Imperial Identities

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c ha pt e r 2

Imperial identities Clifford Ando

The Roman empire has not traditionally been celebrated for its heterogeneity. In history and politics, historiography and political theory, the tendency well into the twentieth century was rather to study and often to praise the universalisation of its dominant cultures, Hellenic and Roman. Indeed, no small measure of Rome’s influence in European history stems from that effect of empire. 1 Such debate as there was focused not on the extent of cultural change nor on its valuation, but on the extent to which that achievement might be attributed to policy, consciously formulated and doggedly pursued. Nor is this theme of the laus imperii an early modern innovation. It was, rather, a topos in ancient literature, Greek and Latin (but not Hebrew).2 Typical in its focus and necessarily brief is the allusion to such praises in Libanius’ oration of 386 ce, urging the emperor Theodosius to extend imperial protection to pagan temples, then under regular threat of vandalism at the hands of Christian extremists: And it was with such gods as fellow soldiers that the Romans marched forth, engaged their enemies and, having conquered them, as conquerors granted the vanquished a condition of life better than that which they had before, taking away their fears and extending them membership in their own citizen body. (Libanius, Or. 30.5; trans. after A. F. Norman)

Other voices in this chorus emphasised the uniformity of laws and currency that enabled large-scale, long-distance trade, or the peace that made tourism and travel possible. But it is naturally the spread of imperial citizenship and the creation thereby of a supra-poliadic political community that attracted then and thereafter the greatest attention.

1 2

For patient comments on earlier drafts of this essay, my thanks to Shadi Bartsch, Tim Whitmarsh and John Weisweiler; and likewise to Maud Gleason, for a helpful conversation even before the writing began. Pagden (1995). See esp. Gernentz (1918) 124–44; see also Oliver (1953); Sherwin-White (1973) 425–44, 461–8; and Ando (2000) 49–70.

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Running in counterpoint to this theme was another, which celebrated the efflorescence of smaller communities – regional, provincial, ethnic, tribal, religious, diocesan and poliadic – some of which were explicitly constituent of the empire, and some not. Paradoxically, this strand of imperial culture moves in lock step with the extension of Roman citizenship. For example, one significant index of celebrations of local identity is the number of cities minting their own coins, and this number peaked under the Severans, in the same period as the citizenship was made very nearly universal (Millar (1993b) 243–5 = (2006) 120–4; on the provincial coinage see Howgego et al. (2005)). That said, many of the products of such celebrations are lost to us. Handbooks of rhetoric under the empire, for example, uniformly identify local history and subjects of local pride – the origin of cities, the distinction of their founders, the deeds of their people in war and peace, and their accomplishments in arts and athletics – as essential components of public oratory, whether one was praising a local notable, lauding the emperor, opening a festival, or inviting the governor to attend a celebration (Menander Rhetor 1, pp. 353–67 Spengel, and, 2, pp. 383, 426, and 429 Spengel; [Dionysius of Halicarnassus], Rhet. 1, 7). But of the many thousands of such speeches once delivered, few survive; and of the immense scholarly activity that supplied rhetors with data few traces remain.3 Nevertheless, it very much appears as though the imposition of an imperial legal and administrative superstructure promoted and perhaps harnessed the celebration of the local. It is on that relationship between the imperial and the local that I focus my attention here. At a general level, it is the aim of this chapter to provide an imperial perspective on the history of localism under Rome. My argument thus runs in counterpoint to those developed in the rest of the volume, in at least two registers. First, the particularism at the level of knowledge, dialect and self-expression, as well as public and private institutional arrangements, that forms the very core of local identity formation, was for the empire the very currency of governance. For empires distinguish themselves in history, from nation states in quality, and from each other in degree, in their success in managing and exploiting diversity (Barfield (2001) 29; Maier (2006) 5–7, 29–36). The details of any given city’s mythic and historical past might, of course, win genuine esteem from a Roman magistrate or faction in the Senate. But the mere fact of diverse local cultures contributed to the ability of the centre to distract conquered populations from realising solidarity 3

A revolution in what may be known of local history in the Hellenistic and Roman periods was effected by Chaniotis (1988), whose efforts have yet to be fully absorbed. For now see Gehrke (2001); Jones (2001a); and especially Clarke (2008).

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with each other around their subjugation, and to interpellate them as subjects of empire. My focus in this chapter is on the Roman contribution to the manufacture and sustenance of diversity. A second register in which my focus complements the local and provincial perspectives adopted elsewhere in this book might be described as that of orientation, which has both theoretical and evidentiary aspects. In focusing on the practices of imperial government and tracing their effects, I rely in the first instance upon public documents, whether honorific or legal instruments or records of diplomatic exchange, so I commence by analysing those collectivities recognised by imperial authorities and memorialised in official texts. (For what it is worth, those collectivities took wildly varied forms, a fact clearly illustrated by the tragic history of the Jews under the principate: Ando (2007).) Furthermore, reliance on public documents privileges government and law as sources of social power; it does not, of course, exclude consideration of religious or cultural affiliation, though these lie largely outside the scope of this essay.4 My hope is that the history of the emergent imperial superstructure whose principles and practices are traced in this essay will shed valuable light on the form and content of the divergent sources exploited elsewhere in this volume, and that my own tracing of its effects may stand in useful dialogue with the more particularist and subjectivist approaches of those essays. That said, I resist drawing any too neat distinction between imperial and provincial perspectives, or between legal-historical and literary study, as though the former yields arguments necessarily processual and the latter insights more authentic. At a theoretical level I might cite any number of comparative or social-theoretical works that argue for the implication of government in its disciplinary and knowledge interests in the formation of subjectivity, delimiting of imaginative horizons, and constitution of the every day. But virtually all such work focuses implicitly or explicitly on the early modern and modern worlds, and indeed some argue that this role for government is precisely a feature distinguishing modernity from its own immediate past. My own argument, that the actions of Roman government contributed decisively to the contours and expression of localism under the empire and ultimately to the rise of an imperial subjectivity, thus constitutes a historical rejoinder to the periodisation assumed in much of the very theorising it invokes. The application to antiquity of modern social theory 4

A forthcoming article, ‘Incarnation’ (Ando (in press b)), attempts to inscribe pagan and Christian asceticism in the history of governmentality under the empire.

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thus proves hermeneutic in the best sense, and it sheds recursive light on the theory itself. Specifically, I argue that Rome sought to sunder pre-existing patterns of social and economic conduct, and it hoped thereby to prevent the realisation of solidarity against itself on the basis of regional, religious or ethnic identity. The principal strategies employed to achieve this were two: one concerned with the imposition and animation of new political geographies, through the drawing of boundaries and channelling of energies between and within provinces, assize districts, cities and towns; and the other aspiring to nurture local and regional socio-economic elites whose interests aligned and overlapped with those of Rome. These efforts were startlingly successful. They were so, moreover, in spite of the multiple heterogeneities that rived Rome and its subjects, regional and civic elites, and elites and their subalterns alike. This variety in both language and social and political structures might well encourage and, indeed, justify a heightened particularism in scholarly practice. But I here decline that impulse. For the students of citizenship are right thus far, that the empire and its structures of governance were universal, and the maintenance of social order across and through localities, each with its own pride and knowledge, must be theorised in light of that fact. The remarkable discoveries of the last generation in numismatics and epigraphy in particular point to an answer. For what they permit us to see, courtesy of an extraordinary heightening of detail and aggregation of data, is the truly fractal nature of the empire: not simply the membership, but the values and norms of public and private organisations overlapped and these latter were, at the level of institutional arrangements, largely homologous.5 Over time, the ceding by Rome of power and cultural authority, the former limited, the latter broad, into the hands of local institutions and the encouragement of their flourishing, effectively tessellated the question of the empire’s legitimacy. It thereby came to rest not solely on the effectiveness of a strictly imperial discourse, between centre and periphery or emperor and subject, but on the legitimacy of every institution established on kindred social-theoretical postulates – collegia and city councils, boards of ephebes and elders, religious rites and criminal courts. The high Roman empire thus represents an extraordinary moment in the history of governmentality, in which a kaleidoscopic potential for identity formation was 5

This language is intended to evoke analytic frameworks used in the comparative study of empires (see esp. Maier (2006) 1–140; cf. Barfield (2001); Pagden (2005); and Covey (2006)). But I deploy it also in order to collapse distinctions too easily and quickly drawn in modern scholarship between the Roman empire and early modern states, and I seek thereby to promote greater precision in comparative work in the future (see also my forthcoming The Ambitions of Government (in press a); cf. Nicolet (1990)).

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realised and yet conduced a singular and peculiarly Roman social order. That moment was long-lived. But pass it did, and I shall suggest in closing that it did so because the centralisation of authority and greater penetration of imperial agents into local life that occurred in the third and fourth centuries both homogenised and ossified regional political cultures and deprived Roman social order itself of the local voices it had once freed to sustain it. In what follows I offer a number of perspectives upon the intersection of forms of domination and culture and knowledge production in late Hellenistic and early Roman Asia. My aim is to illustrate the constraints upon and contributions made to identity formation by changes in the public sphere occasioned by Rome: above all, by interference in prior geographic patterns to social and economic conduct and by pressure placed on Greek language by negotiation with Rome, with its quite different taxonomy of peoples and conceptualisation of the social. Those stories necessarily begin in the landscape of power relations in pre-Roman Asia, and it is with reflections on that world and its initial encounters with Rome that I begin. the freedom of the greeks The argument here pursued proceeds from an orientation somewhat different from that common in studies of either Roman government or provincial identities in the Roman empire, nor do scholars in those two fields communicate as often or as openly as they should. It is insufficient, I argue, to speak generically of Roman power without asking precisely when and by what agents that power was made manifest in provincial life; it is likewise unilluminating to write histories of archival practice that ignore readers, or of taxation without accounting for the movers of goods and farmers of crops in their disparate landscapes. Government, even ancient government, is a practice of daily life. The mapping of places and situating of peoples within multiple taxonomies – juridical, ethnic, geographic and economic – were neither innocent nor, for that matter, non-violent processes, and they, together with the revisions in knowledge generated by them, will have had long-term effects on the formation of provincial subjectivity. From that perspective, this essay thus constitutes an initial attempt to write a critical history of Roman government.6 6

In theoretical terms, my project is essentially Foucauldian, indebted above all to Foucault (1966) and Securit´e, territoire, population, the course of lectures he delivered at the Coll`ege de France in 1977–8 and published in its entirety in 2004. Despite that delay, the course of lectures of that

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Any project seeking to coordinate the reading of ancient documents, particularly the public ones of subject populations, with a modern interest in power must negotiate numerous problems of hermeneutics and rules of evidence. Here I single out three for comment: the danger of anachronism, arising particularly from contemporary study of modern post-colonial states, but also from imperial Greek recollections of their own classical past; second, scholarly neglect of friction and misconstrual in legal and diplomatic conduct between Greeks and Romans, encouraged by our frequent reliance on a single Greek or Latin source for an event, statute or policy, despite our awareness in principle that language difference long remained a very considerable hurdle in communication between state and subject in the Roman empire; and third, the underestimation of the influence on Roman policy of pre-Roman practice in both law and diplomacy, both among Greek cities and between them and supra-poliadic regional powers. The revival of empire studies in the last two decades of the twentieth century inspired much theorising of empire as a political form and legal construct. The success of those endeavours might suggest a corresponding potential to theorise the position of conquered populations and subjectivity of their members. But that suggestion should be declined, for at least two related reasons. First, if I diagnose the problem correctly, the most successful theoretical work produced in this period has focused precisely on form, modelled in constitutionalist or neo-Marxist economic terms. These are modes of analysis designed to bracket the particularities of culture in favour of systems-analytic abstraction. Crudely speaking, the study of subaltern populations has pursued a different quarry with a similar method and sought to extract from myriad historical contexts patterned responses in culture and mind to foreign suzerainty. It seeks above all to find resistance. But reactions to domination and the experience of social violence are too contingent to be thus susceptible to easy abstraction.7 This does not mean, of course, that resistance may not be found; but that its motivations and its forms will vary more widely than the fact of empire. The second reason not to assimilate subjects of empire, one to another and the aggregate to some ideology of rebellion and cultural

7

year achieved wide influence through the publication of a programmatic essay, ‘Governmentality’, available in English in Burchell et al. (1991) and also in Foucault (2000) 201–22. Kindred historical and sociological works, inside and outside classics, include Clavel-L´evˆeque (1983b), (1983c); Anderson (1991); Kain and Baigent (1992); Moatti (1993); and Scott (1998). I pursue a set of related arguments in Ando (in press a). A position I have argued more fully at Ando (2000) 49–70.

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self-determination, arises from the theoretical basis of contemporary scholarship. I shall urge in what follows that conceptions of autonomy and forms of subjectivity vary from culture to culture, and that not all cultures follow Anglo-American liberals in positing homologous forms of autonomy to individuals, cultures and states. The danger of viewing ancient (or other) societies from an uninterrogated liberal conception of social power is perhaps posed most starkly by those who would frame as autonomous all supposedly non-instrumental cultural practices, including expressions of local or ethnic particularism, and read them as resistance.8 But illiberal readings are also possible. An orientation to class interest, for example, would interpret the rise of classicism in literary language and the corresponding rarification of historical and literary knowledge in the early third century bce rather differently – it might then seem part and parcel of an attempt by local elites throughout the east to buttress their political standing by consolidating a monopoly on cultural authority, in the first instance as a product of diaspora and later in cooperation with Rome.9 The circularity of those practices whereby such artistry was deployed by elites publicly to thank each other for acts of euergetism would seem to confirm the validity of this approach. Where Roman Greece and Asia are concerned, one challenge is thus to interrogate the interested foreshortening of historical perspective at work in imperial celebrations of Hellenicity, according to which an illusory, democratic classical Greece succumbed to Roman violence. The resulting occlusion of the prior history of Greek imperialism affects understandings of the politics of ethnicity and literary production in the imperial period in at least two significant ways: we are encouraged thereby to forget the long history of attempts by cities of classical Greece to establish imperial rule over each other, as also to neglect the imperialistic nature of the Hellenistic diaspora. I take these in turn. Where classical Greece is concerned – if we forget, as instructed, Greek suppression of fellow Greeks – its occasional struggles for autonomy in relation to foreigners appear always to have been cultural and ethnic in orientation. Indeed, in this way a blinkered vision of the past was made to serve a particular and interested conception of Greekness in the present, 8 9

In a wide literature significant texts include Scott (1990); Bhabha (1994); and Deleuze and Guattari (1987). On classicism, public performance and elite speech in Greek civic life under the empire see Schmitz (1997) and Korenjak (2000). Neither pursues the more purely instrumentalist spin I lay upon classicism, nor does either systematically relate the cultural authority of Greek civic elites to the economic and social power dispensed to them by Rome.

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by effecting an alignment in historical narrative and self-understanding of systems of cultural and ethnic identity that were distinct in lived reality. On this understanding, Greek literature of the imperial period is at its most obviously colonial when it laments past failures to achieve political solidarity around just such a conception of Greekness. In considering the politics of the Hellenistic diaspora, we would do well to recall that the Greek cities established by Alexander and his successors – as well as many earlier colonies whom they merely aided – were not simply sites of Hellenic culture; they were also nodal points in a political economy that worked to subjugate non-Greek peoples. In that perspective, one of the historical roles of the Hellenistic kingdoms was to collaborate with civic elites in preserving an ethnic hegemony of Greeks over multiple non-Greek populations, and one of the prices paid for that concentration of spectacular power in the hands of kings was the loss of freedom of action in foreign affairs on the part of individual cities.10 It was a small price to pay. Simplistic as it is, this construal of the political economy of the Hellenistic period opens a window upon the constellation of understandings and descriptive apparatus existing in Hellenistic Asia Minor in regard to ethnic, cultural and political identity, into which the Romans stepped in the latter half of the second century bce. It does so in at least three respects relevant to the argument of this paper. First, at a purely historical level, it illuminates the pre-Roman origins of the correlational ethnic and social-theoretic distinctions Greek/non-Greek//poliadic/tribal visible in early Roman administrative mappings of the province of Asia but rapidly dropped (see ‘Provinces and their constituents’, below). Second, it urges scrutiny of the devastation that Roman conquest must have worked upon conceptions of the self and Greekness by the demolition of Greek claims to (racial) superiority that both justified and were themselves buttressed by what we might call the Hellenistic compromise. Third (and consequently), such concentration on the age of conquest and subsequent period of violence, during which social and economic life in the cities of the east was wrenched into conformity with the new geographic and legal realities of

10

Consider, for example, the plight of cities in Cyrenaica or Thrace or Pontus in the first decades of the first century bce. In both regions the sudden withdrawal or collapse of imperial arms (whether those of Ptolemy Apion or Mithridates or some Thracian king) left formerly subject Greek cities exposed to depradations of indigenous peoples – ‘evil-doers’, pirates and other workers of violence who did not dwell in Greek-style conurbations (see, e.g., Laronde (1987): 455–79, esp. 463–72; Syll.3 762).

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Roman rule, would help to denaturalise the notion of Greekness that imperial culture worked so hard to produce.11 The difficulties of evidence and interpretation before us in pursuing this line of inquiry might be illuminated as follows. There are good reasons to understand the situation of Greek politics and politicians in the Roman period as essentially continuous with their experience in the Hellenistic period. As a matter of law and administration, for example, the Romans made extensive efforts to gather documentary evidence for pre-Roman practice and to consider such when setting provinces in order. According to Livy, for example, Lucius Aemilius Paullus announced the tenets of future governance in Macedon following the defeat of Persius in 168 bce only after gathering copies of all public documents of the prior kingdom, wherever they were deposited (Livy 45.29.1). The Roman statute regulating customs duties in the province of Asia likewise makes repeated reference to the practices observed under the Attalids and envisions the publicans employing the very same buildings used for tax collection under the kings (SEG 39.1180: see, e.g., §10 ll. 26–8, §28 ll. 67–8, and §30, ll. 69–71, all clauses from the original statute, which must in my view date to the 120s bce). At the level of diplomacy, the continuities appear to be even more clear. One of the several points illuminated by Fergus Millar in his brilliant essay on ‘State and subject: the impact of monarchy’ was precisely that the cities of the eastern Mediterranean knew exactly how to react to changes in the rulership of the world (in Millar’s case study, the change from triumvirate-cum-republic to Augustan monarchy), precisely because the ritual exchange of praise for privilege through embassies had formed the heart of diplomatic practice for generations.12 (A subsidiary point might be that the Greeks were, in fact, more than mere subjects of violence, as the Romans were more than solely purveyors of such; and continuity in diplomatic form was in itself a concession and form of communication between the two.13 ) The privilege most desired by the Greek cities was freedom, or so it is often denominated in English. But that term little captures the nuances 11

12 13

I urge, in other words, research to bridge the chronological gap between Jonathan Hall’s conclusions regarding the self-subversive potential in genealogical models of kinship in the new geographical realities of the Hellenistic age, and the exacting scholarship directed to public declarations of Hellenic descent (and public performance of classical culture) in the late first century ce and beyond (Spawforth and Walker (1985), (1986); Spawforth in Cartledge and Spawforth (2002): 190–211; Jones (1996), (2004b); Romeo (2002a)). Millar (1984) = (2002) 292–313. On Hellenistic diplomacy see Ma (1999). On what it meant for Greeks to be subjects, see, e.g., Ael. Ar. Or. 23.8 and 11 (translation on pp. 000–000 below), as well as 26.30 and 102.

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of Greek eleutheria, just as English ‘autonomy’ proves a deeply misleading guide to classical or Hellenistic autonomia; nor does either term map onto any single Latin one.14 Those facts have not generated in recent years substantial inquiry into the status and influence of Roman public law in the eastern Mediterranean, nor has there been any attempt systematically to update the lexica of Greek terms for Roman institutions produced in different eras by David Magie (1905) and H. J. Mason (1974).15 A like supposition regarding the invulnerability of even Greek diplomatic practice to foreign influence presumably accounts for the overwhelming tendency in literature on city status under the empire to depart from a prior and often uninterrogated classification of cities as eastern and western, Greek and Latin. That taxonomy may reflect some important historical reality beyond a pattern of language use but, if so, it should be justified. Otherwise, it is tempting to suggest that the language of Greek official documents, however static it might appear, must have been epiphenomenal to real changes in the legal landscape in which the cities of the east now found themselves, and hence that the language was not, in fact, static at all. In other words, though the language of Greek public documents may appear static in style and diction between the early second century bce and mid second century ce, the legal and political landscape it described had radically changed. In content, in signification, the (Greek) language of politics and public law of the later age was a different tongue altogether. The largely uninterrogated practice of isolating the history of the Greek city from that of cities in the west contributes substantially to this misrecognition of the jural and political component to the history of provincial peoples and landscapes in the east. This incuriosity regarding the evolution of Greek under pressure from Rome surprises for at least two reasons. First, the realities of Roman law and legal practice must have imposed upon Greek communities and often 14 15

On freedom see Welles (1965); on autonomy see M. H. Hansen (1995). For a comparison of Greek and Roman legal documents in respect to their doctrines of sovereignty see Ando (in press c). Further essays on Latin’s influence on Greek, not least through loan words, include Lafoscade (1892); Hahn (1906), (1907); Cameron (1931); Zilliacus (1935); D¨olger (1936) (reviewing Zilliacus); Avotins (1989), (1992). Eck (2000) offers valuable generalisations, based largely on the evidence from Perge, but a survey of surviving Latin texts on stone does not, to my mind, provide a sufficient index of Latin’s influence in the east. I omit here secondary literature on the translation of Latin literary texts, but note that Reichmann (1943) includes a glossary. Kearsley’s corpus of the bilingual inscriptions of Asia (2001) and Anastasiadis and Souris’s word index to imperial constitutions from Greek inscriptions and papyri (2000) will hopefully provoke further research. For general remarks on the difficulties posed by language difference and the attempts made by Greeks to overcome these, see Mason (1970) and Ando (1999) 7–8, 14–16.

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Greek individuals the need to negotiate in light of Latin categories and conceptualisations. Merely to collate and read Greek public documents of the Roman period is to collaborate with an ancient elision, for although many cities in the eastern provinces published on permanent media documents of Roman public law translated into Greek, there is no reason to believe that those versions of those texts would have been dispositive in court. At Rome itself, for example, the dispositive text of a statute was that authenticated by witnesses upon its deposition in the archives (I use the term loosely, because the name and location of the archive, as also the process for deposition, changed between late republic and early principate).16 Furthermore, when Roman magistrates wished to communicate with Greek cities in an authoritative manner or simply in a public context, they generally did so in Latin. Aemilius Paullus did just that, despite being at least functionally bilingual (Livy 45.29.3). Greek communities must therefore have grappled regularly with Latin documents, and just as often with individuals who understood the world in Latin terms. It was, after all, ‘the language of power’ (Themistius, Or. 6.71c: ¡ di†lektov ¡ kratoÓsa; cf. Libanius, Ep. 668, contrasting ‘the Greek tongue’ with ‘that of our rulers’, ¡ í Ellav fwnž with ¡ tän kratoÓntwn). Practice in language use by Roman magistrates dealing with Greek cities naturally varied, and the second century bce and fourth century ce marked high points for Latin in that regard for quite different reasons. That said, Paullus’ behaviour in particular points to an issue: in both public and private law, in principle it was the Latin text of a public legal instrument that would have been dispositive, and it lay within the power of Roman magistrates to insist on that fact. The enormously widespread practice of inscribing Roman instruments in Greek may have made those texts intelligible to their addressees – and it certainly served local symbolic aims17 – but we should not allow a pattern in evidence for language choice at the moment of inscription to direct our attention away from the need enjoined upon actors to negotiate between Greek translation and Latin original in daily life. The second reason to be surprised at modern scholars’ incuriosity about the influence of Roman thought and language on Greece and Greek is that much ink has been spilt over those few diplomatic exchanges in which a misunderstanding of language is both recorded and remarked upon by an ancient source. That is to say, historians have noticed language difference as a problem in the ancient world almost exclusively when it is pointed out 16

Mommsen (1887) iii.1010–15; see also ii.545–9.

17

Eck (1998) 359–381.

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to them.18 In light of that evidence, some further effort might have been expended to discover the traces left by similar misunderstandings that went without explicit notice, but such inquiries are in fact quite rare.19 Negotiations over freedom are, in fact, an ideal case study, for in addition to numerous documentary records for embassies to Rome and appeals to Roman magistrates by cities seeking to acquire or preserve their freedom, we possess an unusually large body of critical and theoretical reflections on the status of freedom in the respective traditions of Greece and Rome.20 Chronologically we might begin with the declaration by Flamininus at the Isthmian Games in 196 bce, to the effect that ‘the senate of the Romans and Titus Quintius, general with consular imperium (i.e. proconsul), having defeated king Philip and the Macedonians, release free, without garrison, without taxation, using their ancestral laws, the Corinthians, Locrians, Phocians, Euboeans, the Achaeans of Phthiotis, the Magnesians, Thessalians and Perrhaibians’ (Polybius 18.46.5; see also Plutarch, Flamininus 10.4). This was the traditional language of Greek treaties (Magie 1950: 828– 9), and perhaps for that reason Polybius held it suspect. Or rather, critics in his text of the great powers, whether Rome or sundry Greek kings, frequently accuse the allies of those powers of naivety when they justify their alliance by citing some promise of freedom (see, e.g., 11.5.1–6.8). In so writing, Polybius is often unfair: in most such exchanges, individual cities negotiated from a position of weakness, and they sought on the whole treaties that enumerated specific concessions in great detail and otherwise used language to stake out normative claims that might justify further concessions down the line. It is in any event worth recalling that the conjoining of freedom (of action in foreign affairs) with autonomy (meaning reliance on local law in disputes between individuals holding local citizenship) was no hendiadys: according to Plutarch, forensic oratory and embassies to the emperor remained to the statesman, even when ‘the affairs of cities’ no longer included ‘leadership in wars or the overthrowing of tyrannies or acts of alliance’ (Prae. ger. reip. 805a–b). That said, criticism of Rome and its allies in the pages of Polybius is often more pointed, and not solely when Romans’ status as non-Greeks is 18

19 20

The most famous of such undoubtedly being the confrontation between the Aetolians and Manius Acilius Glabrio, in which the former were revealed to have misunderstood the technical Latin term for unconditional surrender, deditio in fidem, because it could be rendered word for word in Greek as ‘place oneself in another’s trust’ (Polybius 20.9–10). Much information can be gleaned from Snellman (1914–19), who studies the role of translators in Roman diplomacy; see also Thurm (1883), a dissertation on Roman embassies to foreign nations. In secondary literature, exemplary studies include Momigliano (1951); Bernhardt (1971); Jacques (1984); and Millar (1993b).

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at issue. The defective state of Roman freedom also comes in for censure. In his narrative of 181/80 Polybius records debates first in Achaea and later in Rome, during which Greeks discussed first among themselves and later before the Roman senate how notionally free Greek cities should receive written requests from Rome, especially in cases where compliance would entail violation of an oath, a law or an inscription. According to Polybius, it was only in response to the speech of Callicrates, urging them to consult self-interest, that the senate ‘began to exalt those who supported its decrees’, ‘whether justly or unjustly’, ‘and to humble those who opposed them’ (Polybius 24.8–10 at 10.3–4). But in a (sadly typical) rush to blame a fellow Greek for the failings of Rome, Polybius commits more than one error of historical judgement.21 Here it suffices to observe that Roman freedom was defective only from a Greek perspective. To a Roman, the expectation that free cities respect written requests from Rome involved no compromise. In the words of Proculus, in a digression motivated by the question whether postliminium exists between Rome and free or allied cities, a free people is one which is not subject to the power of another people. An allied people is either one that has entered into friendship under an equal treaty or one embraced by a treaty such that one people should with good will respect the maiestas of the other. Note moreover that the one people is understood to be superior; the other is not to be understood as not free. So, even as we understand our clients to be free, even if they do not excel us in authority or dignity, so those who are bound to respect our maiestas with good will should be understood to be free. (Proculus, Ep., Bk. 8 = Dig. 49.15.7.1; trans. after O. Robinson)

Where Greek eleutheria ended and Roman maiestas began was clearly a problem to be worked out in practice. But Greek efforts to locate some accommodation were not aided by the fundamental problem that maiestas is without analogue in Greek political language not simply in its basic meaning, but also by virtue of being an abstraction formed from the comparative. The world can contain many superlatives. In meetings between notionally sovereign states, however, the comparative is an almost insurmountable obstacle. Furthermore, where language difference in international law is 21

To Polybius’ withering criticism of Greeks who would accommodate to Roman power, compare Plutarch’s likening of politicians who play at freedom to children who try to wear their fathers’s sandals or put on their crowns. ‘We smile at such children, but those holding office in the cities, when they stir up the multitude, urging it to imitate the actions and counsels and deeds of their ancestors, though these are incommensurate with the present time and circustances – their deeds are laughable, but what they suffer is no laughing matter, unless they are merely despised’ (Prae. ger. reip. 814a).

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concerned, it bears observing in this context that Cicero, writing to Atticus during his governship of Cilicia in 51/50 bce, both recognised the value of freedom’s correlate, autonomy, and yet signalled the inadequacy of his own literal translation for ‘using their ancestral laws’ by glossing it in Greek (Att. 116.4: omnes suis legibus et iudiciis usae aÉtonom©an adeptae revixerunt). In fact, thanks to a sequence of inscriptions from Pergamum, the most recently recovered published only in 2000, we can now watch a Greek city pass from Attalid to Roman rule, all the while attempting to preserve concessions granted by the king in subsequent negotiation with a power whose language and institutions required constant translation.22 Already in 133 bce, immediately upon death of Attalus, Pergamum learned that he had set the city free in his will but acknowledged that the will required ratification by Rome. It nevertheless sought in the interim to arrange its affairs, and in particular to document the juridical status of its residents, so as to fix affairs on the ground, as it were, in anticipation of subsequent negotiations with Rome (OGIS 338.5–7). Rome for its part probably ratified the will late in 132 (OGIS 435 = RDGE 11). Our knowledge of that act is imperfect for a number of reasons, but prominent among them is that we depend for our knowledge of it on a Greek translation of the relevant senatorial decree, preserved at Pergamum, undoubtedly because in so ratifying the will the senate accepted the city’s liberation. But it seems likely, too, that the text has been edited, perhaps drastically, so as to reflect Pergamum’s very limited interest in its content, and the translation offers in any event a poor reflection of Roman magisterial competencies (the strat¯egoi, ‘praetors’, in ll. 7 and 16–17 demand explanation). It is furthermore precisely Pergamum’s desperate attention on Rome that the newly discovered Pergamene decree attests, for its honorand, one Menodorus, is thanked among other things for advising the city in its reaction to a piece of Roman law-making. What it is he advised is unclear; and, as with Pegamum’s awkward and interested translation of the senatus consultum Popillianum, the terminology of its decree for Menodorus observes no precision regarding Roman institutions – in this case, the genre of Roman text concerned (line 13: kat‡ tŸn ëRwmaikŸn nomo{es©an, on which see W¨orrle (2000) 568–71). Nor, as it happens, was Pergamum alone in its fixation on Rome, or in its ultimately misguided attempt through wilful (mis)construal of Roman language to claim its freedom. Ionian Metropolis, too, honoured one of its citizens, one Apollonius, son of Attalus, son of Andron, because he roused 22

W¨orrle (2000) publishes the new Pergamene text. Many of his tentative conclusions about Roman actions in Asia between 133 and 129 receive support from the decree of Metropolis for Apollonius published by Drewer and Engelmann in 2003 (I.Metropolis), on which see Jones (2004a), ‘Pergamon’.

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the city against Aristonicus in order to retain the freedom that the Romans, ‘the common benefactors and saviours, gave, as they decreed, to all those formerly subject to the rule of Attalus’ (I.Metropolis 1, ll. 13–15). Yet Pergamum’s passage to freedom was only just beginning. For it had, in geographic terms, first to be embraced by the new Roman province, and later removed from it, before the practicalities of Roman freedom, and its place in the new Asia, could be fixed. It is to that process that I now turn. provinces and their constituents The process of annexation into the Roman empire involved changes in provincial society on many levels: Roman officials drew boundaries, conceptual and material, around provinces and between assize districts, cities and towns; this mapping itself mirrored an ordering of the province’s communities, which exercised varying forms of juridical, political and economic power over each other; regulations sought to fracture old networks of trade and sociability, while roads, milestones and boundary stones inscribed Roman control on the landscape itself. In the late republic and particularly during the principate, annexation was also followed rapidly by the establishment of provincial ‘leagues’, representative assemblies that in the republic served to channel communication between subjects of Rome and which rapidly emerged in the principate as principal vehicles for imperial cult. My aim here is not to rehearse the data for these processes nor to examine the regional and chronological variations to which they were subject, but to examine, as concisely as possible, their effectiveness in constituting new foci for expressions of communal solidarity and hence in becoming new mechanisms, or layers, if you will, in the construction of identity.23 The fullest surviving literary account of a Roman effort to organise newly conquered territory is Livy’s narrative of the aftermath of the defeat of Perseus of Macedon in 167 bce – a somewhat ironic happenstance, because Rome did not, in fact, annex Macedon at this time. Annexation de iure followed a revolt in 150–148, which was itself provoked in part by dissatisfaction with the framework of hyper-regulated self-governance established by Paullus. That framework had five components: (1) Paullus ordered the Macedonians to be free, each city having its own territory, using its own laws and electing annual magistrates; (2) they were to pay to the Roman people half the tax they had formerly paid the king; (3) Macedonia 23

For an overview of provincial administration, citing further bibliography, see Ando (2006). S. Mitchell (1999) is a superb study of the organisation of Asia.

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was divided into four regions, each with its own capital, council, magistrates and revenue; (4) it was forbidden to marry or own real estate across regional boundaries; and (5) certain commercial activities that might in themselves support or indirectly finance militarisation were regulated or outlawed outright, but districts that bordered barbarian territories were permitted to station armed guardposts along their borders (Livy 45.29.4–14). The revolt quashed, Macedonia was formally annexed. The major changes to Paullus’ framework entailed by that act were, first, the transformation of the so-called regions into assize districts and, naturally, the loss by the cities of Macedonia of their freedom. One wonders if they noticed. The terminology deployed by Livy to describe the constraints placed on social and economic exchange between districts is both technical and historic: conubium and commercium, together with the right of migration, were the three rubrics under which Rome had regulated social and economic activity between itself and its neighbours and, as its hegemony extended, among its neighbours themselves. In particular, they stand at the heart of Roman imaginings of the history of Latium, from at least the so-called foedus Cassianum of 493 bce to the treaty that ended Rome’s wars with its Latin neighbours in 338 bce and effectively removed the Latins’ potential to achieve union amongst themselves in opposition to Rome.24 Mommsen recognised this history for what it was, a workingout in narrative of a problem of public law ((1887) III.609–13): the status of Roman citizenship as superordinate among a collectivity of citizen communities thus received its explanation, when rights once shared were taken away from the conquered. The crucial sentence in Livy’s narrative of 338 bce is perhaps also the shortest: ‘From the other Latin peoples, they took away rights of marriage, commerce and consultation with each other’ (Livy 8.14.10). Livy’s description of the settlement of Macedon thus reflects lessons learned during the long unification of Italy, of which process the consolidation of Latium served in Roman thought as both model and exemplar. We are, of course, free to challenge the historicity of the foedus Cassianum or the social-theoretical self-consciousness Livy’s narrative attributes to the Romans of 338. But there is little reason to doubt that three centuries’ experience in Italy, and two hundred years of legal writing, would have produced a shared understanding among Roman magistrates of the aims of governance over others and of mechanisms to achieve them. It is therefore 24

On the so-called Latin rights see Humbert (1978) 85–122 or, more briefly, Oakley (1997) 338–9 and (1998) 541–2.

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unsurprising to find principles of administration first visible there widely reduplicated across space and time. The subdivision of the province of Asia that corresponds to the regions into which Macedon was first divided, which were later transformed into assize districts, is likewise the assize district. Though we have as yet no evidence that Rome restricted social and commercial interchange between the districts of Asia, in the eyes of at least one ancient observer, the Augustan geographer Strabo, the division between assize districts precisely did not follow the geographic distribution of Phrygian, Carian and Lydian peoples: e«v d• tŸn sÅgcusin taÅthn oÉ mikr‡ sullamb†nei t¼ toÆv ëRwma©ouv mŸ kat‡ fÓla diele±n aÉtoÅv, ˆll‡ ™teron tr»pon diat†xai t‡v dioikžseiv, –n a³v t‡v ˆgora©ouv poioÓntai kaª t‡v dikaiodos©av. (Strabo 13.4.12) To this confusion [regarding the distribution of ethnic groups] no small contribution has been made by this fact, that the Romans did not divide this territory by tribe, but arranged its assize districts according to some other rationale, those being where they hold assemblies and courts of law.

Despite the apparent discrepancy with Macedon, top-down regulation of relations across district boundaries was presumably not universally necessary, both because the conditions under which territories passed into Roman control differed widely, and because the presence of the governor’s assize itself served to channel social and economic energy. That is why the opportunity to host an assize was so hotly contested.25 Many aspects of civic life under the empire are well studied, the competition between cities for honours and privileges from Rome looming large among them.26 The scale of those contests and their prominence in the historical record is powerful testimony to Roman success in reorientating traditional forms of civic and regional rivalry around a new dynamic, whose currency was the expression of loyalty to Rome and whose reward was distinction among, and occasionally power over, one’s peers.27 What 25

26

27

On the competition to host an assize see Dio, Orr. 35, 38 and 40. Other evidence is collated in Haensch (1997) 860–1, Index III 7 s.v. ‘Rivalit¨at anderer St¨adte mit dem Statthaltersitz’. Further commentary in Ando (in press a) chapter 2. Robert (1977b) is the most elegant introduction to the topic. See also Millar (1977) 375–456; Burrell (2004) (treating one of the most highly contested privileges, that of hosting a regional centre of the imperial cult); and Heller (2006), an exemplary study. For an early example of a city’s being rewarded by power over and profit from its neighbours, see OGIS 441 = RDGE 18, ll. 87–110, a decree of the senate confirming rewards granted by Sulla to Stratonikeia: Sulla had ‘conjoined’ and subordinated communities, lands, fields and harbours to Stratonikeia ‘by including them within its boundaries’ (to±v aÉ]to±v prosÛrisen sunecÛrhsen [polite©av . . . ).

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did not and could not emerge from such contests was the realisation of solidarity against Rome. Roman administration thus worked to heighten the import of local and regional identities by constructing institutions and institutionalising practices that urged individuals and communities to misrecognise the work of interest in the contemporary distribution of power and avenues of legitimation in both centre and periphery, as well as historical configurations of allegiance and affection within and across provincial boundaries. These institutions accomplished that work by sometimes uniting and sometimes disjoining neighbouring communities along networks devised by agents of the empire. To this overall strategy the drawing of provincial boundaries and, indeed, the province as collectivity made essential contributions. Here I comment on two ways in which they did so. First, the drawing of provincial boundaries heightened the importance of place in the constitution of provincial political subjectivity; and second, the imposition of the province as a regional structure between city and empire fractured prior conceptions of the geographic distribution of peoples. The result was not simply the creation of another status for persons but a recursive inscription of older forms of identity within a new framework. Regarding the drawing of boundaries, what deserves emphasis here is that like all the processes encompassed in the settlement of a province, not least the assigning of statuses to towns, boundary-drawing was allembracing. It circumscribed subject cities, to be sure, but also – or perhaps particularly – the free. And though there is no evidence for the censusing by Rome of provincial populations before the Augustan period, Pergamum’s anxiety to register its people as it entered into Roman freedom well attests the fundamental and necessary link that bound the place and rank of individuals to situation of their communities.28 So it is that language of cutting and separating space itself recurs endlessly as a metaphor for establishing the free status of a city. This was so already in the early years of the province of Asia, when Claros thanked its citizen Menippos for having ‘freed the residents of the city from exactions and the governor’s authority, the province having been separated from (the city’s) autonomy’ (Robert and Robert (1989), M´enippos col. 1, ll. 37–40: toÆv d• katoikoÅntav tŸn p»lin –leu{”rwse kateggužsewn kaª strathgikv –xous©av, tv –parce©av ˆp¼ tv aÉtonom©av cwris{e©shv). Likewise, in letters from Trajan and Hadrian, the freedom of Aphrodisias is described in shorthand 28

On the relationship between territoriality and citizenship in Roman public law see Ando (2008); on the institutions of citizenship under the empire, see Ando (2000): 336–85.

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as being effected by means of ‘the city’s removal from the schema of the province’.29 The content of that freedom is elaborated in a much earlier document, a decree of the senate of 39 bce. There it is specified that the people of Plarasa and Aphrodisias were ‘to have, possess, use and enjoy the fruits of all such fields, lands, domiciles, villages, estates, fortresses, pastures and revenues as they held when they entered the friendship of the Roman people’ (Reynolds (1982) no. 8 ll. 58–60). The conjoining of space, land, revenue and freedom could not be closer. Such freedom had limits – very precise ones, at that. For even the earliest clauses of the customs law of Asia specify that persons importing goods should declare them on whatever boundary there is a customs house, ‘whether the boundary is of formerly royal land, a free city, a civic community or a people’ (SEG 89.1180 §10 ll. 26–7; see also §29 l. 69). A clause added to that law in 17 bce further specifies that ‘cities, peoples and communities’ as well as fora that have been excepted from the customs law by ‘statute, plebiscite, senatorial decree or favour of Imperator Caesar Augustus’ should not pay customs within their boundaries, nor should they have to host a customs house further than eight stades within those boundaries. And finally, in language that recalls the letters of Trajan and Hadrian to Aphrodisias, that same clause of 17 bce likewise describes the free peoples of Asia as ‘outside the assize district(s)’ that presumably otherwise surrounded them (SEG 89.1180 §39 ll. 88–96: ›xw dioikžsewv). That status of being geographically and juridically outside was, however, intensely and materially circumscribed. Communities were thus defined, and their residents located, within matrices that were at once geographic and juridical. Being a subject of empire will in this way have imposed on individuals a heightened sense of place, a sense very literally of their location in a Roman mapping of the world.30 That was true even for the free. Communities, too, were thus interpellated, disjoined, one from another, and reconstituted as nodal points within an imperial schema, to be reunited only insofar as they shared relations with Rome. It was that superordinate structure that made locality 29

30

Reynolds (1982) no. 14 l. 3 and no. 15 ll. 13–14. tÅpov, the word I translate as schema, seems more likely to translate Latin forma, map or diagrammatic representations, than formula, schedule. The reduction of territory ‘into the shape of a province’ (in formam provinciae) produced both documents. The presence of ‘agoras’ (translating Latin fora) in the customs law of Asia, clause 39, attests the origin of that clause in a specifically Roman taxonomy. A similar ordering of communities from a Greek perspective would have referred to emporia. The translation here draws attention to the lack of overlap between Greek and Roman visions of the function of nucleated settlements within the landscape. On this problem see Ando (in press a) chapters 4 and 6.

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intelligible. This was, of course, necessary because of empire, but it was also an effect of empire. The province as collection of communities and ultimately as collectivity in its own right also had a role to play in the formation of identity and conceptions of the local. We can chart this process best in the province of Asia, where the gradual publication of epigraphic texts has shed ever more light on the history of provincial institutions and the range of selfdescriptions they employed. In the thirty years this material has been assembled and analysed superbly twice, by Thomas Drew-Bear (1972) and Jean-Louis Ferrary (2001), and I want here only to adduce a few additional texts, to set their conclusions in a wider, imperial context, and to align their arguments with my own. Drew-Bear himself framed the problem in editing and commenting on a decree of the league of Asia, written sometime between Sulla’s reorganisation of the province in 85/4 bce (which, like his gift to Stratonikeia, probably received confirmation at Rome only in 81) and the further reforms made by Lucullus fourteen years later. The members of the league refer to themselves in at least four different ways in the surviving lines of the decree, as ‘the league of the Greeks’, ‘the Greeks’, ‘the peoples and tribes in Asia’ (o¬ –n ti ìAs©ai dmoi kaª t‡ ›{nh) and ‘the league of the Greeks in Asia’.31 As Drew-Bear observed, following Keil, the collocation of ‘peoples’ and ‘tribes’, together with the implicit contrast between them, can be read as embracing but also differentiating Hellenised populations living in cities, in poleis, on the one hand, and the inhabitants of the less Hellenised interior, who did not live in recognisably Greek cities, on the other (1972: 448–9). But to accept that observation – and I think with one revision we must – is to highlight the oddity of then denominating the whole of the league’s membership as ‘the Greeks’. And in any case, what is meant by Asia? Ferrary addresses both those questions, but his inquiry proceeds from a different vantage point, because he opens by asking, of another sequence of texts, what Asian cities might mean when they honoured Romans as the common benefactors of themselves and ‘the Greeks’, ‘the other Greeks’, or ‘the Panhellenes’. Beyond a masterful gathering of evidence, his principal insights are two. First, he suggests strongly that ‘Asia’ in such texts refers to the province, though he declines to identify the league as a Roman foundation. Second, he traces the evolution in the league’s self-representation and 31

Drew-Bear (1972) 444 = Reynolds (1982) no. 5. See ll. 4, 13, 14, 21, 22, 23–4, 24–5 and 28.

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suggests not only that ‘Greek’ came to be used by the league for all its constituents, but that in doing so Greek usage gradually aligned with Roman practice, in which by the Augustan period ‘Greek’ was used of the eastern provinces to refer broadly to aliens. This is brilliantly seen. What is more, as Ferrary himself observes, the history that he traces runs parallel to developments in Roman Egypt, where, in typical Roman fashion, a taxonomy of concrete ontology (namely, a division of the population according to ethnicity) was abstracted and transformed into a purely juridical scheme. That Egyptian history received masterful study by Joseph M´el`eze Modrzejewski ((1985); cf. (1983)), albeit not in the terms used above. I wish to push Ferrary’s argument further, in two directions. First, I believe the league to be a Roman foundation; and second, I suggest that its influence is observable not simply in the altered meaning of ‘Greek’, but also in the geographic import and political significance of Asia. Both Ferrary and Drew-Bear insist that ‘the League of the Peoples and Tribes in Asia’ should be differentiated from the league as it existed in the principate. In that period its structure mirrored precisely the geography and hierarchy established for the province’s communities by the Roman assize system, the evidence for which has been conveniently assembled by Stephen Mitchell ((1999) 22–9). It is true, furthermore, that the customs law of Asia first describes the structure of the province as organised around assize districts only in the clause added in 17 bce But there was no necessary reason for publicans to respect a division by assize district. As the settlement of Macedon among others makes clear, regional structures like assize districts were relevant to public finances only where locally administered taxes were concerned, and only insofar as Rome required delivery of revenues into its hands at such regional centres. The silence regarding assize districts of both the customs law as well as the texts generated by the league itself is therefore no argument against its being a Roman foundaton. In favour of that being the case, one might cite not only the parallel of Macedonia, where even prior to annexation Rome required the foundation of supra-poliadic representative bodies in each region, but also the slightly later parallel of Bithynia, where a ‘league of the Greeks in Bithynia’ was established together with the province in 75/4 bce (Campanile (1993)). One might adduce in addition the language of several earlier decrees by the Asian league itself, for several fragmentary decrees produced early in the first century bce trace their authorship not simply to ‘the Peoples and Tribes,’ but to ‘the Peoples and Tribes in Asia and those individuals adjudged

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friends of the Roman people’.32 This is a distinctly Roman category of persons, a listing of whom was maintained at Rome (IGR 1.118 = RDGE 22, line 12 (Latin), ll. 24–5 (Greek)). Its presence in decrees of the league from the 90s bce is, I suggest, no contingent accretion. It reflected, rather, the origin of the classification of communities into ‘peoples’ and ‘tribes’ not in some Greek taxonomy, but a distinctly Roman one, a rendering into Greek of Latin populi and gentes. The denomination of some communities in Asia as fora in the customs law of Asia urges the same conclusion. The anthropology of both taxonomies, one might say, is distinctively Roman. A final piece of evidence in favour of this argument gestures also to my second suggestion. Near the opening of Book 14, devoted to Ionia, Caria and the coast beyond the Taurus, Strabo is provoked by mention of Leucae to digress regarding the history of Asia during and immediately after the revolt of Aristonicus. At the conclusion of that war, he writes, ‘Manius Aquillius came as consul with ten legates and arranged the province into the form of government it retains to this day’ (Strabo 14.1.38: . . . di”taxe tŸn –parc©an e«v t¼ nÓn ›ti summ”non tv polite©av scma). The use of politeia to refer to the public-law arrangements of a supra-poliadic structure is highly unusual, indeed, virtually unprecedented in Greek literary texts. But it has an important precedent in a letter from Quintus Fabius Maximus, proconsular governor of Macedia in 115/14 bce, to the city of Dyme in Achaea (Syll.3 684 = RDGE 43). Some residents of Dyme, led by one Sosos, son of Tauromenes, attempted to instigate a revolt from Rome, in pursuit of which they ‘burned and destroyed the archives and public records and wrote laws in opposition to the constitution given to the Achaeans by the Romans’ (ll. 9–10: toÆv n»mouv gr†yav Ëpenant©ouv ti ˆpodo{e±shi to±v [ìA]caio±v Åp¼ ëRwma©wn polit[e©a]i). As provinces became susceptible of assimilation to civic communities in the Greek imagination, they came also to serve as foci for patriotic sentiments (cf. Bertrand (1982), an inquiry into the meanings and usage of –parce©a). This process is visible regardless of what origin one attributes to the koinon of Asia. This is most obvious in Greek texts that employ firstperson possessives to signal provincial membership. The citizens of Thera, for example, described Popilius Priscus, governor of Asia in 149–150 ce as ‘the praiseworthy governor of our province’ (IG 12.3.326, ll. 32–3). In similar fashion, ‘the Council and People of Xanthus, the metropolis of the Lycians’ once honoured with a statute Gaius Iulius Saturninus, ‘consular’, 32

Ferrary (2001) 27 cites OGIS 438 from Poemanenon, OGIS 439 from Olympia, IGR 4.291 from Pergamum. To these one should add I.Ephesos 205.

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on his becoming ‘governor of our province’ (OGIS 559).33 But it is also visible in the congratulations that civic communities extended to members who achieved distinction at the provincial level. A notable example in light of the assimilation of all Asians to Greek identity is Oenoanda’s decree in honour of Gaius Iulius Demosthenes, where the word employed for ‘province’ is ›{nov (see W¨orrle (1988), ll. 22 and 50). That usage accords with the habit, common in Lycia, for its population to self-identify using the ethnic ‘Lycian’. Evidence for this is provided above all by epigraphic references to provincial festivals, which are described as ‘open to all Lycians’ (e.g. Hall and Milner (1994) no. 1, ll. 16–17; no. 2, ll. 9–10; on which see van Nijf (2004)). Which returns us to Asia. For like Lycia and Lycian, which had lives, as it were, prior to Rome, but whose meanings altered under pressure from Roman influence, so Asia and Asian came to designate the province and its inhabitants. That process was itself the object of reflection by Aelius Aristides, in a speech delivered to the league of Asia on 3 January 167. First let us consider the whole political structure, of which we are all here constituents, both the larger and the smaller (präton m•n to©nun perª tv Âlhv sust†sewv –n{umh{ämen, e«v ¥n Œpantev o¬ taÅthi sunteloÓmen ¾mo©wv me©zouv kaª –l†ttouv). By how much is it believed to exceed all others, in the judgement of both our rulers and nearly all other men? None of them has so many cities as all these, nor so many large ones. Let us consider next the many beauties of its lands, the moderation of its seasons, its many lifestyles, and its overall location, how it is situated in the navel of the whole empire and crowned all around by many peaceful peoples and tribes on both land and sea. It lives most orderly and one could not accuse it of either arrogance or servility, but, holding a middle ground, it is the best governed polity under the sun (ˆllì –n m”swi scžmati k†llista dŸ tän Ëfì ¡l©wi politeÅetai). It has come to such a height of excellence that although all the land bounded by the Phasis and the Nile right up to this spot was from earliest days called ‘Asia’ by the Greeks, this portion by the sea has taken the name of the continent for itself and made it its own. Thus it has been victorious over the rest. What is more, the respect and generosity of our governors, and their concessions in every matter, have made us appear more than merely equal in honour with many of the governed. (Ael. Ar. Or. 23.8–11)

Here, once again, a province is described as a political collectivity and dignified with political-theoretical terminology once restricted to the polis. The violence to language and unilateral renaming characteristic of empire is here elided. It is the province, rather – that sÅstasiv of poleis which is itself a polite©a – which so outstrips the common run of provinces that it 33

Further examples might be traced via Haensch (1997), ‘Dokumentation’ B III 4 b.

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(alone) has robbed a continent of name. Aristides describes here the end of a revolution in geographic thought and reorientation in political solidarity. By the last decade of the reign of Augustus, those processes were already far advanced. For it was then that Pergamum sought a tax exemption for a pentateric festival in honour of Augustan Rome, ‘in the common name of Asia’ (SEG 89.1180 l. 129 §57: täi koinäi ts©av ½n»mati). governmentality The province was merely one among an array of intersecting, overlapping and discordant institutions by which the life of the empire’s residents was subjected to an ever greater degree of structural differentiation. These played an important, even essential, role in defining the geography of the world. They did so even to the extent of defining what a city was. This happened through a number of institutional mechanisms. Emperors, of course, could promote and demote cities and towns, as they could bestow and remove privileges of all kinds (Millar (1977) 394–434). But of far greater potency in shaping the culture of the empire were the regulations Rome imposed on subject communities, most broadly in the form of charters issued upon the annexation of a province. For though such regulations were designed in the first instance to shape institutional life, they ultimately nurtured the formation of a culturally self-replicating governing class and directed its forms of cultural expression and historical self-understanding. We know best the laws of the eastern provinces, and even these we know only through casual allusion in historical narrative to their drafting and delivery or their citation far later in official transactions. Full awareness of their contents eludes us. That said, we are told that one or another (and probably all) established property qualifications for entry to public office, set minimum ages for magistracies, fixed dates for the entry into office of those magistrates, set rules for local elections, regulated (if not fixed) the size and responsibility of town councils, established principles for the use of community revenues, and governed broadly (if not minutely) relations between cities and their dependent villages.34 But we also know of communities that applied for city status, citing more than 34

On the lex Pompeia of Bithynia and Pontus see Plin. Ep. 10.79–80, 112–15. On the lex Cornelia of Asia see RDGE 65, doc. D, l. 83, where it is cited in a decree of the league of Asia in 9 bce (note that bringing the Greek calendar of the cities of Asia into harmony with the Roman calendar required adjustment to the system of intercalation used by the Greeks – an appendix in Greek to the governor’s letter in Latin explained how this was done ‘according to Roman practice’ (RDGE 65, doc. C, col. ii, line 2). On the lex Gabinia for Syria see Josephus, AJ 14.87–91 (cf. BJ 1.170). Local rules regarding elections known elsewhere betray Roman influence, both where it is expected,

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mere willingness to conform to the lex of their province: they boasted, too, of the size of their councils, their situation within an imperial economy of persons and goods, and the approximation of their monumentalised civic cores to some Roman imperial ideal.35 This was another side of Roman freedom, a window into the reality behind the emperor Trajan’s preference that cities should ‘each follow their own laws’ (Pliny, Ep. 10.113). Yet it was not in the empire’s interest that the wealthiest, most able and most powerful members of local communities – those privileged in access to local office in the charters and constitutions granted or approved by Rome – should identify with those communities too closely. Individuals who served Rome well – which is to say, served well some Roman magistrate – were often rewarded with Roman citizenship. The effect of this process was to some extent kindred with Aelius Aristides’ legally inaccurate but nevertheless telling description of the reinscription of provincial recruits within the Roman polity: What was the policy and what the means (by which you, Rome, recruited an army from among your subjects)? Proceeding through all subject terriories, you searched for those who would perform this public service, and having found them, you removed them from their fatherlands and gave them your city instead (kaª Þv eÌrete, ¾moÓ tv te patr©dov ˆphll†xate kaª tŸn Ëmet”ran aÉtän p»lin ˆnt”dote aÉto±v), with the result that they were ashamed thereafter to name the place whence they originated. Having made them citizens, you made them soldiers, with the result that citizens from this city do not perform military service, but those who serve are nonetheless citizens, having become ex-citizens of their city of origin at the moment of their conscription (tv m•n ˆrca©av ˆp»lidav gegenhm”nouv Œma t strate©), becoming on that very same day fellow citizens of yours and guardians of this city. (Ael. Ar. Or. 26.75)

The translation of all these individuals – friends of Rome, as well as soldiers and veterans – from one juridical framework to another raised profound legal and political problems, not least that as Roman citizens

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in the Flavian municipal charters of Spain (lex Flavia municipalis c. 54) and where perhaps it was not (Oenoanda in Lycia: W¨orrle (1988) 77–100, esp. 90–2). On Roman interference in the internal affairs of the cities of Greece after its annexation (presumably codified in a lex Mummia) see Polybius 39.5 (esp. 2–3 [‘As they were leaving, the ten senatorial commissioners enjoined Polybius to visit the cities and sort out anything about which people were confused, until they should achieve peace of mind with respect to the constitution and the laws (m”criv oÕ sunž{eian ›cwsi t polite© kaª to±v n»moiv). And indeed, after some time he brought it about that people accepted the constitution given to them . . . (–poižse toÆv ˆn{rÛpouv st”rxai tŸn dedom”nhn polite©an)’] and 5) and Pausanias 7.16.9, 8.30.9 and 8.37.2. See esp. ILS 6092 from Sabora, 6090 (Abbott and Johnson (1926) no. 151) from Tymandus and 6091 (Abbott and Johnson (1926) no. 154 = MAMA 7 no. 305) from Orcistus. On the last named, see esp. Chastagnol (1981).

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they might claim freedom from local liturgies and so, in fact, remove themselves and their influence from local politics. So it was that by the reign of Augustus a solution had been wrought, in which such individuals and their immediate relations received Roman citizenship but did so ‘without prejudice to local law’.36 These individuals functioned as complex brokers, simultaneously valuable ‘because the Romans are zealous in support of the political goals of their friends, and it is a good thing to harvest from the friendship of powerful men some benefit towards the public happiness’ of one’s native community (Plut. Prae. ger. reip. 814c), and dangerous because they could bring imperial attention to bear on local affairs, for reasons as petty as their own sense of honour (see, e.g., Syll.3 850, from Antoninus to the city of Ephesus, remonstrating with it for not honouring properly one Vedius Antoninus, who, failing to obtain satisfaction from the city, slyly appealed to the emperor for assistance in building projects intended to adorn (as he said) his city). In this way, even beyond advantages they accrued in local politics from the public law systems imposed by the empire, members of the municipal elite exercised influence by virtue of their ability to represent local interests to agents of the empire; and their conception of what exactly was in local interest was made by Roman power to carry great weight. The embedding of Roman citizens in provincial cities thus further fractured even the potential for the exercise of autonomy on the part of free and subject cities alike. In both of these cases – that is, the city bringing itself into conformity with Roman ideals, and a family of Romans becoming embedded in a subject and hence alien city – what we must imagine is not simply the legal framework or even the pageantry and symbolism of their passage from the community into the other. Each rather involved ongoing processes of revision, accommodation and rupture that must have been at times purposive and at others subconscious. The path for these changes was often enough opened by the shattering of truths and collapse of institutions and beliefs worked by Roman conquest. But progress along the path, however we esteem it, was rarely itself the work of violence but rather the product 36

On this topic see Millar (1983) = (2004) 336–71, and cf. Cherry (1990). For one index of change in Roman policy in this matter, compare RDGE 22, a senatorial decree of 78 bce preserved in Latin and Greek at Rome, demanding local concessions for three Greeks who served Rome during the Social War (they are to be ‘free of all liturgies and immune to all taxes in their respectives patrides’ (Greek text line 23); RDGE 58, the dossier of letters from Octavian to the city of Rhosos regarding his friendship with Seleukos; and IAM 94, from Banasa, a grant of citizenship by Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus and confirmed by Marcus and Commodus: the grant of Roman citizenship takes place ‘with local law preserved’ (line 13, from letter #1, and lines 19–20, from letter #2: salvo iure gentis).

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of a reconstructed social consensus, in which even forms of resistance took on a Roman cast and were absorbed by an imperial discursive regime. The so-called Alexandrian martyr acts, for example, like many of their later, Christian counterparts, take the form of a record of a proceeding before a magistrate and stake their claim to authenticity through mimicry of the protocols of Roman government texts. Their very articulation of dissent from one or another norm presumes the broader legitimacy of Roman models of political interaction, on the one hand, and Roman modes of organising and representing them on the other.37 To adopt an ancient metaphor used to describe the reorientation of religious life to the new festival calendar of the Christian church, acculturation to Roman paradigms, however limited and partial in both aim and extent, nevertheless amounted to a change in the rhythm of civic life.38 In conclusion, I would like to frame two further problems entailed by the argument above regarding the institutions as well as the historical and cultural self-understanding fundamental to local patriotism in the Roman empire. Each deserves further research. The institutional life of cities throughout the empire became more and more complex over time. This was true of city government, naturally, but also of an extraordinary range of non-governmental guilds, groups and clubs of religious, commercial, ethnic, demographic, territorial, familial and other orientation. The organisations in themselves served to bisect and reconstitute populations along multiple axes. But they also came gradually to mimic the institutional arrangements of provincial and city government, and in so doing they will have further naturalised and legitimated the basic postulates of a Roman social order.39 So, for example, city councils in the east differentiated roles and responsibilities in multiple ways – some were honorific, some carried weight and authority, some were financial in orientation, and still others technical: archons, secretaries, treasurers, priests and others wore the garb and performed the work of public service. Under the empire, similar institutional arrangements and homonymous offices gradually became visible in gerousiai, colleges of neoi and ephebes, guilds of doctors, syngeneiai, as well as districts, villages and clubs of colonists.40 The 37 38 39 40

A point I have argued at greater length elsewhere: see Ando (2000) 128–30, concluding a long argument. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory the Wonderworker (PG 46, col. 953): . . . pr¼v kain¼n b©on metarru{m©zwn p†san ˆ{r»wv tŸn kat’ aÉt¼n gene†n. For an ancient statement of this theme see Ael. Ar. Or. 24.8–9, a remarkable assertion of an homology between private and public structures of authority. See for now van Nijf (1997); also Harper (1928), MacAdam (1983) and Sartre (1993) on Syria; as well as Schuler (1998) 231–65 and Dmitriev (2005) 30–3, 133–5 and 228–38 on Asia.

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most famous and influential such organisation was the institutionalised church, whose offices, structure and conciliar procedure were patterned with uncanny accuracy on those of the empire. The kaleidoscopic variety of these organisations, and their seeming autonomy from the central power, will only have heightened their influence in echoing back, in such varied registers, the necessity of Rome. On this reading, Gibbon was right to claim that the church could never truly resist but only support the government to which it was once handmaid and later partnered. Among these many collectivities, cities and provincial leagues particularly sponsored festivals. These offered multiple occasions for public reflection on the identity of the host community. Beyond a few examples of speeches delivered on such occasions, we possess two handbooks of rhetoric that offer advice and instruction to orators hired to celebrate them. What is notable about their advice, and in particular about their examples, is the constant interpellation of the local by the imperial. Under the rubric of accomplishments, for example, Menander urged that cities be praised for their system of governance (their politeia): [A further point about the political system] is that it is best for a city to be ruled in accordance with its own will, not against its will, and for it to observe the laws with exactness, but not to need laws. This last section of praise, however, is virtually useless today, since all Roman cities are regulated by one (Menander Rhetor 1, p. 360.10–16 Spengel; trans. after Russell and Wilson)41

The festival speech had likewise to celebrate both a city’s origin – including the identity of its founder – and its accomplishments in war and peace. Among the latter, of course, the cities of the empire will have shared their incorporation into it, and while the fact of sharing, and the experience itself, could be elided, the presence of the empire could not. Let the capstone of your whole speech be praise of the emperor, because he who presides over peace is really the organiser of all festivals (kaª Âti t Ànti ˆgwno{”thv p†ntwn ˆgÛnwn ¾ tŸn e«ržnhn prutaneÅwn), since it is peace that enables them to be held. Some speakers have praised the actual organisers of the games, if they are distinguished, saying that they have previously been of service in other ways and are especially ambitious in this. If you have nothing more important to put forward, make the point that this foundation is the greatest and most truly Hellenic expression of ambition for one’s fatherland (Âti ˆrcŸ 41

See also Menander Rhetor 1, p. 363.4–14 Spengel, regarding praise of the city under the rubric of justice: ‘Nowadays the topic of laws is of no use, since we conduct public affairs by the common laws of the Romans’ (ˆll‡ t¼ tän n»mwn –n to±v nÓn cr»noiv Šcrhstoná kat‡ g‡r toÆv koinoÆv tän ëRwma©wn n»mouv politeu»me{a).

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tv filotim©av tv perª tŸn patr©da meg©sth kaª ëEllhnikwt†th). (PseudoDionysius, Rhet. 1.7; trans. after Russell and Wilson)

This embedding of the local in the imperial finds different but equally potent expression in Aelius Aristides’ metaphorical likening of Rome and its provincial communities to a city with so many suburbs: under the empire, ‘the whole of the inhabited world, as if attending a festival, has put down its former garb of iron, and turned to adornment and all good cheer’ (Or. 26.94–7 at 97; on the metaphor see Ando (1999) 18–30). Local identity and local knowledge under the Roman empire were thus crafted through constant negotiation and regular reference to the superordinate structures of the empire itself. Those structures had both universalising and particularising aspects – the emperor and his laws were shared; ties to province and district were not. This history is not, however, solely an imperial one, which is to say, that the construction and construal of the local was neither simple nor top-down. Much agency was exercised by provincials, whose private institutions came to echo the patterns of social and structural differentiation that received normative if not originary articulation in public documents of the empire and its constituent communities. The product of all this was an imperial subject. The coming-of-age of that subject, too, was celebrated by Aelius Aristides. For it was, he claimed, also among the empire’s benefactions that it extended conubium with all, to all (Or. 26.102). In closing, let me say that in this perspective, the history of the ancient city was the history of the empire. The extreme intensification of the empire’s penetration into the structures of everyday life in the late third and early fourth centuries ce will gradually have silenced, by one or another means, whether intentionally or not, some of the local voices in the chorus studied here. The stability of the empire will thus have come to rest upon a more homogenised cluster of principles of legitimation. But the local cultures of the empire remained too variegated – and the technology of its communicative apparatus too primitive – to sustain such a monody. This moment in the history of governmentality ended, and from its passage the Roman empire emerged a less cohesive, less vibrant state.