey was concerned to prevent excessive taxation in the new provinces and to leave the level of taxation to be negotiated between the publicani and local magistrates. As the city-state was the backbone of provincial organization, Pompey needed a civic structure to organize the vast territory of what was to become Roman Pontus. Pompey’s own vanity and the irresistible temptation to follow the example of Alexander would also have influenced the decision, but the choice to establish seven new cities and reorganize Zela and Amaseia into citystates suggests that urbanization was more than a celebration of the victory against the kings or a way to establish a parallel to Alexander. It was a courageous political move aimed to show the world that a notoriously hostile region had now finally been defeated and pacified. In 66 bce, when Pompey initiated the organization of Roman Pontus, the region was already culturally diverse, divided between Greek colonies on the coast and the cities in the hinterland, where the inhabitants included indigenous people, families of Persian origin, and an uncertain number of Roman veterans who were either too weak to travel back to Italy or keen to try their luck in the new province. There is little reason to assume that Greek families moved to the region in any significant number. Strabo and his family testify to how Greeks or even Greek communities were already an integrated part of Mithridates’ kingdom, but there is no evidence to support the theory of largescale migration of Greek colonists to the region—the people living in the villages would not have been influenced by Greek culture to any significant

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extent. If that had been the case, it is reasonable to assume that Strabo would have had something to say either about the migration as such or about the practices that Greek colonists would have established when they arrived in the region. After all, Strabo’s family came as migrants to serve at the court of the Mithridatic kings. Instead, he is silent about any influence from Greek culture, even in the case of Amaseia, which suggests that Greek families in the region would have had little impact on the institutional landscape in the cities’ early phase or on the life that was being lived in the cities probably well into the imperial period. How people defined themselves and how they came across in the eyes of others was determined by the groups and communities to which they belonged or from which they were excluded. In order to feel Greek, people in the Pontic hinterland would need to have established some sense of belonging to a Greek community or to have a share in Greek cultural heritage and, preferably, to be recognized as Greek by other Greeks in the region—men like Strabo—or when they visited cities on the Black Sea coast or in Bithynia. In order to become Greek, after all a very loosely defined cultural group, people in Pompey’s cities would need to have participated in Greek cultural institutions such as the gymnasium, to develop a sense of Greek customs and the ability to speak some form of Greek, or to familiarize themselves with Greek norms and values. Yet, without references to Greek immigration or, for that matter, without traces of Greek cultural institutions until the High Empire, we cannot simply assume that the cities were influenced by Greek culture to any significant degree—that is, not until the cities were back under Roman rule. This does not, of course, rule out the possibility that groups of Greeks moved to the cities or that some Greek institutions were established there and so, in one way or other, influenced the urban landscape or how people there lived their lives. But without evidence we have no way of knowing whether that was the case or, if it were, the effect it had on people in the different towns. What we can say is that Strabo did not believe the cities to be particularly Greek when he wrote his account of Pontus sometime in the early first century ce. Judging from what we know about Roman Pontus, there is little to suggest that urbanization in itself was an attempt to civilize the region by introducing civic communities with Greek institutions at the forefront. Instead, the cities in the hinterland are more convincingly seen as a long-term solution to the administrative challenges Pompey faced when he wanted to establish a province in a region with little urban tradition and no prior experience of

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political autonomy or knowledge of how to organize a local form of government. The decision to introduce the same form of constitution across the double province that allowed citizens of lower social standing seats on the city council was one way to keep the new citizens interested and committed to the political life in their new hometowns. Together with the laws that offered citizenship to sons of Pontic mothers, the rules against double citizenship add to the impression of a Roman general more committed to the cities’ growth and administrative functions than to the cultural landscape. Antony’s decision to give up Pontus and to divide the territory between local rulers was not forced upon him because the cities failed to prosper or because Pompey’s ambitious plan had somehow fallen short. With the aim of conquering Parthia and the threat of civil war hanging over him, Antony was in a position where he had to rely on local forces as he would not have the resources to lead a large-scale campaign into Parthia while at the same time governing the region directly through provincial communities. Parthia’s invasion of Syria after Caesar’s death and Pharnaces’ attempt to take back his father’s kingdom during the war between Caesar and Pompey demonstrated how vulnerable the region was, particularly when Roman generals were busy fighting each other. To wage another expansionistic war, Antony needed to free up as much of his own funds and military resources as possible and find a form of organization for Anatolia and the Near East in which the administrative and military responsibilities were left in the hands of loyal clients. In that sense it was Rome, not the cities, that needed more time before provincial reorganization was sustainable; or, more accurately perhaps, it was Antony who chose war against Parthia over stability and consolidation in Anatolia and the Near East. By the time the cities were once again under direct Roman rule, we know more about the institutional landscapes and their groups and memberships. What emerges are cities characterized by a number of different cultural and political institutions with Roman, Greek, and local elements, and a population that showed a simultaneous sense of belonging to different cultural, legal, and political groups. The traditional understanding that cities were Greek is correct in the sense that a large part of the population in the High Empire would have felt an influence from Greek culture strong enough for them to define themselves as Greek. Up until recently, scholars have focused almost exclusively on the Greek elements of the cities, but at the same time they have disregarded the influence from Rome and indigenous institutions that continued to form an essential part of the cities’ cultural and political landscapes. That signs of Greek influence are scarce well into the first century is often forgotten.

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The evidence does not support the consensus that the cities were founded in the image of Greek colonies on the Black Sea coast or in Bithynia. Furthermore, there is a tendency among scholars to ignore the fact that various Roman and indigenous institutions were an integral part of the political and cultural landscape right from the moment the cities were founded. Also, the claim that the civic population would strive toward a Greek way of life or that Pompey’s aim was to promote Greek cultural values represents a form of cultural chauvinism, according to which Greeks and Greek culture in broader terms are seen as the more sophisticated choice for the provincials and a higher step up in the cultural hierarchy for people in a less culturally advanced region. Such conclusions are on the whole unconvincing. It is the same line of thought that is criticized by scholars who question “Romanization” as a useful term for understanding cultural interaction between Rome and the population in the western part of the empire, or the idea that Roman culture was the obvious choice for people here. When assuming that Pompey and the people in the cities strove toward Greek ideals of urban life, however they are to be defined, there is an immediate risk of oversimplifying how the cities developed and the motives behind Pompey’s decision to urbanize the hinterland in the first place. Also, there is little evidence for an affection for Greek culture, which is attributed to Pompey. The general did add members of the Greek elite to his circle of advisors, men like Gn. Pompeius Theophanes from Mytilene to whom he may well have listened carefully, just as he was inspired by the theater in Mytilene when he built Rome’s first theater in stone. But unlike Octavian’s foundation of Nicopolis at Actium, as far as we can tell, Pompey did not supply his cities with Greek colonists and there is nothing to suggest that he introduced Greek cults, festivals, or other cultural institutions in any of the settlements. The one-sided focus on how Greek the inhabitants were tends to disregard the cultural complexity of the cities and the prestige that was tied to the status of being a member of the Roman collectivity. Roman citizenship is an example of an institution from which the majority of people in the provinces were excluded, but most members of the elite in Pompey’s cities would still have held Roman rights, at least in the High Empire. In the cities and in the East in general, to be Roman was to be tied even more strongly to the elite communities than in the western provinces, although freed slaves and retired auxiliaries were given the opportunity to assume Roman rights when freed by Roman masters or after the end of military service.

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Being Roman in the legal sense of the word was not open to all, at least not until Caracalla in 212 made Roman rights available to the empire’s free population, but as is suggested by the many inscriptions set up in commemoration of people with Roman status, careers in Roman administration, or Roman institutions such as the imperial cult, ties to Rome were a matter of prestige. If being Roman or an active member of a Roman institution was looked upon with critical eyes, the elite might still have worked to ensure a positive relationship with Rome and the emperors, but there would have been little reason for them to display their relationship with Rome and Roman institutions as explicitly and as elaborately as they did across all of Asia Minor. The cults to Persian and Anatolian deities, such as those to Anaïtis, Omanus, and Anadatos in Zela, to Ma in Komana, or to Zeus Stratios in Amaseia, testify to how the pre-Roman deities continued to be an integral part of the cities’ religious landscapes, at least in the former centers of the Pontic kingdom. Yet the continuity of the old Persian and Anatolian cults into the imperial period is a reminder of how enduring central elements of people’s lives in some parts of the region could be, even after influence from Greek culture would have been at its highest. When it comes to the cities in the hinterland, it has to be remembered that the influence of Greek customs was not brought to bear upon the inhabitants by groups of Greek settlers. Rome, or the associates Pompey left in charge of reorganizing Mithridates’ kingdom, introduced Greek as the administrative language, which over time left the elite with the ability to read and write Greek, and to enjoy the works of Greek writers to the extent that they could get their hands on the texts. As discussed in Chapter 2, this was a long process that is likely to have been disrupted, at least in some of the cities, when Antony divided the province among his local supporters. Judging from the evidence from the late first to the second century ce, the urban elites were now devoted to Greek culture and pursued a life in which Greek cultural institutions were an integral part of their lives, as is exemplified by the gymnasia in Pompeiopolis and Sebastopolis, the theater in Pompeiopolis, and the Greek deities that we know of from inscriptions and coins from across the region. Those who used the gymnasium, sent their boys to the ephebeia, or joined some of the other Greek institutions in the cities are likely to have felt a sense of belonging to a collectivity of Greeks. However, the collectivity of Greeks was just one of several memberships to which the elite in the cities would have felt a sense of belonging. Another collectivity was that of Roman citizens in the city or the region, which, unlike

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being Greek, brought with it a number of legal and political privileges and a clear distinction between conqueror and conquered. Besides being Greek, members of the urban elite were Romans and, judging from the epigraphic material, proud of their legal status and of their role in institutions that promoted Roman power in communities where the majority of the inhabitants were unable to become Roman. The silent majority of inhabitants were left largely without the opportunity to become Roman but were able to imitate members of the elite by using Roman names, celebrating the emperor at temples and festivals, and enjoying the games or an afternoon at the baths. One was not Roman because one came to the baths or to the games, or because one chose Roman names for one’s sons or daughters. But the way people in the cities enjoyed Roman cultural institutions or were inspired by Roman naming practices testifies to how Roman institutions were a central part of the urban landscape and of people’s everyday lives. The average citizen in one of Pompey’s towns may not have been able to define himself as Roman, as he did not hold Roman citizenship, but he lived in a city where Roman institutions and norms continued to be a dominant factor. He is also likely to have participated wholeheartedly in the cults and rituals to the emperor and may well have seen himself as a fully integrated member of the Roman empire, not simply as a subject, and surely as something other than the people who lived beyond the borders. Being Paphlagonian, Cappadocian, Persian, and perhaps Pontian were other pieces that added to the mosaic of people’s identities. As discussed earlier, the pre-Roman cults continued to coexist with Roman and Greek cults, and the references to preRoman names such as Phazimonitai in the oath to Augustus in Neapolis show that the indigenous heritage continued to play some role in people’s lives and in how they defined themselves and the communities they lived in. If we accept Sen’s theory that a person’s identity was decided by the sum of the groups and memberships he or she belonged to, then someone’s identity was, if not unique, then at least individual. The inhabitants in any of the cities would have belonged to several of the same groups: to one of the tribes in the city, to the body of citizens in the town, to pre-Roman ethnic or cultural groups such as the communities of Persians or Greeks that may have lived in Amaseia, or to the groups of former villagers, like the former Phazimonitai or their descendants in Neapolis. Other memberships were less straightforward. Only the minority of the population would have been Roman citizens and some would have been more devoted to Greek culture than others, and

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therefore keener to associate themselves with the Greeks than others. During the High Empire, there is much to suggest that at least the elite became more devoted to Greek culture. Whether the average member of the elite in, for example, Pompeiopolis saw himself as more Greek than Roman, or for that matter Paphlagonian, cannot be known. How people identified themselves depended on who they were, the moment in time that such choices were made, and the specific context in which they were when they needed to do so. Strabo and his family originated from the city of Amisus and defined themselves as Greeks who were able to trace their roots back to one of the old Greek colonies on the northern Black Sea coast. It is certainly a possibility that Strabo was a Roman citizen, but he makes no reference to his Roman status and there is nothing in his writing to suggest that he saw himself as a member of the collectivity of Roman citizens. On the contrary, he made it perfectly clear that he believed the Romans to be culturally inferior to the Greeks, even if Rome was more successful as an imperial power than any Greek state had ever been. That Strabo did not see himself as Roman, or did not portray himself as such even if he was, may have to do with the fact that Greeks, even those with Roman citizenship, were still largely excluded from the political process in Rome. Some Greeks had found a way into the Senate, but it was not until the late first and second centuries that members of the Greek elite became members of the Senate on a more regular basis. Judging from the inscription his family funded, Marcus Antonius Rufus from Sebastopolis was involved in both Roman and Greek institutions. The tria nomina underline his status as a Roman citizen and his role as priest and benefactor of the imperial cults in Sebastopolis and at the koinon suggest, together with the animal games he funded, that Rufus was deeply involved in the cults to the emperor and so engaged in the promotion of Roman power and in institutions closely tied to Roman rule. Besides advertising Rufus’s roles as a loyal servant of the emperor and as a committed magistrate in Sebastopolis, the inscription notes that he was the one who opened the city’s first gymnasium. Whether Rufus would have seen himself as more Greek than Roman is not for us to decide—it may even have been difficult for his contemporaries to determine. What we may say with confidence is that he was keen to advertise his belonging to different groups and collectivities, both Roman and Greek. In addition, we should not neglect his devotion to Sebastopolis, which may have been the most dominant feature in the many relationships that together defined who Rufus was: a rich member of the Sebastopolis elite,

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a Roman citizen from the highest social level in the province of Cappadocia, and a man devoted to Greek culture. Severus from Pompeiopolis is another character who kept his ties to his hometown long after he became the son-in-law of Marcus Aurelius and so reached the highest level of the imperial elite. Severus’s family was from Pompeiopolis, but he would not have spent much time in the city, where the population was keen to keep him on as their patron. As in the case of Rufus, there is little sense in arguing that Severus did not define himself as Roman. He was, of course, a Roman citizen and a devoted member of the empire’s elite with a notable career in Roman politics and imperial administration. How devoted he would have been to the Greek world is less obvious. What we do know, however, is that he donated lavishly to buildings in Pompeiopolis, including the theater, and appears in epigraphic material as the city’s most important benefactor of the time. How other people in the region defined themselves depended on the person in question and the groups and contexts of which they were part. Many would not have held Roman citizenship but may still have felt a sense of belonging to the empire and seen the emperor as someone who was an authority they could gather around and whose affection they hoped to ensure. Some would have lived a life they themselves and people around them recognized as Greek, even if men such as Strabo, Dio Chrysostom, or Pausanias disagreed. They would have exercised in the gymnasium and sent their sons there to study and to gain familiarity with Greek literature and history. They would also have come to the theater with their friends and peers to watch and be seen and will have discussed political and philosophical ideas that they had recently heard of or listened to in one of the stoas or while relaxing after a bath. Many of the same people would have taken part in the cult to different gods that were being worshipped in the city, whether they were Greek gods such as Tyche, or the emperor, or Zeus Stratios. In that sense, in the second century ce a man in the former kingdom of the Mithridatic kings could have felt a sense of belonging to Greek, Roman, and indigenous groups all at the same time and without much friction. As a result, someone in second-century Neoclaudiopolis could define himself as a citizen, a man whose roots went all the way back to the villages of Phazimon, a Roman citizen, a member of the political elite, and someone devoted to Greek culture. Pompey’s cities developed differently from most other cities in the East, where Greek was the host culture either from the start or where the influence of Greek cults grew gradually stronger. What made Pompey’s cities special

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was that they were not, from the moment they were founded, inhabited by large numbers of Greek settlers who could bring their cultural background and institutions with them into their new homes. The influence of the Greek world was therefore slower to establish and much less significant in the Pontic hinterland than was the case in Bithynia, where some of the cities were founded by Greek colonists or by later Macedonian and Bithynian kings who then chose to model their towns on Greek ideals and with Greek institutions in the foreground. In the former kingdom of Mithridates VI, the local villagers, descendants of the Persian aristocracy, and some of the king’s advisors (some of whom would have been Greek while others were Persians and Roman veterans) founded the cities and established the political, religious, cultural, and legal institutions in the towns. Their benchmark was the lex Pompeia and they would have worked with the direction they obtained from Rome and Rome’s representatives in the region. In such a world, the influence of Greek culture would have been slight and there is every reason to pay attention when a distinction is drawn between the Greek colonies on the coast and the towns in the hinterland, which were not Greek in any sense of the word.

Notes

Abbreviations of ancient sources in the notes are those used in the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

Introduction 1. On the name Pontus as a Roman invention, see Mitchell 2002, 50–51. The people of the Mithridatic kingdom were called Cappadocians and the land they inhabited went under the name Cappadocia by the Black Sea, Cappadocia by the Euxine. See Polyb. 5.43.1. See also Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 24. 2. Mommsen 1857, 142–45. 3. Rice Holmes 1923, 211. 4. Ormerod and Cary 1932, 396. 5. Anderson 1939, 5; A. Jones 1940, 58. 6. Magie 1950, 369–71. 7. Scullard 1959, 107–8. 8. Abbott and Johnson 1926, 72–73. 9. Frank 1914, 316, 323–24, followed by Broughton, who stresses that Pompey made arrangements to prevent the worst abuse from publicani (1938, 533). 10. Frank 1914, 323. 11. Fletcher 1939, 23–27. 12. Van Ooteghem 1954, 248–49; on how the power of the publicani should not be overestimated, see Badian 1968, 69–70. 13. Kallet-Marx 1995, 329–30. 14. Morrell 2017, 57. 15. Marshall 1968, 107–9. 16. Marshall 1968, 107. 17. Mitchell 1993, 32–33. 18. Marek 1993, 45–46. 19. Marek 2010, 366–67. 20. On the changes made to the institution of the city council, see Marek 1993, 42; for the effort to promote the Hellenic way of life in Asia Minor, see Marek 2010, 367–68. 21.  A. Jones 1940, 60–61; A. Jones 1963, 1–5; Mitchell 1984, 121, 130–33; MacMullen 2000, 9–10. 22. Rostovtzeff 1928, 215; Rostovtzeff 1941, 978–79; A. Jones 1940, 58; Woolf 1997, 3–4; Eck 2012, 186.

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23. Wörrle 1998, 91–92; Fernoux 2004, 142–46. 24. Fernoux 2004, 142–43. 25. On how, at Antony’s arrival into the East, the cities were not fit to assume their administrative function, see Syme 1939, 271; Anderson 1939, 7; Magie 1950, 436; Fletcher 1939, 19; Buchheim 1960, 49–50, Bengtson 1977, 271; Olshausen 1980, 910; Sørensen 2016a, 122–26. For a more optimistic view on the cities’ behalf, see Marek 2010, 386. 26. Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 35–36. For further discussion, see Chapter 2. 27. Maalouf 1998, 10–12; Sen 2006, xii–xiii, 19–20, 33–34. 28. Beard, North, and Price 1998, 348–49.

Chapter 1 1. Leach 1978, 65; Sherwin-White 1994, 249. 2. On how Plutarch’s numbers are likely to be exaggerated, see Sherwin-White 1994, 250–51. 3.  See also Gelzer 1959, 80; Sherwin-White 1994, 242; Keaveney 1992, 167b; Vervaet 2014b, 216 4. On how it was Gabinius’s aim that Pompey should replace Lucullus in Asia Minor, see, e.g., Gelzer 1959, 70–71; Sherwin-White 1994, 248–49; Sall. H.v.5. fr. 14. 5. Kallet-Marx 1995, 312–13. 6. Madsen 2016b, 143–46, esp. 145 n. 26. 7.  Cassius Dio mentions that the people in Rome had sent out a delegation to verify whether Lucullus, as stated in his letters, had pacified the region, but then goes on to describe how members of the Senate, including Caesar and Cicero, supported the change of command (Cass. Dio 36.43.2–3). 8. Madsen 2014c, 128. 9. For how Roman imperialism was driven by economic interests, see most notably Harris 1979, 103–4; Harris 2016, 39–40. 10. On how Pompey was looking to benefit the equestrian ordo and so also the publicani, see Frank 1914, 316; Badian 1968, 70–75. On the importance of taxation in general, see Harris 1979, 93; Harris 2016, 48. See also Kallet-Marx 1995, 138–48, for how the publicani looked to maximize their revenues in Asia Minor and also how different governors tried to regulate the level of taxation. Morrell 2017, 79–80, suggests that even if taxation was a natural part of Roman expansion, Pompey was looking to introduce a fair and so more stable system of taxation in the Pontic part of the province. 11. Sherwin-White 1984, 232–33. 12. See Gelzer 1959, 30–31; Leach 1978, 14–15; Seager 2002, 22–23; Vervaet 2014a, 132–33. 13. Seager 2002, 23. 14. On how Pompey in the trial following the war enjoyed the support of influential senators such as L. Marcius Philippus, Q. Hortensius, and Cn. Papirius Carbo, see Seager 2002, 25. 15. Gelzer 1959, 34–38; Seager 2002, 20–23; Seager 1994b, 190–91. 16. For the marriage alliance, see Seager 2002, 26–27; Plut. Pomp. 9; Sull. 33. 17. Gelzer 1959, 38–41; Seager 2002, 26–27. 18. Steel 2013, 111. 19. On Pompey’s African triumph, see Beard 2007, 15–18; Lundgreen 2011, 233–36; Lange 2013, 74–75; Lange 2016, 105.

Notes to Pages 23–30

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20. Gelzer 1959, 40; Seager 2002, 28–29; Beard 2007, 15–19; Östenberg 2009, 179–80. 21. On the defeat of Murena, see Madsen 2009b. On Murena’s triumph in 81, see Madsen 2014c, 122–24; Lange 2016, 81. For how Murena’s triumph was a way to deflate Pompey’s success, see also Leach 1978, 32. 22. Plut. Pomp. 15; Gelzer 1959, 42–43; Seager 1994b, 206–7. 23. Seager 2002, 32–33; Cic. Pro lege Man. 62; App. BCiv. 1.108–11. 24. On Pompey’s first consulship, see Gelzer 1959, 62–64; Seager 2002, 36–39; Seager 1994a, 221. On the triumph in 70, see Lange 2016, 106–7. 25. Badian 1970, 25; Keaveney 1982, 170; Seager 1994b, 201. 26. Seager 1994a, 224–25, 227; Seager 2002, 37. Here Seager points to how the reintroduction of the tribunes’ legislative powers was met with little opposition. 27. Flower 2010, 135–38. On how the reintroduction of the tribunes’ legislative rights did not undermine Sulla’s reforms, see Gruen 1974, 23–24; Gelzer 1959, 65. 28. Gruen 1974, 28. 29. As recently pointed out by Morrell 2017, 29–36, there is nothing to suggest that Pompey opposed the idea of senators on the jury and it is worth noticing that senators were still part of the jury and also that senatorial juries did convict members of their own order. 30. Cass. Dio 36.20-23; Plut. Pomp. 24–25. See Gelzer 1959, 70–75; Seager 2002, 44–45. 31. Gelzer 1959, 70; Sherwin-White 1994, 249–50; Seager 2002, 45–46; Christ 2004, 60. 32. Gelzer 1959, 72; Seager 2002, 44. 33. Gelzer 1959, 73–74; Seager 2002, 44–46; Vervaet 2014b, 216–19. On Catulus’s speech against Pompey’s command, see Plut. Pomp. 25.5–7. 34. Gruen 1974, 63; Kallet-Marx 1995, 320–21. See also Cic. Pro lege Man. 68. 35. Syme 1939, 44, 66 n. 4. 36. On the support for the bill, see Seager 2002, 49–50. 37. For how the aristocracy strongly opposed the lex Manilia, see also Cass. Dio 36.43.1. 38. Translation from Grose Hodge 1927. 39. For similar thoughts on how the king’s fighting powers were considerably reduced, see Madsen 2014c, 126–27. 40. For a modern view on how Lucullus’s initial success in Anatolia meant that Pompey still had to prove himself militarily, see Sherwin-White 1994, 256. On how Lucullus was losing his grip on the situation in Pontus and Armenia, see Keaveney 1992, 170. See also Cass. Dio 36.16.1 on Lucullus’s conquest of Pontus and Armenia. 41. Sherwin-White 1994, 237–42, 255–56. See Plut. Luc. 14.1 and 18.1 on the conquest of the East; Plut. Luc. 25.5 for the first victory against Armenia; Plut. Luc. 27.3–6 and 31.4–8 on the later victories against Armenia. See Plut. Pomp. 33.1 for comments in the Pompey biography on how Lucullus had already crushed Tigranes. See Cass. Dio 36.16.1 on Lucullus’s conquest of Pontus and Armenia. 42. Östenberg 2013, 819. 43.  See Madsen 2016b, 144. On how Pompey took the victory from Lucullus, see Plut. Pomp. 30. 44. Translation from Cary 1914. 45. See also Keaveney 1992, 183–84; Madsen 2014c, 126; Lange 2016, 81. 46. On how Lucullus was communicating to Rome that Mithridates had been defeated, see Cass. Dio 36.43.1–2. For a discussion of how rumors traveled easily between Asia Minor and Rome, see, e.g., Bekker-Nielsen’s discussion of Cicero’s letter to Quintus when the latter was

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governor in Asia (Bekker-Nielsen 2006, 112–13). See also Cic. Q. fr. 1.13.37. On the road network in Pontus, see most recently Sørensen 2016a, 117; Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 33. 47. Scullard 1959, 115. 48. Plutarch’s and Dio’s accounts are here largely identical. Both relate how Tigranes II surrendered himself to Pompey. Both authors, Plutarch in more detail than Dio, describe Pompey’s terms for peace. The account of how Pompey prevented the proud king from completing his obeisance and how Tigranes was restored as the king of Armenia could easily have originated from Theophanes’ tale of the righteous Pompey, who treated his enemies firmly but respectfully. For the subjection of Armenia, see Gelzer 1959, 86–87; Greenhalgh 1981, 117–21; Sherwin-White 1994, 252–53; Seager 2002, 56–57. 49. Sherwin-White 1994, 258–60. For Lucullus’s arrangements in Syria, see App. Syr. 49. 50. Sherwin-White 1994, 256. 51. It is telling that Crassus, Caesar, Augustus, and later on Trajan and Septimius Severus were all keen to wage war on Parthia and, if they succeeded, demonstrate their victories against the old and prestigious kingdom. 52. Gelzer 1959, 100–101; Greenhalgh 1981, 130–31; Seager 2002, 57–58. 53. For the arrogant treatment of the Parthian envoys, see Cass. Dio 37.6. 54. It is difficult to know when an agreement between Rome and Parthia was made. One option is when Lucullus was campaigning in Armenia. Plutarch, although not at all clear, mentions that envoys were sent between Lucullus and the Parthian king. It is, however, worth remembering that Lucullus was planning, according to Plutarch, to wage war on Phraates. Plut. Luc. 30. 55. Greenhalgh 1981, 131. 56. Cass. Dio 36.16. 57. On the provincialization of Syria, see Plut. Pomp. 39.2; App. Mithr. 106; App. Syr. 49; Justin 40.2.3–4; Gelzer 1959, 93–96; Greenhalgh 1981, 134–35; Sherwin-White 1994, 241, 258–59; Seager 2002, 58; Sartre 2005, 38–39 n. 46. 58. Sartre 2005, 38. 59. Sherwin-White 1994, 260. 60. Sherwin-White 1984, 225–26. 61. Badian 1968, 75; Sherwin-White 1994, 240. 62. Badian 1968, 73–75; Lintott 1993, 79–80. On how the Gracchan tax system in Asia was employed in a moderate form, see Sherwin-White 1984, 232–33. 63. Abbott and Johnson 1926, 73; Frank 1914, 316; Badian 1968, 70–75. 64. Morrell 2017, 77. On how economic motives were an integrated part of Roman imperialism, see Harris 2016, 40–41. 65. Frank 1914, 316; Badian 1968, 75. 66. Frank 1914, 316. 67. Sherwin-White 1994, 270; Cic. Q. fr. 1.1.35. 68. On how Pompey did not organize a tax system that primarily served the interests of the publicani, see Morrell 2017, 77–82. 69. Sartre 2005, 43. 70. Sherwin-White 1994, 260–62. 71. Gelzer 1959, 103–5; Greenhalgh 1981, 138–45; Sherwin-White 1994, 262; Seager 2002, 59. 72. For a discussion of the various scholarly positions on Roman Imperialism, see Hoyos 2013, 6–8; Edwell 2013, 46–48.

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73. Rich 1993, 65–66. 74. Beard 2007, 9–14; Madsen 2014c, 127–28; Lange 2016, 77–78. 75. Translation from Walton 1967. 76. Vervaet 2014a, 140. See also Lange 2016, 77–78, on how the way Dio shapes his narrative may explain why Dio seems to place the vote for Pompey’s triumph before the general’s return to Italy. 77. Flower 2010, 144. 78. Madsen 2009b, 228; Madsen 2014c, 121; Lange 2016, 101–2. 79. Madsen 2009b, 228; Madsen 2014c, 120–21. 80. Madsen 2014c, 122–24. 81. Madsen 2014c, 122–23. 82. Madsen 2014c, 128. 83. For Cicero’s mention of Lucullus’s initial success against Tigranes, see Cic. Pro lege Man. 21–22. 84. Green 1978, 4–6. 85. Martin 1998, 26–27, 50–51; Livy 9.18. 86. Michel 1967, 134–35. 87. Højte 2005, 44. 88. Michel 1967, 135. 89. Mitchell 1993, 31. 90. Ida Östenberg argues that the famous slogan served as a way to underline the speed and efficiency with which Caesar defeated the Pontic king and was therefore an attempt to question the glory that previous generals, including Pompey, had enjoyed from fighting in Pontus (Östenberg 2013, 818–21). In her analysis Östenberg also assumes that Pompey struggled to bring Mithridates to a fall, something the rapid victory in Armenia Minor in 66 does not support.

Chapter 2 1.  Rostovtzeff 1928, 215; A. Jones 1940, 58; Sartre 1991, 123–33; Marek 1993, 43-46; Marek 2010, 364–68. For the view that Pompey the Great introduced a form of constitution with a clear Roman imprint, see Mitchell 1984, 123–24; Fernoux 2004, 138–43. On how the transformation from a Greek to a Roman form of city council was not fully carried out in Bithynia and Pontus, see Heller 2009, 347–48. 2. For an implicit definition along these lines of what a Greek city was, see Strabo’s survey of Pontus, book 12.3. On how Strabo makes a distinction between Greek and non-Greek cities based on cultural institutions, see Madsen 2014b, 78–82. For further discussion, see Woolf 1997, 3–4. 3.  On how the access to the councils in the Greek east could be restricted by property qualifications, see Eck 2012, 186. 4. Marek 1993, 45–46; Marek 2010, 366–67. 5. On what constituted a Greek city in the second century, see Hadrian’s letter to the citizens of Naryx in C. Jones 2006, 151–52, where Hadrian confirms Naryx’s status as a city (polis). See also Pausanias on Panopeus (10.4.1). 6. Woolf 2006, 94–97. 7. For further discussion, see Madsen 2009a, 13–17. See also Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 34–37.

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Notes to Pages 51–62

8. Madsen 2009a, 32–33. 9. On how Amisus had a right to follow its own law, see Plin. Ep. 10.92–93. On how other cities had their own laws, see, e.g., 10.109 or 10.113. 10. Sørensen 2016a, 163–64; Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 36. See also Suet. Ner. 18. 11. See also Roller 2018, 694–95. 12.  Wesch-Klein 2001, 251–56; SEG 51.1717. On the official title of Pontus, see Mitchell 2002, 50–51. 13. Hansen 2000, 166. See also Austin 1981, 164. 14. The boule in the Libyan city had five hundred seats out of a population of ten thousand with full civic rights. 15. On the councils’ probouleutic function in Bithynia, see Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 67, on how Dio Chrysostom speaks in the council, not the assembly, when he refuses the nomination for the archonship. See also Dio Chrys. 49.14–15. On how the assembly and the city councils represented the poor and the privileged classes respectively, see Salmeri 2000, 73–75. See BekkerNielsen for the opposite reading that political conflicts ran between fractions within each institution, not between the institutions (Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 173–74). 16. On Strabo as an insider on Pontic geography, see Madsen 2014b. 17. See also Roller 2018, 715–16. 18. For the refoundation of Zela, see Strabo 12.3.37, and see 12.3.34 for how Comana was placed under the authority of Archelaüs. See also Roller 2018, 713, 715. 19.  For Neapolis, see Strabo 12.3.38; for Megalopolis, see 12.3.37; for Pompeiopolis, see 12.3.40. See Roller 2018, 714–15. For a discussion on whether Neapolis is in or at the same location as Phazemon, see Bekker-Nielsen 2013, 7–14, esp. 13–14. 20. Marek 2011, 189–91. 21. Marshall 1968, 108; Mitchell 2002, 49. 22. Marshall 1968, 108–9; Williams 1990, 153. 23. On how the law of double citizenship was being disregarded in the age of Cicero and how he defended it, see also Sherwin-White 1973, 292–94. On how, in the age of Cicero, Romans were holding citizenship in more than one city at the same time and how some were serving as magistrates in Athens, see Cic. Balb. 30. See also Sherwin-White 1966, 724–26. 24. Fernoux 2004, 137–38. See also Marshall 1968, 108; Marek 1993, 43. 25. Williams 1990, 153. On how the lex Pompeia ignored aspects of isopoliteia, see SherwinWhite 1966, 724; A. Jones 1940, 160, 172. 26. Sherwin-White 1966, 7245; Digest 50.1.29. 27. On how not everyone on the council welcomed the idea of more members, see BekkerNielsen 2008, 126–27. 28. On how censors had the power to expel council members, see Plin. Ep. 10.114.1. 29. On how new council members in the imperial period were only rarely elected by the assembly when the emperor enlarged a city’s council, see Quass 1993, 383. 30. Austin 1981, 164. 31. Austin 1981, 164. 32. Quass 1993, 382. 33. Quass 1993, 382–83; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 126–27; Heller 2009, 346–47. 34. Dmitriev 2005, 154–55. 35. Fernoux 2004, 139; A. Jones 1940, 336 n. 28. See Heller 2009, 349, for an analysis of how the censor institutions introduced a new element to the democratic boule. On how property qualifications or entrance fees were not part of Pompey’s code, see Dmitriev 2005, 154–55.

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36. Trajan’s ruling suggests that a new law had been passed to set an upper limit to the size of gifts citizens could receive from their city. What Amisus tried to do was to use the law in retrospect and have Piso return a gift he had obtained years before the law came into force. Plin. Ep. 10.111. See also Madsen 2009a, 36–38. 37. Madsen 2009a, 36–38. 38. Jongman 1988, 242, 256. 39. A. Jones 1963, 1–5; MacMullen 2000, 9–10. 40. Sartre 1991, 124; Woolf 1997, 3–4. 41. On how the Nicopolis that Augustus settled after his victory at Actium was essentially a Greek town with Greek cultural institutions, a gymnasium, a stadium, and games, see Strabo 7.7.6. On how Sinope, despite being a Roman colony, was still a Greek town, see Strabo 12.3.11. For further discussion, see below. 42.  Packer 2010, 140–41. Morrell 2017, 90–95, suggests without much evidence that Pompey was inspired by Stoic ideas. On how the influence of Greek culture had a noticeable impact on the Roman elite, see, e.g., Zanker 1987, 15–18. 43. Glotz 1928, 34; Giovanni 1971, 87; Cartledge 1993, 4, 108. Marek 1993, 42, uses the term polis-Verfassung; see also Marek 2010, 366–67. On how the city of Zela in Pontus was turned into a Greek city (polis) following Pompey’s reform, see Aliquot and Caillou 2014. For the opposite point of view, that polis as a term was not generally perceived by the ancient commentators as a specific Hellenic institution, see Hansen 2000, 145. 44. Hansen 1996, 201–2, 204. 45. Hdt. 1.76.2 uses the term polis for Pteria in Cappadocia; see Thuc. 6.88.6 for a reference to poleis in Etruria; Xen. Hell. 4.1.1 for a reference to Phrygian poleis. See also Hansen 2000, 145. 46. Hansen 2000, 141. For the distinction between a city and a Greek city, see PseudoSkylax Periplous 2. 47. For how Trapezous is described as a Greek city, see Strabo 12.3.17. On how Sinope, which was a Roman colony by the time Strabo wrote, is referred to both as a Greek community of Milesian origin with a gymnasium and as a Roman colony in control of part of the city space and the chora, see Strabo 12.3.11. 48. On how Strabo uses polis as the term to describe cities in Spain, see, e.g., Strabo 3.1.7. 49. Austin 1981, 164; Hansen 2000, 166. 50. Carlsson 2010, 151–55. 51.  See, e.g., the inscription set up by the phylê of the Sebastene where a Titius Ulpius Aelianus Papianus is honored for, among other things, having donated food. I. Prusias ad Hypium 27.17. 52. Quass 1993, 388. 53. For the organization of the oppida and the aristocratic elite, see Collis 2000, 231–32, 234. 54. Cornell 2000, 209–11, 221–24. On how the Gallic centers were turned into cities based on a Roman model, see Bekker-Nielsen 1989, 65–68. See also Woolf 1998, 8–9. 55. On how Pompey returned to Italy as conqueror of the East, see Cass. Dio 37.20.1–6. 56. Marek 1993, catalogue no. 1; Marek 2011, 189. 57. See Madsen 2009a, 19–20. 58. For the debate on Pliny’s purpose in the letters in book 10, see Woolf 2006, 97; Madsen 2009a, 13–16; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 71–72. 59. For the remark on the size of Nicopolis, see Strabo 12.3.28. On Comana’s population and its function as the emporium of Armenia, see Strabo 12.3.36. For further discussion, see below.

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60. Christ 2004, 124–25; Packer 2010, 141. 61. Frank 1914, 323. 62. McGing 2014, 37. 63. For Strabo’s family relations, see Dueck 2000, 5–8. 64.  On Strabo’s teacher Aristodemus of Nysa, one of many intellectuals in the city, see 14.1.48. See also Dueck 2000, 8. Another of Strabo’s teachers was the peripatetic philosopher and friend of Augustus, Xenarchus from Seleucia in Cilicia, who taught in Seleucia, in Alexandria, and in Athens before he ended his career as a teacher in Rome (14.5.4). Tyrannion from Amisus was Strabo’s grammar teacher; although he came from Pontus he taught Strabo in Rome, where he was assisting Roman nobles with organizing libraries (13.1.54). See also Dueck 2000, 9; Plut. Sull. 26.1. 65. For the discussion of barbarians, civilized as well as less civilized, see Strabo 1.4.9, 15.1.53; Dueck 2000, 76–78; Almagor 2005, 48–50. 66. Strabo 2.5.26, 3.2.15, 3.3.8, 4.1.5, 4.1.12. See also Dueck 2000, 116–17. For further discussion, see Chapter 4. 67. On how Pontus was not civilized by Pompey, see Madsen 2014b, 82–84. 68. Roller 2018, 276. 69. See also Hall 2002, 189–91, 221–22. See also Madsen 2014b, 80. 70. Madsen 2014b, 80. 71. For the brief reference to Amisus, see Strabo 12.3.14. On the reference to Trapezous as a Greek city, see 12.3.17. 72. Fleischer 2009, 109–15. 73. Marek 1993, 135–36. 74. For the building activities in Pompeiopolis in the second century, see Müller 2011, 29; Bielfeldt 2011, 49–50, 58–59. 75. Swain 1996, 348; Paus. 10.38.4. For further discussion of Nicopolis at Actium, see below. 76. Marek 1993, 135–36. 77. Purcell 1987, 88–90; Osgood 2006, 377; Ruscu 2006, 254–55; contra Lange 2009, 102–3. 78. Ruscu 2006, 250; ILS 2080. 79. Ruscu 2006, 250–51; Purcell 1987, 79–82. On the colony of Butrint, which Augustus renewed as Colonia Augusta, see Bowden 2011, 102, 104–7. 80. Lange 2009, 104; Bowden 2011, 102, 104–7. 81. On how Greek culture was generally well in place by the time of conquest, see Woolf 1994, 127–29; MacMullen 2000, 19–20. 82.  For the influence of Greek culture at the Pontic court, see McGing 1986, 89–93; McGing 2014, 21, 28–29, 36–37. 83. On local or Persian religion in Pontus, see Mitchell 2002, 57–58; Olshausen 1990, 1865– 69; McGing 2014, 27. 84. On Roman veterans in Pompeiopolis, see Marek 1993, 64–65; Marek 2010, 366. For further discussion, see Chapter 4. 85. On how the population in Pontus was not prepared for civic life, see Frank 1914, 323; Magie 1950, 436. See also Buchheim 1960, 50; Fletcher 1939, 17–20; Dreizehnter 1975, 237; Sørensen 2016a, 122–25. For a discussion on how the cities were viable urban communities in the age of Strabon, see Marek 1993, 49–51; Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 34–36. 86. Syme 1939, 272; Marek 2010, 386. 87. Syme 1939, 271; Marek 2010, 386. 88. Syme 1939, 271.

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89. Syme 1939, 271. 90. Syme 1939, 272. 91. Sørensen 2016a, 124. 92. Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 34–36. 93. Syme 1939, 104–5, 270, 275. 94.  On how Antony’s uncontrolled love for Cleopatra prevented him from making the right decision, see Plut. Ant. 25, 29. On how Antony’s affection for Egypt’s queen led him to transfer much of the Near East to her kingdom, see Plut. Ant. 36. See also Cass. Dio 49.4.1. 95. Ober 2001, 42–45; Osgood 2006, 62–64. 96. Ober 2001, 43–44, points out that there is little to suggest that Antony wanted to return to Rome to assume a central role in Roman politics. Instead, Ober believes, Antony hoped to influence Roman politics from Alexandria by removing Octavian and replacing the supporters of his rival in the Senate with people loyal to him. 97. On how a victory against the Parthians may have prevented the outbreak of the civil war, see Lange 2009, 50–51. 98. On the panic in Italy, see Cass. Dio 48.3. On dissatisfied soldiers, see Osgood 2006, 121, 128. On the colonization of Italy, see Osgood 2006, 154, 159–63. 99. Huzar sees Fulvia as an observant politician who realizes political potential in being the one to carry out the settlement (1978, 131–32). Goldsworthy agrees that Fulvia was looking out for Antony’s interests in Italy but also hoped that a victory against Octavian would win her husband back from the arms of Cleopatra (2010, 172–73). 100. On how redistribution of land among client kings was an example of divide and conquer, see Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 36. 101. Huzar 1978, 158–61; Marek 2010, 384–87. 102. Buchheim 1960, 49; Marek 1993, 49–50; Marek 2010, 384–87. See also Sørensen 2016a, 122–23. 103. Marek 2010, 384. 104. Marek 2010, 384. 105. Buchheim 1960, 49; A. Jones 1971, 170; Marek 1993, 50. 106. Marek 1993, 50; Marek 2010, 384. 107. Buchheim 1960, 49; Marek 1993, 51. 108. Marek 1993, 50; Marek 2010, 384; Bekker-Nielsen 2014, 6–71. 109. Goldsworthy 2010, 275. 110.  Huzar 1978, 137–38; Osgood 2006, 242–43; Lange 2009, 28–29; Goldsworthy 2010, 276. 111. Goldsworthy 2010, 312–14. 112. Mitchell 1993, 37–41. 113. Bekker-Nielsen 2017, 36. 114.  On how Straton ruined Amisus, see Strabo 12.3.14. On Adiatorix’s killing of the Romans in Heraclea, see Strabo 12.3.6.

Chapter 3 1. The inscription set up in honor of Marcus Antonius Rufus in Sebastopolis testifies to how gladiatorial contests and animal hunts were part of the entertainment in the city (IGR 3.115). See also Sørensen 2016a, 45.

218

Notes to Pages 98–109

2. Herod is one example of a client king who inaugurated a cult to Augustus well before Judaea was once again placed under direct Roman rule. Josephus BJ 1.414; AJ 15.339. 3.  Lavan 2016a, 3, 7; Garnsey 2004, 137–38. See also Sherwin-White 1973, 311; Madsen 2009a, 87. 4. Halfmann 1979, 23–26; Griffin 1984, 212; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 99. 5. For Hirtius’s references to how Pharnaces took Roman property, see B. Alex. 39–41. 6. Lavan 2016a, 34; Ando 2012, 85. 7. Cass. Dio 51.20.6–7; Sørensen 2016a, 19–22. 8. Garnsey 1970, 266; Sherwin-White 1973, 310–11; Shaw 2000, 370–71. 9. Marek 1993, catalogue 3.1. 10. For Hirtius’s use of the term pontic, see B. Alex. 41. For Strabo’s reference to the Pontians, see 12.3.33. See also Mitchell 2002, 48–50. According to Mitchell, the Romans introducted a provincial citizenship and with that indirectly a shared Pontic identity across what largely corresponded to the area of Roman Pontus. For further discussion, see Chapter 4. 11. See also Lavan 2016a, 32. 12. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 86–88; Koortbojian 2013, 2; Price 1984, 30–33, 46; Mellor 1975, 13–16; Bowersock 1965, 114; Taylor 1931, 35, 142–45. 13. Price represents a noticeable exception in Price 1984, 24. 14.  E.g., Mommsen 1921, 318; Taylor 1931, 35; Nock 1966, 485; Deininger 1965, 18–19; Habicht 1973, 55–58; Mellor 1975, 80 n. 346; Price 1984, 54–56; Hänlein-Schäfer 1985, 264–65; Burrell 2004, 17–19, 147–48; Gradel 2002, 73–76; Woolf 2008, 237; Koortbojian 2013, 228–29; Edelmann-Singer 2015, 86–88. 15. For views on how Rome and the emperor modified or adjusted what were essentially proposals presented on a local initiative, see Mommsen 1921, 318; Taylor 1931, 146–47; Bowersock 1965, 116, 121; Nock 1966, 485. See also Deininger 1965, 18–19; Mellor 1975, 80; Price 1984, 54; Hänlein-Schäfer 1985, 264–65; Burrell 2004, 17–19, 147–48. On how the local communities bestowed divine honors on those whom they continued to understand as humans, see Bowersock 1973, 206; Galinsky 2011, 16. 16. Taylor 1931, 35; Bowersock 1965, 121; Mellor 1975, 21, 26; Fayer 1976, 14–16; EdelmannSinger 2015, 86–88. 17. Clauss 2001, 63–66. 18. On how Augustus is seen to have exceeded the Olympian gods and how he was seen as a deity, see Price 1984, 54–56. See also Friesen 2001, 30–36. 19. Price 1984, 55–56; Friesen 2001, 31–32. 20. Price 1984, 1, 71; Edelmann-Singer 2015, 86. 21. Price 1984, 65–77, esp. 72. 22. Most notably in the writing of Taylor 1931, 216–17. 23. Gradel 2002, 99–103, esp. 101. 24. Gradel 2002, 101–2. 25. Gradel 2002, 80–84. 26. Madsen 2009a, 46–47; Madsen 2016a. 27. Tac. Ann. 4.55; Madsen 2009a, 47–48. 28. Cass. Dio 59.28.1 (translation from Cary 1914). 29. Whittaker 1996, 95–97. 30. Madsen 2016a. 31. Translation from Sørensen 2016a, 19–22.

Notes to Pages 111–128

219

32. Burrell 2004, 207; Josephus BJ 1.414; AJ 15.339. 33. Strabo 12.3.41; Marek 2010, 405. 34. Marek 2010, 405; Bekker-Nielsen 2014, 63. 35.  On the cult in Beneventum and Vedius Pollio’s role in it, see Hänlein-Schäfer 1985, 54–57; CIL 9,1556. See also Syme 1961, 28–29; Madsen 2017a, 103. 36. Friesen 2001, 26; Hertz 2003, 133–35; Edelmann-Singer 2015, 90–92. 37. E.g., Mommsen 1921, 318; Nock 1966, 485; Deininger 1965, 18–19; Habicht 1973, 55–58; Mellor 1975, 80 n. 346; Price 1984, 54–56; Hänlein-Schäfer 1985, 264–65; Burrell 2004, 17–19, 147–48; Gradel 2002, 73–76; Woolf 2008, 237; Koortbojian 2013, 228–29. 38. Deininger 1965, 16–17. 39. Cass. Dio 54.30.3. For a similar use of the term ethnos, see App. BCiv. 2.13. 40. Sørensen 2016c, 82–85. 41. Vitale 2012b, 183. 42. Deininger 1965, 17–18. 43. Madsen 2016c, 24–25. 44. Madsen 2016c, 26–27. 45. Burrell 2004, 39. 46. Friesen 2001, 32; Price 1984, 84–85. 47. Beard, North, and Price 1998, 349; Galinsky 2011, 3. 48. Holler 2016, 183–86. 49. On the governors, as in the cases of Paullus Fabius Maximus or Vedius Pollio in Asia, see Price 1984, 69–70. 50. See Price 1984, 54–55. 51. Madsen 2017a, 104–5. 52. Hänlein-Schäfer 1985, 128, 149. 53. For Apollonios, see I. Priene 106. For Philistes, see IGR 4.1756.IX. See also Sørensen 2016c, 80–81. 54. SEG 39.1255, 44.940, 44.938. See also Sørensen 2016c, 87; Hertz 2003, 138–39. 55. Burrell 2004, 208–9. 56. Burrell 2004, 234–35; Grégoire 1909, 35 no. 13; CIG 4189. 57. Marek 1993, catalogue Pomp 21. 58. For translation and comments, see Sørensen 2013, 176–79. 59. Mitford 1991, 202–5; Sørensen 2016a, 46–50. 60. Frija 2012, 71–73. 61. Burrell 2004, 208; Sørensen 2016a, 48–49. 62. Mitford 1991, 213–14, no. 20. 63. Mitford 1991, 200, no. 8. 64. On how the koina leaders were Romans and members of the cities’ elites, see Burrell 2004, 346; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 105–7; Bekker-Nielsen 2016, 374–75, 378–79; Edelmann-Singer 2015, 154–55; Lozano 2017, 149. 65. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 60–63; Vitale 2012a, 62. On festivals inaugurated in the honor of Roman magistrates, see also Cic. Pro Flac. 55; Plut. Luc. 23.1. 66. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 35. 67. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 40; Strabo 14.1.31; OGIS 222. 68. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 40–42. 69. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 62.

220

Notes to Pages 128–137

70. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 101–2; Vitale 2012a, 288–90; Deininger 1965, 70–71. 71. Sørensen 2016c, 84. For the first reference to the koinon of Asia, see IGUR 1.249, 14–15. For the first attested Bithynarch, see I. Pergamon 151. For the first appearance of silver cistophori and bronze coins, see Metcalf 1980, 139–40. 72. Sørensen 2016a, 84–85. For the references to the koinon in Amastris, see Marek 1993, catalogue Amastris 7. See also I. Sinope 105, 16; I. Prusa ad Olympum 13, 2–3; I. Sinope 103; I. Prusias ad Hypium 29. 73. Metcalf 1980, 139–40; Dalaison 2014, 127. 74. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 71–72; Marek 2015, 308–9; Marek 1993, 69–71. 75.  See Digest 2.11.1. On the considerable cost involved in traveling, see Plin. Ep. 10.43, where 12,000 sesterces is given as the sum used when delegates from Byzantium visited the emperor. For an estimate of the root and the length of the journey, see the Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World at http://orbis.stanford.edu/. 76. Sørensen 2016a, 85–86. For the coin mentioning the koinon of Paphlagonia, see Marek 2015, 313. For the references to Paphlagoniarchs, see Marek 2011, 191; Marek 2015, 314. For an example of an archpriest to the emperor, see Marek 1993, catalogue Pompeiopolis no. 2. For the festival held by the koinon of Paphlagonia, see Marek 2015, 314. 77. Burrell 2004, 234–35. 78. IGR 3.132; Burrell 2004, 234–35; Vitale 2012a, 260–61; CIG 4189; Grégoire 1909, 35, 13. 79. See, e.g., Deininger 1965, 65–66; Mitchell 2002, 48–50; Dalaison 2014, 126–27; Dalaison 2016, 218–20. 80. A. Jones 1971, 428; Marek 1993, 63–66; Marek 2010, 517–19; Vitale 2012a, 203–4. 81. For a thorough survey of how the discussion evolved, see Sørensen 2016a, 73–84. See also Marek 1993, 73–74; Marek 2015, 311–15. 82. Mitchell 2002, 48–50. 83. Sørensen 2016a, 78. 84. Mitchell 2002, 48–51. 85. Strabo 11.8.4; Mitchell 2002, 48, 50. 86. Marek 1993, 76. 87. Burrell 2004, 206; Dalaison 2014, 126–27, 142; Marek 2015, 312–13 88.  On how the number of tychai may be read as an abbreviation for a larger number of cities, see Deininger 1965, 64–65; Burrell 2004, 205–6; Loriot 2006, 529–31; Dalaison 2014, 126–27; Dalaison 2016, 217. 89. Marek 2015, 312–13. 90. Deininger 1965, 158–61; Edelmann-Singer 2015, 35. On the prosecution of governors, see Brunt 1961, 212; Sørensen 2016a, 62–71. 91. On how the cities may have paid the koinon to obtain membership, see EdelmannSinger 2015, 235, 237. 92. Burrell 2004, 343. 93. On the generosity of Antonius Rufus, see IGR 3.115. 94. Bekker-Nielsen 2016, 374–75. 95. Sørensen 2016a, 58. 96. On the few literary references to the business of the koina, see Bekker-Nielsen 2016, 369. 97. Brunt 1961, 212–15. 98. For a discussion of how the lack of references to the koina in the repetundae case could suggest that the councils were not involved, see Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 86; Sørensen 2016a, 66–67; Sørensen 2016b, 343–44.

Notes to Pages 137–154

221

99. On how everyone had the right to prosecute the governor, see Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 86. 100. Tac. Ann. 4.15; Brunt 1961, 220. 101. Sørensen 2016a, 66; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 86. 102. Burrell 2004, 350–51; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 86; Dio Chrys. Or. 38.26–38. 103. See Sørensen 2016a, 71. 104. Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 86 n. 198. 105. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 224; Ziethen 1994, 12. 106. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 188. 107. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 188–89. 108. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 188; Kremydi-Sicilianou 2005, 102. 109. Edelmann-Singer 2015, 35. 110. On how the koina were established by the Greek cities thenselves, see Bowersock 1965, 115–16. 111. Brunt 1961, 224–27. 112. Madsen 2009a, 101–2. 113. Fassbinder 2011; Müller 2011; Bielfeldt 2011; Koch 2011. 114. Madsen 2009a, 72; Halfmann 1979, 135, 180; Marek 2011, 189. 115. Mitchell 1993, 50–51. 116. Mitchell 1993, 35 n. 103, 50; Cic. Deiot. 25. 117. König 2005, 47. 118. On how the gymnasia were used for academic purposes, see König 2005, 49–51. 119. König 2005, 54–55, 58–59. 120. König 2005, 59–60; A. Jones 1940, 221. 121. König 2005, 59. 122. König 2005, 63. 123. Sørensen 2016a, 45–48. 124. Sauer 2015, 331–40; Sauer 2016, 194–200. On how coins depict the officially accepted deities in the cities, see also Kremydi-Sicilianou 2005, 96. 125. Amasia: Dalaison 2014, 134, fig. 2; Neokaisareia: Dalaison 2014, 140, figs. 124–26; Trapezous: Dalaison 2014, 144, fig. 40; Zela: Dalaison 2014, 145, fig. 44; Sebastopolis: Dalaison 2014, 148, fig. 63. For Pompiopolis and Neoclaudiopolis, see also Sauer 2015, 330. 126. Dalaison 2014, 145, fig. 44. 127. Dalaison 2014, 144–45, fig. 43. For examples of coins depicting Asclepius, see Sauer 2015, 330. 128. Sauer 2015, 330. 129. Koch 2011, 63–73.

Chapter 4 1. On how Greekness was not a matter of ethnic criteria, see Hdt 8.144.2; Polyb. 34.14; Diod. Sic. 5.6.5; Dion. Hal. 1.89–90; Hall 2002, 189–90. On the definition of ethnicity, see also Hall 1997, 32–33. 2. On the Paphlagonians, see Mitchell 2010. On the people of the Mithridatic kingdom, see Mitchell 2002, 37–40. See also McGing 2014, 36–37. 3. On how the Paphlagonian elite felt the influence of the Achaemenid reign, see Mitchell 2010, 102. See also Marek 2010, 217–18, e.g., on Persian-inspired rock-cut graves in Paphlagonia.

222

Notes to Pages 154–159

4.  On the population’s choice of Persian names, see Sørensen 2016a, 175–76. While the name Mithridates is rare outside of old Persian centers, Pharnaces was relatively common throughout the entire region. Zela interestingly stands out from the other Persian centers. The city has a considerable number of epitaphs set up to Roman citizens and only a few inscriptions refer to Greek and indigenous names. See McGing 2014, 25–27; Sørensen 2016a, 176. On Persian and local deities such as, e.g., Anaïtis, Ma Pharnakou, Selene at Ameria, and Zeus Stratios, see Olshausen 1990, 1901–3; McGing 2014, 25–27, 33. On how pre-Roman deities appear on cities’ coins from the first to third centuries ce, see Dalaison 2014: on the cult to Zeus Stratios in Amaseia, see 136–37; on the cult to Men in Neokaisareia, see 139 as well as Strabo 12.3.31; on the Anaïtis cult in Zela, see 145–47; on the cult to Ma in Comana, see 147. 5. McGing 2014, 26; Sørensen 2016a, 176–77. 6. For a prosopographic study of the court of Mithridatid kings, see Olshausen 1974, 159– 61, 166–67. 7. Strabo 12.3.30; Madsen 2014b, 80–82. 8. See Chapter 3. See also Sørensen 2016a, 19–22. 9. On how, for instance, Roman citizenship should not automatically be seen as testimony to how that particular person would identify himself as Roman, see Swain 1996a, 70; Ando 2000, 10–13; Madsen 2009a, 89–90; Lavan 2016a, 33. 10. On the process of becoming Greek in the Pisidian city Termessos, see Van Nijf 2010, 175–76. 11. On the gymnasium in Pompeiopolis, see Marek 1993, catalogue 1; Marek 2011, 190. On Greekness as a matter of culture, see Whitmarsh 2010, 9. 12. Lieu 2004, 12. See also Madsen 2009a, 3. 13. On how, by the reign of Caracalla, Roman citizenship did not extend far beyond the 30 percent in the provincial communities, see Lavan 2016a, 32. See Lavan 2016b, 154, on how not all members of the elite would have been Roman citizens, at least not in the eastern part of the empire. 14. Van Nijf 2010, 166. 15. Woolf 1994. 16. Haverfield 1923, 11–14; Rostovtzeff 1928, 215, 223–24; A. Jones 1940, 58; A. Jones 1963, 1–5; Bowersock 1965, 69–72; Bowersock 1969, 127–29; Swain 1996, 70–71, 240–41; MacMullen 2000, 7–9. For more recent studies, see Gleason 2010, 126, on how “Greek and Roman identities interpenetrated but were not fused.” On how biculturalism in the sense of a multiplied identity as both Greek and Roman (as Herodes Atticus arguably displayed when he advertised his Roman family relations and status as a highly placed Roman magistrate with the construction of the Nymphaeum in Olympia: Gleason 2010, 130–35) was not the norm in the mid-second century ce, see Woolf 2010, 196. 17.  Woolf 1994, 127–30; Swain 1996, 70–71. On how in the High Empire intellectual Greeks juxtaposed conflicting models of the relationship between Greek culture and Roman power, see König 2014, 247, 252. 18. Swain 1996, 70. 19. Swain 1996, 411–12. 20. Swain 1996, 422. 21. Whitmarsh 2010, 10–12. 22. Maalouf 1998, 10–12; Sen 2006, xii–xiii, 19–20, 33–34. 23. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 9.

Notes to Pages 159–172

223

24. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 13. 25. Webster 2001, 217–19; Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 11. 26. Woolf 1998, 7–8, 22–23; Webster 2001, 210–11. 27. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 11. 28. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 11. 29. Webster 2001, 217–18. 30. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 13–14, 23–24. 31. On how Arrian moved between Greek and Roman circles, see Stadter 1980, 164–69, esp. 167; Madsen 2009a, 119–25; Madsen and Rees 2014, 1–2; Madsen 2014a, 101–13. 32. On Herodes Atticus’s bicultural identity, see Gleason 2010, 126. On Herodes’ marriage to Annia Regilla and the relation to the patrician family of Appius Annius Gallus, consul 139, see Tobin 1997, 33, 77. 33. Marek 1993, catalogue 1; McLean 2002, 93. 34. König 2005, 59–61. See also Chapter 3. 35. Woolf 1998, 121–25. 36. Woolf 1994, 127–29. 37. Woolf 1998, 125; Mattingly 2010, 288–90; Hingley 2010, 60–61. 38. For Hirtius’s account of Roman citizens in Pontus during the reign of Pharnaces II, see B. Alex. 34. 39. Adams 2007, 24, 34–35. 40. On bilingualism as the ability to speak and understand more than one language, see Adams 2003, 7–8. 41. Plin. Ep. 4.13; Sherwin-White 1966, 286–89. 42. Gregory of Nysa Ep. 15; Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 34. 43. Madsen 2009a, 81. 44. Dueck 2000, 82; Madsen 2017b, 37; Strabo 5.3.8. 45. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 26. 46. On Aristides’ distinction between Roman and non-Romans and on how he was part of the Roman people, see To Rome 59. Arrian is keen to mention his merits as governor in Cappadocia in the Periplus 1.1–4, 6.2. Cassius Dio stages himself as competent senator and describes the provincial elite as the most natural part of the empire’s political establishment, 52.19. Dio Chrysostom is both the loyal advisor to Trajan (Or. 1.6–9) and the Greek man of letters who cares about the Roman level of culture (Or. 13.29–33). 47. On how the local elite in Bithynia keenly displayed both their Greek and their Roman affiliations, see Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 26–28; Madsen 2009a, 99–102. On how biculturalism was not the norm, see Woolf 2010, 196. 48. Hdt 8.1.44.2; Polyb. 34.14; Diod. Sic. 5.6.5; Dion. Hal. 1.89–90. 49.  Dio Chrys. Or. 37.25–27; Lamar Crosby 1946, 1–2; see also Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 3–6. 50. Madsen 2014b, 82–86. 51. Olshausen 1990, 1901–3; French 1996, 81–83; Williamson 2014, 184–86; McGing 2014, 33; Dalaison 2014, 136–39. 52. Dalaison 2014, 136–37. 53. McGing 2014, 33; Dalaison 2014, 137. 54. Sørensen 2016a, 125. 55. Zuiderhoek 2009, 150.

224

Notes to Pages 172–195

56. On how the demoi still had a role to play in local politics and how they as political institutions had to be factored into the decision-making process, see Zuiderhoek 2014, 104. 57. Madsen 2009a, 94, 99–104. 58. On the issue of corn in Prusa, see Dio Chrysostom’s defense in Or. 46.6–10. On how Dio was not the most obvious choice to become the next archon in Prusa, see Or. 49.1–6. See also Bekker-Nielsen 2008, 120. Aristides had to bring in the governor of Asia to liberate him from the pressure to take office as high priest of Asia. When Aristides, backed by the governor Severus, refused the honor, the assembly in Smyrna offered him the priesthood of the city’s Asclepius cult, which he declined. Pernot 2008, 182–85. 59. Mattingly 2010, 285. 60. Dueck 2000, 85. 61. On how it was not uncommon for the cognomen to refer to physical particularities, see Dueck 2000, 7. 62. Dueck 2000, 7. 63. Dueck 2000, 7. 64. Dueck 2000, 8. 65. Strabo 6.2.6; Dueck 2000, 85. 66. On Strabo’s description of Rome, see 5.3.8; Dueck 2000, 85–86. On the triumph of Germanicus, see Strabo 7.1.4. 67. See Strabo 2.5.26, 3.3.8. See also Dueck 2000, 115–17; Madsen 2017b, 38–42. 68. Dueck 2000, 76–77; Almagor 2005, 48–50. 69. Translation from Roller 2014. 70. Strabo 3.4.19, 8.6.23; Dueck 2000, 121. 71. Strabo 6.1.2; Madsen 2017b, 37–38. 72. Madsen 2014d, 31–36. 73. Madsen 2014d, 33–36. 74. Translation from Roller 2014. 75. Strabo 4.1.12. For further discussion of how, according to Strabo, Rome civilized the barbarians, see Dueck 2000, 115–19. 76. Madsen 2014b, 80–82. 77. Madsen 2017b, 42–43; Lavan 2016b, 156–57. 78. Devreker 1980, 261–64; Eck 2000, 219; Madsen 2009a, 62–63. 79. Madsen 2017b, 41–42. 80. Translation from Sørensen 2016a, 45. 81. Sørensen 2016a, 176–77. 82. For a similar argument in the case of Bithynia, where the Thrachian-Bithynian elite is said to have been replaced by a Greco-Roman elite, see Corsten 2006, 85–89. For examples of how Celtic names were common among members of the Galatian aristocracy, see, for instance, Mitchell and French 2012, 227–30. 83. Sørensen 2016a, 74–75. 84. Sørensen 2016a, 117–22. 85. Madsen 2009a, 96–99. 86. Aliquot and Caillou 2014, 56. For two other soldiers from Zela, see SP III 268, 270. 87. Bekker-Nielsen, Høgel, and Sørensen 2015, 122. 88. Fuhrmann 2012, 197, 214. 89. Bekker-Nielsen, Høgel, and Sørensen 2015, 116, no. 1.

Notes to Pages 195–196

225

90.  For a thorough analysis of the inscription and discussion of the reconstruction, see Bekker-Nielsen, Høgel, and Sørensen 2015, 116. 91. Bekker-Nielsen, Høgel, and Sørensen 2015, 118–19. 92. For examples of other Aemilii in the region, see I. Heracleia Pontica 47.23; Marek 1993, catalogue no. 44; Bekker-Nielsen, Høgel, and Sørensen 2015, 115–19.

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Index

Achaia, 62 Actium, 11, 66, 82, 72, 80–82, 90, 203, 215 n. 41, 216 n. 75 Adiatorix, 87, 178 Aelius Aristides, 168, 174–75, 197, 223 n.46, 224 n.58 Aelius Gallus, 178 Aemilia Lucilla, 196 Aemilius Lepidus, M., 23 Aemilius Paullus, L., 153 Aemilius Pollio, 196 Aemilius Rectus, L., 119 Afranius, L., 34 Africa, 22, 40, 44–45, 70, 197 Agrippa, 129 Ahura Mazda, 171 Ailius Pulker, 191–93 Alexander Severus, 123 Alexander the Great, 3–4, 36, 45, 48, 52, 69, 78, 102, 127, 142, 179, 200 Amaseia, 1, 3, 11, 13, 48, 53, 75, 79–80, 100, 123, 133–34, 149–51, 154, 161, 170–72, 176–77, 185, 187–88, 200–201, 204–5 Amastris, 91, 128–29, 133 Amisus, 50, 62, 78, 80, 88, 90–91, 92–93, 169, 178, 206, 214 n.9, 215 n.36, 216 n.64, 216 n.71, 217 n.114 Amyntas, 90 Anaïtis, 1, 53, 80, 93, 148, 161, 204, 222 n.4 Anatolia, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 13–15, 19–20, 26, 28, 31–32, 34, 36, 39–41, 43, 46, 66, 69, 72, 78, 84, 86, 89, 100, 102, 111, 152–53, 157, 168, 176, 178, 186–88, 192, 196–97, 199, 202, 211 n.40 Ancyra, 146 Andrapa, see Neapolis Anicius Maximus, 51 Annia Galeria, 177

Antiochus, 33, 36–37 Antonia Maxima, 185, 188 Antonia Stratonike, 185 Antonius Rufus, M., 124–26, 135–36, 147–48, 168, 176, 185–89, 195, 206–7, 217 n.1, 220 n. 93 Antonius Satorneinus, L., 124 Antonius, L., 86–87 Antonius, M., 16 Antony, M., 7–8, 16, 20, 45, 66, 74, 77, 79, 82, 84–93, 111–12, 130, 132, 146, 154, 165–66, 173, 178, 186–87, 196, 200, 202, 204, 210 n.25, 217 n.96, 217 n.99 Apameia, 56, 66 Apollo, 11, 81, 108, 116 Apollonios, 120, 219 n.53 Appian, 132, 171 Appolonius of Tyana, 181 Arabia, 15, 39, 42, 91–92, 189 Archelaüs, 53, 67, 214 n.18 Aretas, 40, 42 Ariobarzanes II, 2 Aristobulos II, 39 Aristotle, 67–68 Arles, 169 Armenia, 2, 19–20, 31–37, 40–42, 44, 52, 55, 89, 90, 92, 145, 211 n.40, 211 n.41, 212 n.48, 212 n.54 Armenia Minor, 1, 6, 28, 32, 53, 67, 74, 78, 88, 101, 123, 129, 131, 133, 135, 142, 153–54, 187, 213 n.90, 215 n.59 Arrian, 161, 168, 223 n.31, 223 n.46 Artavasdes, 89 Artemis, 108, 116 Asclepius, 148, 151, 160–61, 221 n.127, 224 n.58 Asia (province), 3, 6–7, 16, 19, 24, 29, 38, 43, 45, 68, 82, 97, 120–21, 133, 135, 136–37,

240 Asia (province) (continued ) 141, 143, 149–50, 153, 212 n.62, 219 n.49, 221 n.46, 224 n.58; cult to Augustus, 100, 103–7, 112–15, 118–19, 120–21, 123; Koinon, 116, 118, 122–24, 127–29, 133, 135–37, 138, 141–43, 220 n.71 Asia Minor, 3, 6, 15–17, 23, 27–28, 41, 43, 47, 52, 74, 82, 87, 96, 102, 105–6, 108, 113–14, 117, 121–22, 126–28, 144, 152, 178, 204, 209 n.20, 210 n.4, 210 n.10, 211 n.46 Ateporix, 88 Athena, 148 Athens, 29, 43, 48, 66, 87, 161, 169, 175, 214 n.23, 216 n.64 Attica, 29 Augustus, 45, 124, 142, 178–79, 181–82, 184, 212 n.51, 215 n.41, 216 n.64; Augustus cult, 80, 97–98, 102–9, 111–22, 126–28, 218 n.2, 218 n.18; Oath in Neapolis, 80, 100, 110, 111, 155, 167, 205; Octavian, 11, 66, 81–91, 105–8, 111–12, 114–15, 117, 120, 181, 203, 217 n.96, 217 n.99; reorganization of Pontus, 50, 60, 64, 69–70, 74, 88, 92 Aulus Hirtius, 55, 99, 164 Aurelius Pharnaces, 196 Avidius Nigrinus, 139 Baton, 78 Beneventum, 113, 120, 219 n.35 Bithynia, 1, 5–7, 17, 20, 29–30, 38, 42, 50–52, 56–58, 66, 69, 73, 82, 84, 87, 90, 97, 101, 120, 126, 149–50, 153, 169, 172, 186, 201, 203, 208, 214 n.15, 223 n.47, 224 n.82; cult to Augustus, 100, 103, 106–7, 112, 121, 123, 125, 129; koinon, 113–15, 117, 128–29, 132, 135–39, 142–44 Bithynion, 125; Claudiopolis, 125 Black Sea, 3, 11, 13, 19, 48, 75, 77–78, 82, 101, 129, 132, 143, 149–50, 152–53, 169–72, 176, 201, 203, 206 Brundisium, 89 Butrint, 81, 216 n.79 Caecilius Macrinus, 137–38 Caligula (emperor), 107–8 Camisenê, 54 Campus Martius, 66 Cappadocia, 2, 16, 28, 32, 50, 54, 92, 123–24, 130–31, 133, 173, 187, 205, 207, 209 n.1, 223 n.46

Index Caracalla (emperor), 204, 222 n.13 Cassius Dio, 18, 28–30, 33–35, 42, 54, 58–59, 90–91, 100, 103–5, 107–8, 113–15, 118, 128, 164, 168, 210 n.7, 212 n.48, 213 n.76, 223 n.46 Cassius Loginus, G., 86 Cassius Longinus Varus, C., 25, 86 Castor II, 88, 111 Caucasus, 15, 32–34, 46, 199 Celsus, 55 Chersonesos, 77 Cicero, see Tullius Cicero Cilicia, 1–2, 11, 16–17, 26, 29, 33, 37–38, 42, 46, 84, 88, 91–92, 216 n.64 Claudius (emperor), 119, 128 Claudius Aelianus, 123 Claudius Chareisios, 124 Claudius Severus, C., 177, 189 Claudius Severus, Gn. (the elder), 177 Claudius Severus, Gn. (the younger), 123, 146, 177, 189, 207 Cleopatra, 85, 91, 217 n.94, 217 n.99 Comana, 20, 53, 67, 74, 88, 93, 154, 161, 187, 214 n.18, 215 n.59, 222 n.4 Como, 63 Corinth, 66, 169, 179 Cornelianus Capito, 185, 188 Cornelius Africanus, P., 16, 22 Cornelius Cinna, L., 21 Cornelius Sulla, L., 14, 19, 21–23, 25, 41, 43–44, 199 Culupenê, 54 Cyprus, 91–92 Cyrene, 61, 68 Cyzicus, 44, 113 Darius, 88, 93 Deiotaus, 20, 88, 111, 147 Demeter, 148 Dio Chrysostom, 56, 60, 62, 139, 145, 168, 175, 207, 214 n.15, 223 n. 49, 224 n.58 Diodorus Siculus, 42, 76 Diogenes, 78 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 76 Dionysus, 148 Diospolis, 79, 88, 150; Neokaisareia, 123–24, 131, 132–34, 185, 222 n.4 Diphilos, 78 Domitian, 62–63, 130 Domitius Ahenobarbus, 22

Index Egypt, 15, 45–46, 68, 86, 91–92, 108, 112, 119, 178–79, 217 n.94 Ephesus, 48, 107–8, 113, 116, 136, 142–43, 175–76 Epirus, 81 Eratosthenes, 179–80, 183 Eupatoria, 46, 53, 73, 79 Euripides, 195 Fabius Maximus, P., 118–19, 141, 219 n.49 Favorinus (sofist from Arles), 169 Flavius Archippus, 62–63 Fonteius Magnus, 138 Fulvia, 86–87, 217 n.99 Gabinius, A., 16, 18, 25, 27, 29, 38, 210 n.4 Gades, 57 Gaius (jurist), 58 Galatia, 50, 88, 92, 108, 111–12, 123, 130, 146, 163, 169, 173, 186–87 Gangra, 108, 125; Germanicopolis, 125 Gaul, 76, 87, 129, 167, 169, 182–83, 197 Germanicus, 179, 188, 224 n.66 Gregory of Nysa, 166, 223 n.42 Hadrian, 50, 123–24, 126, 128, 169, 176, 184, 185, 191, 213 n.5 Heraclea, 48, 50, 74, 77, 82, 87, 90–91, 93, 119, 156, 178, 217 n.114 Heracles, 148 Herod, 111 Herodes Atticus, 161, 222 n.16, 223 n.32 Herodotus, 67, 76, 169 Hispania Ulterior, 115, 122 Hortensius, H., 26–27, 210 n.14 Hyrcanos II, 39 Iarbas, 22 Ignatius Maximus, C., 192 Ikizari, 53 Italy, 4, 30, 41–42, 49, 55, 57–58, 65, 70, 72, 77, 80, 86–87, 89, 99, 120, 103–8, 112, 120–21, 153, 158, 160–61, 163–64, 166–67, 176, 179–81, 183–84, 196, 199–200, 213 n.76, 215 n.55, 217 n.98, 217 n.99 Jerusalem, 39 Judaea, 42, 85, 91, 111, 218 n.2 Julia Pulkra, 191–92 Julia Zmaragdis, 193, 194–95

241 Julius Bassus, 138, 139, 144 Julius Caesar, G., 18, 24, 27–28, 30, 33, 36, 43, 46–47, 70, 84–87, 177, 179, 183, 202, 10 n. 7, 212 n.51, 213 n. 90; cult to Caesar, 103, 105, 107–8, 113, 117, 130, Julius Epikrates, G., 120 Julius Heliodorus, 193–95 Julius Patruinus, 131 Julius Piso, 62–63, 215 n.36 Julius Rufus, 192 Junius Brutus, M., 86 Jupiter, 165 Kabeira, 53 Kaisareia, 125; Hadrianopolis 125 Kallatis, 77 Karana, see Sebastopolis Kreteia, 125; Flaviopolis, 125 Laodikeia, 46 Latium, 52, 70 Lentulus Clodianus, C., 25 Libanius, 166 Licinius Crassus, M., 23, 29, 212 n.51 Licinius Lucullus, L., 15–18, 20, 27–31, 32–38, 43–45, 66, 75, 178, 199–200, 210 n.4, 210 n.7, 211 n.40, 211 n.41, 211 n.43, 211 n.46, 212 n.49, 212 n.54, 213 n.83 Licinius Murena, L., 23, 43–44, 171–72, 211n.21 Livia 115, 117, 138, 142 Livy, 45 Lucilius Capito, 116, 137–38 Lutatius Catulus, Q., 23, 25–27 Lycia, 128 Macedonia, 82, 153 Maecenas, 104 Magna Graecia, 77, 160, 180 Magnopolis, 46, 53, 68, 73–74, 78, 88, 150 Manilius, G., 18, 29 Marcius Rex, Q., 17 Marcus Aurelius, 123, 146, 161, 177, 184, 189, 207 Marius, G., 14, 16, 21–22, 25 Mars, 165 Massalia, 169 Megalopolis, 46, 53–54, 68, 73, 88, 124, 133, 214 n.19; Sebasteia, 124 Mesopotamia, 34–35, 42

242 Metellus Nepos, Q., 30–31 Miletus, 107–8, 116, 136, 142 Mithradation, 46 Mithridates VI Eupator, 1–2, 4–5, 7–9, 10, 12, 14–20, 25–26, 28–34, 36, 40–41, 43–46, 53–54, 58, 73, 75–76, 85, 87–88, 90, 92, 129, 149, 132, 154–55, 166, 168, 170–73, 178, 187, 199, 200, 204, 208, 211 n.46, 213 n.90 Moesia Inferior, 132 Muse, 87 Mutina, 87–88 Mytiline, 66, 203 Naples, 76–78, 120, 180 Neapolis, 13, 53, 74, 79, 80, 88, 93, 97, 100, 102, 108–12, 120, 123–26, 128, 131, 133, 143, 146–47, 193, 205, 214 n.19; Andrapa, 193–94; Neoclaudiopolis, 13, 123, 148, 156, 191, 192, 195–98, 207; Phazemon, 155, 214 n.19 Near East, 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 15, 18–20, 31–33, 35–36, 39, 41, 46, 55, 66, 69, 72, 84, 86, 91, 199, 202 Nemesis, 148 Neokaisareia, see Diospolis Nero (emperor), 52, 128, 189 Nicaea, 72–73, 107, 113, 128, 139, 142, 186 Nicomedia, 56, 73, 106–7, 114–15, 117, 139, 161 Nicopolis at Actium, 66, 72, 80–83, 101, 203, 216 n.75 Nicopolis in Armenia Minor, 11, 46, 54–55, 58–59, 74, 78, 88, 93, 101, 123, 129, 131, 135, 143, 181, 187, 197, 215 n.59 Nike, 148 Numidia, 22 Nysa, 166, 178, 216 n.64 Octavian, see Augustus Omanus, 80, 204 Palestine, 36–37, 39–40 Paphlagonia, 1, 42, 53, 88, 101–2, 108–12, 123, 125, 129–30, 133, 142, 153–54, 158, 220 n.76, 221 n.3 Parthia, 2–3, 10, 32–36, 40–41, 85–87, 89–92, 187, 202 Patrae, 81 Pausanias, 181, 184, 207, 213 n.5 Pergamum, 106, 108, 114–17, 120, 127, 136, 143

Index Perusia, 88 Petra, 40 Pharnaces II, 7, 29, 55, 85, 99, 154, 177, 187, 191, 202, 218 n.5, 223 n.38 Pharnakeia, 88 Phasis, 54 Phazemon, see Neapolis Philadelphia in Egypt, 119 Philippi, 84–87, 89 Philistes, 120 Philostratus, 181 Phoenicia, 32, 39, 91–92 Phraates, 34–35, 37, 212 n.54 Picenum, 21 Pimolisa, 53 Pindar, 195 Plautus, 45 Pliny the Elder, 81–82 Pliny the Younger, 5, 49, 50–53, 56–57, 59–64, 72–73, 119, 126, 137–40, 144, 153, 166, 215 n.58 Plutarch, 16, 18, 22–23, 28–30, 33, 41, 43, 90–91, 181, 210 n.2, 212 n.48, 212 n.54 Pola, 120 Polemon II, 52, 88, 90, 93–94, 172 Polybius, 76, 173 Pompeiopolis, 12, 46, 53, 55, 58–59, 68, 79–81, 83, 88, 92–93, 97–98, 100–101, 111–12, 123, 129, 143, 146–48, 160–63, 168, 176–77, 189, 190, 196, 204, 206–7, 214 n.19, 216 n.74, 216 n.84, 220 n.76, 222 n.11 Pompeius, Q., 21 Pompeius, S., 89 Pompeius Strabo, Gn., 21 Pompeius Theophanes, Gn., 203 Pompeius Trogus, 36 Pompey the Great: career and commands, 15–31, 210 n.14, 210 n. 19, 211 n.21, 211 n.24, 211 n.40, 211 n.41, 211 n. 43; the East, 32–41; in modern scholarship, 3–6, 209 n.9, 210 n.10, 213 n.1; organization of Pontus, 48–55, 57–59, 62, 64–86, 92–94, 96–97, 99–102, 106, 111–12, 122–23, 128–33, 142–43, 148–50, 153–55, 163–66, 168; trophy towns, 41–47, 86, 177, 196; victory and triumph, 1, 7, 13–14, 42–47, 50, 58, 72, 76, 199, 212 n.48, 213 n.76, 215 n.55, 216 n.67 Pomponius Atticus, T., 81

Index Pontus, 1–3, 5, 7, 10–11, 15, 17, 20–21, 30, 32, 39, 42, 63, 66–67, 76, 79, 81, 88, 125–26, 165, 178, 186, 191, 201, 209 n.1, 212 n.46, 213 n.2, 214 n.12, 216 n.83, 216 n.85; Pontus et Bithynia, 40, 45, 47, 49, 50–59, 61–64, 68–70, 73–74, 76, 77, 83–85, 87, 92–93, 96–102, 111–12, 122–23, 128–29, 131, 132–34, 137, 151, 153–54, 159, 164–67, 170, 173–74, 197, 199, 200, 213 n.1, 215 n.43, 216 n.64, 216 n.67, 218 n.10, 223 n.38; Pontus Galaticus, 123, 133, 136; Pontus Mediterraneus, 132–34; Pontus Polemonianus, 123, 133, 136, 176 Porcius Cato, M (the younger), 30 Prusa, 56, 60, 62–63, 128, 142, 169, 175, 224 n.58 Prusias ad Hypium, 128, 186 Prusias ad Mare, 87, 90 Pseudo-Skylax, 67 Pythodoris, 88 Red Sea, 15, 42 Rhegion, 77 Sagylion, 53 Scipio, see Cornelius Africanus Scribonius Curio, G., 25 Sebastopolis, 97, 123–24, 126, 134, 136, 147–48, 168, 176, 185, 188–90, 196, 198, 204, 206, 217 n.1, 221 n.125; Karana, 124 Secundus Curibus, O., 81 Seius Strabo, 178 Septimius Severus (emperor), 132, 212 n.51 Sergius Catilina, L., 30 Serrhae, 81 Sertorius, Q., 23 Servilius Isauricus, P., 25–27 Servilius Strabo, 178 Sidene, 88 Silanus, G., 116, 138 Sinope, 66, 77–78, 80, 82, 91–92, 129, 130, 133, 149, 154, 156, 171, 175, 215 n.41 Smyrna, 107–8, 115–16, 120, 134, 136, 141, 224 n.58 Solon, 68 Sophene, 32–33 Spain, 23, 25, 40, 70, 76, 167, 182–83, 187, 215 n.48 Strabo from Amaseia, 11, 48, 52–54, 67, 74–82, 87–88, 90, 94, 100, 154–55, 160, 166,

243 169–70, 173, 176–84, 188, 193, 200–201, 206, 207, 213 n.2, 214 n.16, 215 n.48, 216 n.63, 216 n.64, 216 n.85, 218 n.10, 224 n.66 Straton, 88, 93, 217 n.114 Suetonius, 103–4, 118 Sulla, see Cornelius Sulla Syria, 1–3, 11, 30, 32–33, 42, 69, 212 n.49; Coele-Syria, 33, 36–37, 39, 91; Province, 11, 36, 38, 40, 46, 84–85, 91–92, 200, 202, 212 n.57 Tacitus, 81–82, 107–8, 113, 115–16, 134, 138 Taras, 77 Terentius Maximus, 62–63 Termessos in Pisidia, 157 Thessaly, 62 Thucydides, 67 Tiberius (emperor), 74, 107–8, 115–17, 122, 137–38, 141, 184 Tigranes II, 1–2, 8–9, 15–18, 20, 25–26, 28–30, 32–35, 37, 43, 46, 199 Tigranokerta, 17 Tium, 119 Trajan, 5, 49–52, 56, 59–60, 62, 64, 72–73, 119, 124, 126, 137, 148, 153, 161–62, 212 n.51, 215 n.36, 221 n.125, 223 n.46 Trapezous, 78, 88, 215 n.47, 216 n.71 Tullius Cicero, Marcus, 18, 25–28, 30–31, 36, 38, 43–44, 57, 81, 99, 210 n.7, 211 n.46, 213 n.83, 214 n.23 Tyche, 148, 207 Ulpian (jurist), 55–56 Ulpius Carinnus, 192, 195 Valerius Naso, 141 Varenus Rufus, 138–40, 144–45 Vedius Pollio, P., 113, 219 n.35, 219 n.49 Verres, G., 25–26 Vezirköprü, 123 Xenophon, 67 Zela, 1, 16–17, 20, 27–29, 44, 53, 67, 79–80, 85, 88, 92–93, 97, 148, 150, 154, 156, 161, 169, 192–93, 197, 200, 204, 214 n.18, 215 n.43, 221 n.125, 222 n.4, 224 n.86 Zenon, 88, 108 Zeus Stratios, 13, 151, 170–72, 204, 207, 222 n. 4

Acknowledgments

This book is the product of the joint research project Where East Meets West: Urbanization, Provincialisation and Cultural Interaction in Roman Anatolia, funded by the Danish Council of Independent Research. Over three and a half years, members of the project team visited Turkey on a number of occasions to participate in conferences, visit sites, and conduct fieldwork; to travel around North Central Anatolia to experience the region’s geography and road networks; or to study the many unpublished epigraphic remains. I am grateful for having been part of such a stimulating and engaged group, and I have learned from the many fruitful discussions we have had together over the years. A number of colleagues have read and commented on the manuscript, and I am entirely grateful for their insightful comments and many valuable suggestions. I offer my most sincere gratitude to Søren Lund Sørensen, Vera Sauer, and Kristina Winther-Jacobsen for the stimulating three and a half years we worked together on the project, and I am grateful for the comments and advice they have offered to improve the manuscript at reading sessions and at conferences, where some of the ideas and conclusions were presented. I am also grateful to Josiah Osgood, Carsten Hjort Lange, and Andrew Scott for taking the time to read part of the book and to the reader at the University of Pennsylvania Press for the many useful suggestions, comments, and corrections offered. I am also indebted to Deborah Blake, my editor at the press, for encouraging the project and for her many stimulating suggestions along the way. I am also grateful to Christian Høgel for his translation of Digest 50.1.1.2 and to Roger Rees for proofreading the manuscript. I am deeply grateful to my colleague Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen, who took the time to read the manuscript in its various stages. His work on Roman Anatolia is a continuous inspiration. He always has the time to discuss all sorts of matters, big or small. I am looking forward to many more conversations in the future. The choices I made when writing the book and all the mistakes are, of course, my own.

246

Acknowledgments

Over the course of the project, I have benefited from shorter or longer stays at a number of different institutions. Thank you to Clifford Ando for welcoming me to the University of Chicago; to Greg Woolf and the Institute of Classical Studies at University of London, where I enjoyed the benefits of a fellowship in the spring of 2014; and to Jason König at the School of Classics at University of St. Andrews, where I come and go and feel very much at home. I am also very fortunate to be married to Rikke Heilmann Madsen. Without her support and, most of all, understanding, working on this book would have been a very different experience. Another source of valuable support is the secretarial staff at the University of Southern Denmark. Without their continuous assistance, the time available to do research would have been considerably more limited. In that light, I would like to offer my deepest gratitude to my colleague Karen Fog Rasmussen, the study secretary at the Department of History and Classical Studies. This book is dedicated to her for her energy and commitment to helping both students and staff, and for the support she offered me when I was the director of teaching over the last three and a half years, when the large part of this book was written.