The Provinces of the Roman Empire, from Caesar to Diocletian. v. 1

by Theodor Mommsen

The great peninsula which is washed on three sides by the three seas, the Black, the Aegean, and the Mediterranean, and which is connected towards the east with the Asiatic continent proper, will, so far as it belongs to the frontier–territory of the empire, be dealt with in the next section, which treats of the region of the Euphrates and the relations between the Romans and Parthians. Here we have to set forth the peaceful relations, more especially of the western districts, under the imperial government.

The natives and the colonists.The original, or at any rate pre–Greek, population of these wide regions held its ground in many places to a considerable extent down to the imperial period. The greatest part of Bithynia certainly belonged to the formerly discussed Thracian stock; Phrygia, Lydia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, show very manifold and not easily unravelled survivals of older linguistic epochs, which in various forms reach down to the Roman period; strange names of gods, men, and places meet us everywhere. But, so far as our view reaches—and it is but seldom allowed to penetrate here very deeply—these elements appear only losing ground and waning, essentially as a negation of civilisation or—what seems to us here at least to coincide with it—Hellenising. We shall return at the fitting place to the individual groups of this category; so far as concerns the historical development of Asia Minor in the imperial period there were but two active nationalities, the two which were the last immigrants, the Hellenes in the beginnings of the historical period, and the Celts during the troublous times of the Diadochi.

Hellenic and Hellenistic culture.The history of the Hellenes of Asia Minor, so far as it forms a part of Roman history, has already been set forth. In the remote age, when the coasts of the Mediterranean were first navigated and settled, and the world began to be apportioned among the progressive nations at the expense of those left behind, the flood of Hellenic emigration had poured no doubt over all the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, but yet nowhere—not even towards Italy and Sicily,—in so broad a stream as over the Aegean Sea rich in islands, and the adjacent charming coast of anterior Asia rich in harbours. Thereafter the west–Asiatic Greeks themselves had taken an active part, above all the rest, in the further conquest of the world, and had helped to settle from Miletus the coasts of the Black, and from Phocaea and Cnidus those of the Western, Sea. In Asia Hellenic civilisation doubtless laid hold of the inhabitants of the interior, the Mysians, Lydians, Carians, Lycians; and even the Persian great power remained not unaffected by it. But the Hellenes themselves possessed nothing but the fringe of coast, including at the utmost the lower course of the larger rivers and the islands. They were not able here to gain continental conquests and a power of their own by land overagainst the powerful native princes; moreover the interior of Asia Minor, highlying and in great part but little capable of cultivation, was not so attractive for settlement as the coasts, and the communications of the latter with the interior were difficult. Essentially in consequence of this, the Asiatic Hellenes attained still less than the European to inward union and to great power of their own, and early learned submissiveness in presence of the lords of the continent. The national Hellenic idea first came to them from Athens; they became its allies only after the victory, and did not remain so in the hour of danger. What Athens had wished to provide, and had not been able to furnish for these clients of the nation, was accomplished by Alexander; Hellas he was obliged to conquer, Asia Minor saw in the conqueror simply its deliverer.

Formation of new centres.Alexander’s victory in fact not merely made Asiatic Hellenism secure, but opened up for it a wide, almost boundless, future; in the process of continental settlement, which, in contrast to the merely littoral, marked this second stage of Hellenic world–conquest, Asia Minor took part to a considerable extent. Yet of the great centres for the newly formed states there was none that came to the old Greek towns of the coast.[224] The new period required new formations in general, and above all, new towns, to serve at once as Greek royal residences and as centres of populations hitherto non–Greek, that were to be brought to Greek habits. The great political development moves around the towns of royal foundation and of royal name, Thessalonica, Antioch, Alexandria. With their masters the Romans had to contend; the possession of Asia Minor they gained almost throughout, as a man gets an estate from relations or friends, by bequest in a testament; and, however heavy was the burden at times of Roman government on the regions thus acquired, there was not added here the sting of foreign rule. Doubtless the Achaemenid Mithradates confronted the Romans in Asia Minor with a national opposition, and the Roman misrule drove the Hellenes into his arms; but the Hellenes themselves never undertook anything similar. Therefore there is little to be told of this great, rich, and important possession in a political respect; and all the less, inasmuch as what has been remarked in the previous section concerning the national relations of the Hellenes generally to the Romans holds good in substance also for those of Asia Minor.

The provinces of Asia Minor.The Roman administration of Asia Minor was never organised in a systematic way, but the several territories were, just as they came to the empire, established without material change of their limits as Roman administrative districts. The states which king Attalus III. of Pergamus bequeathed to the Romans, formed the province of Asia; those of king Nicomedes, which likewise fell to them by inheritance, formed the province of Bithynia; the territory taken from Mithradates Eupator formed the province of Pontus united with Bithynia. Crete was occupied by the Romans on occasion of the great war with the pirates; Cyrene, which may also be mentioned here, was taken over by them according to the last will of its ruler. The same legal title gave to the republic the island of Cyprus; to which was here added the need for the suppression of piracy. This had also laid a basis for the formation of the governorship of Cilicia; the land was annexed to Rome completely by Pompeius at the same time with Syria, and the two were administered jointly during the first century. Possession of all these lands was already acquired by the republic. In the imperial period a number of territories were added, which had formerly belonged but indirectly to the empire: in 729 U.C.25. the kingdom of Galatia, with which there had been united a part of Phrygia, Lycaonia, Pisidia, and Pamphylia; in 747 U.C.7. the lordship of king Deiotarus, son of Castor, which embraced Gangra in Paphlagonia and probably also Amasia and other neighbouring places; in 17 A.D. the kingdom of Cappadocia; in 43 the territory of the confederation of the Lycian towns; in 63 the north–east of Asia Minor from the valley of the Iris to the Armenian frontier; Lesser Armenia and some smaller principalities in Cilicia probably by Vespasian. Thereby the direct imperial administration was carried out throughout Asia Minor. As dependent principalities, there remained only the Tauric Bosporus, of which we have already spoken, and Great Armenia, of which the next section will treat.

Senatorial and imperial government.When, on the introduction of the imperial government, the administrative partition was made between it and that of the senate, the whole territory of Asia Minor, so far as it was at that time directly under the empire, fell to the latter body; the island of Cyprus, which at first had come under imperial administration, was likewise transferred, a few years later, to the senate. Thus arose the four senatorial governorships of Asia, Bithynia and Pontus, Cyprus, Crete and Cyrene. Only Cilicia, as part of the Syrian province, was placed at first under imperial administration. But the territories that subsequently came to be directly administered as parts of the empire were here, as throughout the empire, placed under imperial governors; thus even under Augustus there was formed from the inland districts of the Galatian kingdom the province of Galatia, and the coast district of Pamphylia was assigned to another governor, under which latter Lycia was also placed under Claudius. Moreover Cappadocia became an imperial governorship under Tiberius. Cilicia also naturally remained, when it obtained governors of its own, under imperial administration. Apart from the fact that Hadrian exchanged the important province of Bithynia and Pontus for the unimportant Lycio–Pamphylian one, this arrangement remained in force, until towards the end of the third century the senatorial share in administration generally was, with the exception of some slight remnants, superseded. The frontier was in the first period of the empire formed throughout by the dependent principalities; after their annexation the imperial frontier did not, apart from Cyrene, touch any of these administrative districts, excepting only the Cappadocian, so far as to this at that time was apportioned also the north–eastern border–district as far as Trapezus;[225] and even this governorship bordered not with the foreign land proper, but in the north with the dependent tribes on the Phasis, and farther on with the vassal–kingdom of Armenia, which belonged de jure and in more than one sense de facto to the empire.

In order to gain a conception of the condition and the development of Asia Minor in the first three centuries of our era, so far as this is possible in the case of a country as to which we have no direct historical tradition, we must, looking to the conservative character of the Roman provincial government, begin with the older territorial divisions and the previous history of the several regions.

Asia.The province of Asia was the old kingdom of the Attalids, the west of Asia Minor as far north as the Bithynian and as far south as the Lycian frontier; the eastern districts at first separated from it, the Great Phrygia, had already in the republican period been again attached to it (iii. 288)iii. 274., and the province thenceforth reached as far as the country of the Galatians and the Pisidian mountains. Rhodes too and the other smaller islands of the Aegean Sea belonged to this province. The coast–towns.The original Hellenic settlement had, besides the islands and the coast proper, occupied also the lower valleys of the larger rivers; Magnesia on the Sipylus, in the valley of the Hermus, the other Magnesia and Tralles in the valley of the Maeander, had already before Alexander been founded as Greek towns, or had at any rate become such; the Carians, Lydians, Mysians, became early at least half Hellenes. The Greek rule, when it set in, found not much to do in the coast districts; Smyrna, which centuries before had been destroyed by the barbarians of the interior, rose at that time from its ruins, in order speedily to become one of the first stars in the brilliant belt of the cities of Asia Minor; and if the rebuilding of Ilion at the sepulchral mound of Hector was more a work of piety than of policy, the laying out of Alexandria on the coast of the Troas was of enduring importance. Pergamus in the valley of the Caicus flourished as the court–residence of the Attalids.

The interior.In the great work of Hellenising the interior of this province in keeping with the intentions of Alexander, all the Hellenic governments, Lysimachus, the Seleucids, the Attalids vied with each other. The details of the foundations have disappeared from our tradition still more than the warlike events of the same epoch; we are left dependent mainly on the names and the surnames of the towns; but even these suffice to make known to us the general outlines of this activity continuing for centuries, and yet homogeneous and throughout conscious of its aim. A series of inland townships, Stratonicea in Caria, Peltae, Blaundus, Docimeium, Cadi in Phrygia, the Mysomacedonians in the district of Ephesus, Thyatira, Hyrcania, Nacrasa in the region of the Hermus, the Ascylaces in the district of Adramytium, are designated in documents or other credible testimonies as cities of the Macedonians; and these notices are of a nature so accidental, and the townships in part so unimportant, that the like designation certainly extended to a great number of other settlements in this region; and we may infer an extensive settling of Greek soldiers in the districts indicated, probably connected with the protection of anterior Asia against the Galatians and Pisidians. If, moreover, the coins of the considerable Phrygian town Synnada combine with the name of their city that of the Ionians and the Dorians as well as that of the common Zeus (Ζεὺς πάνδημος), one of the Alexandrids must have summoned the Greeks in common to settle there; and the summons was certainly not confined to this single town. The numerous towns, chiefly of the interior, the names of which are traceable to the royal houses of the Seleucids or the Attalids, or which have otherwise Greek names, need not here be adduced; there are found in particular among the towns certainly founded or reorganised by the Seleucids several that were in later times the most flourishing and most civilised in the interior, e.g. in southern Phrygia Laodicea, and above all Apamea, the old Celaenae on the great military road from the west coast of Asia Minor to the middle Euphrates, already in the Persian period the entrepôt for this traffic, and under Augustus, next to Ephesus, the most considerable city of the province of Asia. Although every case of assigning a Greek name is not to be connected with a settlement by Greek colonists, we may be allowed at any rate to reckon a considerable portion of these townships among Greek colonies. But even the urban settlements of non–Greek origin, which the Alexandrids found in existence, turned of themselves into the paths of Hellenising, as indeed the residence of the Persian governor, Sardes, was organised even by Alexander himself as a Greek commonwealth.

Its position under the Romans.This urban development was completed when the Romans entered upon the rule of interior Asia; they themselves did not make special exertions to promote it. That a great number of the urban communities in the eastern half of the province reckon their years from that of the city 67084., is due to the fact that then, after the close of the Mithradatic war, these districts were brought by Sulla under direct Roman administration (iii. 328)iii. 312.; these townships did not receive city–rights only then for the first time. Augustus occupied the town of Parium on the Hellespont and the already–mentioned Alexandria in Troas with veterans of his army, and assigned to both the rights of Roman burgess–communities; the latter was thenceforth in Greek Asia an Italian island like Corinth in Greece and Berytus in Syria. But this was nothing but a provision for soldiers; of the foundation of towns proper in the Roman province of Asia under the emperors there is little mention. Among the not numerous towns named after emperors there it is only perhaps in the case of Sebaste and Tiberiopolis, both in Phrygia, and of Hadrianoi on the Bithynian frontier, that no older name of the city can be pointed out. Here, in the mountain–region between Ida and Olympus, dwelt Cleon in the time of the triumvirate, and a certain Tilliborus under Hadrian, both half robber–chiefs, half popular princes, of whom the former even played a part in politics; in this asylum of criminals the foundation of an organised urban community by Hadrian was at all events a benefit. Otherwise in this province, with its five hundred urban communities, the province richest in cities of the whole state, not much more was left to be done in the way of foundation; there was room at the most perhaps for division, that is, for detaching such hamlets as developed themselves de facto into urban communities, from the earlier communal union and making them independent, as we can point to a case of the kind in Phrygia under Constantine I. But from Hellenising proper the sequestered districts were still far remote when the Roman government began; especially in Phrygia the language of the country, perhaps similar in character to the Armenian, held its ground. If from the absence of Greek coins and of Greek inscriptions we may not with certainty infer the absence of Hellenising,[226] yet the fact that the Phrygian coins belong almost throughout to the Roman imperial period, and the Phrygian inscriptions as regards the great majority to the later times of the empire, points to the conclusion that, so far as Hellenic habits found their way at all into the regions of the province of Asia that were remote and difficult of access to civilisation, they did so in the main only under the emperors. For direct interference on the part of the imperial administration this process, accomplishing itself in silence, gave little opportunity, and traces of such interference we are not able to show. Asia, it is true, was a senatorial province, and we may here bear in mind that with the government of the senate all initiative fell into abeyance.