Nationalities.From the more southerly Greek districts this—the most northerly—stood aloof as well in its national basis as in the stage of its civilisation. While the Macedonians proper on the lower course of the Haliacmon (Vistritza) and the Axius (Vardar), as far as the Strymon, were an originally Greek stock, whose diversity from the more southern Hellenes had no further significance for the present epoch, and while the Hellenic colonisation embraced within its sphere both coasts—on the west with Apollonia and Dyrrachium, on the east in particular with the townships of the Chalcidian peninsula—the interior of the province, on the other hand, was filled with a confused mass of non–Greek peoples, which must have differed from the present state of things in the same region more as to elements than as to results. After the Celts who had pushed forward into this region, the Scordisci, had been driven back by the generals of the Roman republic, the interior of Macedonia fell to the share especially of Illyrian stocks in the west and north, of Thracian in the east. Of both we have already spoken previously; here they come into consideration only so far as the Greek organisation, at least the urban, was probably introduced—as in the earlier,199 so also in the imperial period—among these stocks only in a very limited measure. On the whole, an energetic impulse of urban development never pervaded the interior of Macedonia; the more remote districts hardly reached—at least as in a real sense—beyond the village–system.
Greek polity.The Greek polity itself was not a spontaneous growth in this monarchical country, as it was in Hellas proper, but was introduced by the princes, who were more Hellenes than their subjects. What shape it had is little known; yet the civic presidency of politarchs uniformly recurring in Thessalonica, Edessa, Lete, and not met with elsewhere, leads us to infer a perceptible, and indeed in itself probable, diversity of the Macedonian urban constitution from that elsewhere usual in Hellas. The Greek cities, which the Romans found existing, retained their organisation and their rights; Thessalonica, the most considerable of them, also freedom and autonomy. There existed a league and a diet (κοινόν) of the Macedonian towns, similar to those in Achaia and Thessaly. It deserves mention, as an evidence of the continued working of the memories of the old and great times, that still in the middle of the third century after Christ the diet of Macedonia and individual Macedonian towns issued coins on which, in place of the head and the name of the reigning emperor, came those of Alexander the Great. The pretty numerous colonies of Roman burgesses which Augustus established in Macedonia, Byllis not far from Apollonia, Dyrrachium on the Adriatic, on the other coast Dium, Pella, Cassandreia, in the region of Thrace proper Philippi, were all of them older Greek towns, which obtained merely a number of new burgesses and a different legal position, and were called into life primarily by the need of providing quarters in a civilised and not greatly populous province for Italian soldiers who had served their time, and for whom there was no longer room in Italy itself. The granting of Italian rights certainly took place only to gild for the veterans their settlement abroad. That it was never intended to draw Macedonia into the development of Italian culture is evinced, apart from all else, by the fact that Thessalonica remained Greek and the capital of the country. By its side flourished Philippi, properly a mining town, constituted on account of the neighbouring gold mines, favoured by the emperors as the seat of the battle which definitively founded the monarchy, and on account of the numerous veterans who took part in it and subsequently settled there. A Roman, not colonial, municipal constitution was obtained already in the first period of the empire by Stobi, the already mentioned most northerly frontier–town of Macedonia towards Moesia, at the confluence of the Erigon with the Axius, in a commercial as in a military point of view an important position, and which, it may be conjectured, had already in the Macedonian time attained to Greek polity.
Economy. Roads and levy.In an economic point of view little was done on the part of the state for Macedonia under the emperors; at least there is no appearance of any special care on their part for this province, which was not put under their own administration. The military road already constructed under the republic right across the country from Dyrrachium to Thessalonica, one of the most important arteries of intercourse in the whole empire, called forth renewed effort, so far as we know, only from emperors of the third century, and first from Severus Antoninus; the towns adjacent to it, Lychnidus on the Ochrida–lake and Heraclea Lyncestis (Bitolia), were never of much account. Yet Macedonia was, economically, better situated than Greece. It far excelled it in fertility; as still at present the province of Thessalonica is relatively well cultivated and well peopled, so in the description of the empire from the time of Constantius, at all events when Constantinople was already in existence, Macedonia is reckoned among the specially wealthy districts. If for Achaia and Thessaly our documents concerning the Roman levy are absolutely silent, Macedonia on the other hand was drawn upon, in particular for the imperial guard, to a considerable extent, more strongly than the most of the Greek districts—on which, no doubt, the familiarity of the Macedonians with regular war–service and their excellent qualifications for it, and probably also the relatively small development of the urban system in this province, had an important bearing. Thessalonica, the metropolis of the province, and its most populous and most industrial town at this time, represented likewise under various forms in literature, has also secured to itself an honourable place in political history by the brave resistance which its citizens opposed to the barbarians in the terrible times of the Gothic invasions (p. 248).
Thrace.If Macedonia was a half–Greek, Thrace was a non–Greek land. Of the great but for us vanished Thracian stock we have formerly (p. 207) spoken. Into its domain Hellenism came simply from without; and it will not be superfluous in the first instance to glance back and to set forth how often Hellenism had previously knocked at the gates of the most southerly region which this stock possessed, and which we still name after it, and how little it had hitherto penetrated into the interior, in order to make clear what was left for Rome here to overtake and what it did overtake.Philip and Alexander.Philip, the father of Alexander, first subjected Thrace, and founded not merely Calybe in the neighbourhood of Byzantium, but also in the heart of the land the town which thenceforth bore his name. Alexander, here too the precursor of Roman policy, arrived at and crossed the Danube, and made this stream the northern boundary of his empire; the Thracians in his army played by no means the least part in the subjugation of Asia. After his death the Hellespont seemed as though it would become one of the great centres of the new formation of states, and the wide domain from thence to the Danube200 as though it would become the northern half of a Greek empire, and would promise for the capital of Lysimachus, the former governor ofLysimachus.Thrace—the town of Lysimachia, newly established in the Thracian Chersonese—a like future as for the capitals of the marshals of Syria and Egypt. But this result was not attained; the independence of this kingdom did not survive the fall of its first ruler (281 B.C., 473 U.C.). In the century which elapsed from that time to the establishment of the ascendancy of Rome in the East, attempts were made, sometimes by the Seleucids, sometimes by the Ptolemies, sometimes by the Attalids, to bring the European possessions of Lysimachus under their power, but all of them without lasting result. Empire of Tylis. The empire of Tylis in the Haemus, which the Celts not long after the death of Alexander, and nearly at the same time with their permanent settlement in Asia Minor, had founded in the Moeso–Thracian territory, destroyed the seed of Greek civilisation within its sphere, and itself succumbed during the Hannibalic war to the assaults of the Thracians, who extirpated these intruders to the last man. Thenceforth there was not in Thrace any leading power at all; the relations subsisting between the Greek coast–towns and the princes of the several tribes, which would probably correspond approximately to those before Alexander’s time, are illustrated by the description which Polybius gives of the most important of these towns: “Where the Byzantines had sowed, there the Thracian barbarians reaped, and against these neither the sword nor money is of avail; if the citizens kill one of the princes, three others thereupon invade their territory, and, if they buy off one, five more demand the like annual payment.”
Later Macedonian rulers.The efforts on the part of the later Macedonian rulers to gain once more a firm footing in Thrace, and in particular to bring under their power the Greek towns of the south coast, were opposed by the Romans, partly in order to keep down the development of Macedonia’s power generally, partly in order not to allow the important “royal road” leading to the East—that along which Xerxes marched to Greece and the Scipios marched against Antiochus—to fall in all its extent into Macedonian hands. Already, after the battle at Cynoscephalae, the frontier–line was drawn nearly such as it thenceforth remained. The two last Macedonian rulers made several attempts, either directly to establish themselves in Thrace or to attach to themselves its individual rulers by treaties; the last Philip even gained over Philippopolis once more, and put into it a garrison, which, it is true, the Odrysae soon drove out afresh. Neither he nor his son succeeded in placing matters on a permanent footing; and the independence conceded by Rome to the Thracians after the breaking up of Macedonia destroyed whatever Hellenic germs might still be left there. Thrace itself became—in part already in the republican, and more decidedly in the imperial period—a Roman vassal–principality, and then in 46 a Roman province (p. 211); but the Hellenising of the land had not passed beyond the fringe of Greek colonial towns, which in the earliest period had been established round this coast, and in course of time had sunk rather than risen. Powerful and permanent as was the hold of Macedonian civilisation on the East, as weak and perishable was its contact with Thrace; Philip and Alexander themselves appear to have reluctantly undertaken, and to have but lightly valued, their settlements in this land.201 Till far into the imperial period the land remained with the natives; the Greek towns that were still left along the coast, almost all on the decline, remained without any Greek land in their rear.
Greek towns in Thrace and on the Black Sea.This belt of Hellenic towns stretching from the Macedonian frontier to the Tauric Chersonese was of very unequal texture. In the south it was close and compact from Abdera onward to Byzantium on the Dardanelles; yet none of these towns held a prominent position in later times with the exception of Byzantium, which through the fertility of its territory, its productive tunny fisheries, its uncommonly favourable position for trade, its industrial diligence, and the energy of its citizens—heightened merely and hardened by its exposed situation—was enabled to defy even the worst times of Hellenic anarchy. Far more scantily had the settlements developed themselves on the west coast of the Black Sea; among those subsequently belonging to the Roman province of Thrace Mesembria alone was of some importance; among those subsequently Moesian Odessus (Varna) and Tomis (Küstendje). Beyond the mouths of the Danube and the boundary of the Roman empire, on the northern shore of the Pontus, there lay amidst the barbarian land Tyra202 and Olbia; further on, the old and great Greek mercantile cities in what is now the Crimea—Heraclea or Chersonesus and Panticapaeum—formed a stately copestone.
Under Roman protection.All these settlements enjoyed Roman protection, after the Romans had become generally the leading power on the Graeco–Asiatic continent; and the strong arm, which often came down heavily on the Hellenic land proper, prevented here at least disasters like the destruction of Lysimachia. The protection of these Greeks devolved in the republican period partly on the governor of Macedonia, partly on the governor of Bithynia, after this became Roman; Byzantium subsequently remained with Bithynia.203 We may add that in the imperial period, after the erection of the governorship of Moesia and subsequently of that of Thrace, the supplying of protection devolved on these.
Protection and favour were granted by Rome to these Greeks from the first; but neither the republic nor the earlier imperial period made efforts for the extension of Hellenism.204 After Thrace had become Roman, it was divided into land–districts;205 and almost down to the end of the first century there is no record of the laying out of a town there, with the exception of two colonies of Claudius and Vespasian—Apri in the interior not far from Perinthus, and Deultus on the most northern coast.206 Philippopolis and other towns with civic rights. Domitian began by introducing the Greek urban constitution into the interior, at first for the capital of the country, Philippopolis. Under Trajan a series of other Thracian townships obtained like civic rights; Topirus not far from Abdera, Nicopolis on the Nestus, Plotinopolis on the Hebrus, Pautalia near Köstendil, Serdica now Sofia, Augusta Traiana near Alt–Zagora, a second Nicopolis on the northern slope of Haemus,207 besides, on the coast, Traianopolis at the mouth of the Hebrus; further, under Hadrian Adrianopolis, the modern Adrianople. All these towns were not colonies of foreigners but polities of Greek organisation, composed after the model set up by Augustus in the Epirot Nicopolis; it was a civilising and Hellenising of the province from above downwards. A Thracian diet existed thenceforth in Philippopolis just as in the properly Greek provinces. This last offshoot of Hellenism was not the weakest. The country was rich and charming—a coin of the town Pautalia praises the fourfold blessing of the ears of grain, of the grapes, of the silver, and of the gold; and Philippopolis as well as the beautiful valley of the Tundja were the home of rose–culture and of rose–oil—and the vigour of the Thracian type was not broken. Here was developed a dense and prosperous population; we have already mentioned the largeness of the levy in Thrace, and few territories stand on an equality with Thrace at this epoch in the activity of the urban mints. When Philippopolis succumbed in the year 251 to the Goths (p. 240), it is said to have numbered 100,000 inhabitants. The energetic part taken by the Byzantines in favour of the emperor of the Greek East, Pescennius Niger, and the several years’ resistance which the town even after his defeat opposed to the victor, show the resources and the courage of these Thracian townsmen. If the Byzantines here, too, succumbed and lost even for a season their civic rights, the time, for which the rise of the Thracian land paved the way, was soon to set in, when Byzantium should become the new Hellenic Rome and the chief capital of the remodelled empire.
Lower Moesia.In the neighbouring province of lower Moesia a similar development took place, although on a smaller scale. The Greek coast–towns, the metropolis of which, at least in the Roman period, was Tomis, were, probably on the constituting of the Roman province of Moesia, grouped as the “Five–cities–league of the left shore of the Black Sea,” or as it was also called, “of the Greeks,” that is, the Greeks of this province.Tomis and the Pontic Pentapolis.Later there was annexed to this league, as a sixth town, that of Marcianopolis, constructed by Trajan not far from the coast on the Thracian frontier, and organised, like the Thracian towns, after the Greek model.208 We have already observed that the camp–towns on the bank of the Danube, and generally the townships called into life by Rome in the interior, were instituted after the Italian model; lower Moesia was the only Roman province intersected by the linguistic boundary, inasmuch as the Tomitanian cities–league belonged to the Greek, the Danubian towns, like Durostorum and Oescus to the Latin, linguistic domain. In other respects essentially the same holds true of this Moesian cities–league, as was remarked regarding Thrace. We have a description of Tomis from the last years of Augustus, doubtless by one banished thither for punishment, but certainly true in substance. The population consists for the greater part of Getae and Sarmatae; they wear, like the Dacians on Trajan’s column, skins and trousers, long waving hair and unshorn beard, and appear in the street on horseback and armed with the bow, with the quiver on their shoulder, and the knife in their girdle. The few Greeks who are found among them have adopted the barbarian customs, including the trousers, and are able to express themselves as well or better in Getic than in Greek; he is lost, who cannot make himself intelligible in Getic, and no man understands a word of Latin. Before the gates rove predatory bands of the most various peoples, and their arrows not seldom fly over the protecting city–walls; he who ventures to till his field does it at the peril of his life, and ploughs in armour—at anyrate about the time of Caesar’s dictatorship; on occasion of the raid of Burebista, the town had fallen into the hands of the barbarians, and a few years before that exile came to Tomis, during the Dalmato–Pannonian insurrection, the fury of war had once more raged over this region. The coins and the inscriptions of that city accord well with these accounts, in so far as the metropolis of the “left–Pontic cities–league” in the pre–Roman period coined no silver, which several other of these towns did; and, in general, coins and inscriptions from the time before Trajan occur only in an isolated way. But in the second and third centuries it was remodelled and may be termed a foundation of Trajan with very much the same warrant as Marcianopolis, which likewise quickly attained to considerable development. The barrier formerly mentioned (p. 227) in the Dobrudscha served at the same time as a protecting wall for the town of Tomis. Behind this wall commerce and navigation were flourishing. There was in the town a society of Alexandrian merchants with its own chapel of Serapis;209 in municipal liberality and municipal ambition the town was inferior to no Greek town of middle size; it was still even now bilingual, but in such a way that, alongside of the Greek language always retained on the coins, here on the border, where the two languages of the empire came into contact, the Latin is also often employed even in public monuments.
Tyra.Beyond the imperial frontier, between the mouths of the Danube and the Crimea, the Greek merchant had made few settlements on the coast; there were here only two Greek towns of note, both founded in remote times by Miletus, Tyra at the mouth of the river of the same name, the modern Dniester, and Olbia on the bay into which the Borysthenes (Dnieper) and the Hypanis (Bug) fall. The forlorn position of these Hellenes amidst the barbarians pressing around them, in the time of the Diadochi as well as during the earlier rule of the Roman republic, has already been described (iii. 297)iii. 282.. The emperors brought help. In the year 56, that is, in the exemplary beginning of Nero’s government, Tyra was annexed to the province of Moesia.Olbia.Of the more remote Olbia we possess a description from the age of Trajan;210 the town was still bleeding from its old wounds; the wretched walls enclosed equally wretched houses, and the quarter then inhabited filled but a small portion of the old considerable city–circuit, of which individual towers that were left stood far off in the desolate plain; in the temples there was no statue of the gods which did not bear traces of the hands of the barbarians; the inhabitants had not forgotten their Hellenic character, but they dressed and fought after the manner of the Scythians, with whom they were daily in conflict. Just as often as by Greek names, they designated themselves by Scythian, i.e. by those of Sarmatian stocks akin to the Iranians;211 in fact, in the royal house itself Sauromates was a common name. These towns were indebted doubtless for their very continued existence less to their own power than to the good–will or rather the self–interest of the natives. The tribes settled on this coast were neither in a position to carry on foreign trade from emporia of their own, nor could they dispense with it; in the Hellenic coast–towns they bought salt, articles of clothing and wine, and the more civilised princes protected in some measure the strangers against the attacks of the barbarians proper. The earlier rulers of Rome must have had scruples at undertaking the difficult protection of this remote settlement; nevertheless Pius, when the Scythians once more besieged them, sent to them Roman auxiliary troops, and compelled the barbarians to offer peace and furnish hostages. The town must have been incorporated directly with the empire by Severus, from whom onward Olbia struck coins with the image of the Roman rulers. As a matter of course this annexation extended only to the town–territories themselves, and it never was intended to bring the barbarian dwellers around Tyra and Olbia under the Roman sceptre. It has already been remarked (p. 239) that these towns were the first which, presumably under Alexander († 235), succumbed to the incipient Gothic invasion.
Bosporus.If the Greeks had but sparingly settled on the mainland to the north of the Black Sea, the great peninsula projecting from this coast, the Tauric Chersonesus—the modern Crimea—had for long been in great part in their hands. Separated by the mountains, which the Taurians occupied, the two centres of the Greek settlement upon it were, at the western end the Doric free town of Heraclea or Chersonesus (Sebastopol), at the eastern the principality of Panticapaeum or Bosporus (Kertch). King Mithradates had at the summit of his power united the two, and here established for himself a second northern empire (iii. 298), which then, after the collapse of his power, was left as the only remnant of it to his son and murderer Pharnaces. When the latter, after the war between Caesar and Pompeius, attempted to regain his father’s dominion in Asia Minor, Caesar had vanquished him (iv. 439), and declared him to have forfeited also the Bosporan empire. Asander. In the meanwhile Asander, the governor left there by Pharnaces, had renounced allegiance to the king in the hope of acquiring the kingdom for himself by this service rendered to Caesar. When Pharnaces after his defeat returned to his Bosporan kingdom, he at first indeed repossessed himself of his capital, but ultimately was worsted, and fell bravely fighting in the last battle—as a soldier at least, not unequal to his father. The succession was contested between Asander, who was in fact master of the land, and Mithradates of Pergamus, an able officer of Caesar, whom the latter had invested with the Bosporan principality; both sought at the same time to lean for support on the dynasty heretofore ruling in the Bosporus and on the great Mithradates, inasmuch as Asander married Dynamis, the daughter of Pharnaces, while Mithradates, sprung from a Pergamene burgess–family, asserted that he was an illegitimate son of the great Mithradates Eupator—whether it was that this rumour determined the selection, or that it was put into circulation in order to justify it. As Caesar himself was called in the first instance to attend to more important tasks, arms decided between the legitimate and the illegitimate Caesarian, and once more in favour of the latter; Mithradates fell in combat, and Asander remained master in the Bosporus. In the outset—without doubt, because he had not the confirmation of the lord–paramount—he avoided assuming the name of king, and contented himself with the title of archon, borne by the older princes of Panticapaeum; but he soon procured, probably even from Caesar himself, the confirmation of his rule and the royal title.212 At his death (737–738 U.C.)17–16. he left his kingdom to his wife Dynamis. So strong was still the power of hereditary succession and of the name of Mithradates, that both a certain Scribonianus, who first attempted to occupy Asander’s place, Polemon.and after him king Polemon of Pontus, to whom Augustus promised the Bosporan kingdom, conjoined with the taking up of the dominion a marriage–alliance with Dynamis; moreover, the former asserted that he was himself a grandson of Mithradates, while king Polemon, soon after the death of Dynamis, married a granddaughter of Antonius, and consequently a kinswoman of the imperial house. After his early death—he fell in conflict with the Aspurgiani on the Asiatic coast—his children under age did not succeed him; and even with his grandson of the same name, whom the emperor Gaius reinstated, notwithstanding his boyish age, in the year 38, into the two principalities of his father, the Bosporan kingdom did not long remain. In his place the emperor Claudius called a real or alleged descendant of Mithradates Eupator, and in this house, apparently, the principality thenceforth continued.213
The Eupatorids.Extent of the Bosporan rule.While in the Roman state elsewhere the dependent principality disappears after the end of the first dynasty, and from Trajan’s time the principle of direct government is carried out through the whole extent of the Roman empire, the Bosporan kingdom subsisted under Roman supremacy down to the fourth century. It was only after the centre of gravity of the empire was shifted to Constantinople that this state became merged in the empire at large,214 in order to be soon thereafter abandoned by it and to become, at least in greater part, the prey of the Huns.215 The Bosporus, however, in reality was and continued to be more a town than a kingdom, and had more similarity with the town–districts of Tyra and Olbia than with the kingdoms of Cappadocia and Numidia. Here, too, the Romans protected only the Hellenic town Panticapaeum, and did not aim at enlargement of the bounds and subjugation of the interior any more than in Tyra and Olbia. To the domain of the prince of Panticapaeum belonged the Greek settlements of Theudosia on the peninsula itself, and Phanagoria (Taman) on the opposite Asiatic coast, but not Chersonesus216—or at least only somewhat as Athens belonged to the province of the governor of Achaia. The town had obtained autonomy from the Romans, and saw in the prince its immediate protector, not its sovereign; as a free town, too, in the imperial period, it never coined with the stamp either of king or emperor. On the mainland, not even the town which the Greeks called Tanais—a stirring emporium at the mouth of the Don, but hardly a Greek foundation—stood permanently under subjection to the Roman vassal–princes.217 Of the more or less barbarian tribes on the peninsula itself, and on the European and Asiatic coast southward from Tanais, probably only the nearest stood in a fixed relation of dependence.218
Military position of the Bosporus.The territory of Panticapaeum was too extensive and too important, especially for mercantile intercourse, to be left like Olbia and Tyra to the administration of changing municipal officials and a far distant governor; therefore it was entrusted to hereditary princes—a course further recommended by the circumstance that it might not seem advisable to transfer directly to the empire the relations which this region sustained to the surrounding tribes. The rulers of the Bosporan house, in spite of their Achaemenid pedigree and their Achaemenid mode of reckoning time, felt themselves thoroughly as Greek princes, and traced back their origin, after the good Hellenic fashion, to Herakles and the Eumolpids. The dependence of these Greeks on Rome—the royal in Panticapaeum, as the republican in Chersonesus—was implied in the nature of things, and they never thought of rising against the protecting arm of the empire; if once, under the emperor Claudius, the Roman troops had to march against an insubordinate prince of the Bosporus,219 yet withal this region itself, amidst the fearful confusion in the middle of the third century, which especially affected it, never broke away from the empire even when it was falling to pieces.220 The prosperous merchant–towns, permanently in need of military protection amidst a flux of barbaric peoples, held to Rome as the advanced posts to the main army. The garrison was doubtless chiefly raised in the land itself, and to create and manage it was beyond doubt the main task of the king of the Bosporus. The coins, which were struck on occasion of the investiture of such a king, exhibit doubtless the curule chair and the other honorary presents usual at such investiture, but also by their side shield, helmet, sword, battle–axe, and war–horse; it was no peaceful office which this prince undertook. The first of them, whom Augustus appointed, fell in conflict with the barbarians, and of his successors, e.g. king Sauromates, son of Rhoemetalces, fought in the first years of Severus with the Siracae and the Scythians—perhaps it was not quite without reason that he stamped his coins with the feats of Herakles. By sea, too, he had to be active, especially in keeping down the piracy which never ceased in the Black Sea (p. 242); that Sauromates likewise is credited with having brought the Taurians to order and chastised piracy. Roman troops, however, were also stationed in the peninsula, perhaps a division of the Pontic fleet, certainly a detachment of the Moesian army; their presence even in small numbers showed to the barbarians that the dreaded legionary stood behind these Greeks. In another way still the empire protected them; at least in the later period there were regularly paid from the imperial chest to the princes of the Bosporus sums of money, of which they stood in need, in so far as the buying off of the hostile incursions by stated annual payments probably became a standing practice here—in what was not directly territory of the empire—still earlier than elsewhere.221
Position of this vassal–prince.That the centralisation of the government had its application also in reference to this prince, and he stood to the Roman Caesar on a footing not much different from that of the burgomaster of Athens, is in various ways apparent; it deserves mention that king Asander and the queen Dynamis struck gold coins with their name and their effigy, whereas king Polemon and his immediate successors, while retaining the right of coining gold, seeing that this territory as well as the adjoining barbarians were for long accustomed exclusively to gold currency, were induced to furnish their gold pieces with the name and the image of the reigning emperor. In like manner from Polemon’s time the prince of this land was at the same time the chief priest for life of the emperor and of the imperial house. In other respects the administration and the court retained the forms introduced under Mithradates after the model of the Persian grand monarchy, although the chief secretary (ἀρχιγραμματεύς) and the chief chamberlain (ἀρχικοιτωνείτης) of the court of Panticapaeum stood related to the leading court–officers of the great kings, as the enemy of the Romans Mithradates Eupator to his descendant Tiberius Julius Eupator, who, on account of his claim to the Bosporan throne, appeared as a suitor at Rome at the bar of the emperor Pius.
Trade and commerce in the Bosporus.This northern Greece remained valuable for the empire on account of its commercial relations. Though these at this epoch were doubtless less important than in earlier times,222 yet the mercantile intercourse continued very lively. In the Augustan period the tribes of the steppes brought slaves and skins,223 the merchants of civilisation articles of clothing, wine, and other luxuries to Tanais; in a still higher degree Phanagoria was the depôt for the exports of the natives, Panticapaeum for the imports of the Greeks. Those troubles in the Bosporus in the Claudian age were a severe blow for the merchants of Byzantium. That the Goths began their piratic voyages in the third century by pressing the Bosporan vessels to lend them involuntary aid, has been already mentioned (p. 244). It was doubtless in consequence of this traffic, indispensable for the barbarian neighbours themselves, that the citizens of Chersonesus maintained their ground even after the withdrawal of the Roman garrisons, and were able subsequently—when in Justinian’s time the power of the empire once more asserted itself in this direction—to return as Greeks into the Greek empire.
ASIA MINOR.
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.
Urban rivalries.Syria, and still more, Egypt, became merged in their capitals; the province of Asia and Asia Minor generally had no single town to show like Antioch and Alexandria, but their prosperity rested on the numerous middle–sized towns. The division of the towns into three classes, which are distinguished as to the right of voting at the diet, as to the apportionment of the contributions to be furnished by the whole province, even as to the number of town–physicians and town–teachers to be appointed,227 is eminently peculiar to these regions. The urban rivalries, which appear in Asia Minor so emphatic and in part so childish, occasionally even so odious—as, for example, the war between Severus and Niger in Bithynia was properly a war of the two rival capitals Nicomedia and Nicaea—belong to the character of Hellenic politics in general, but especially of those in Asia Minor. We shall mention further on the emulation as to temples of the emperors; in a similar way the ranking of the urban deputations at the common festivals in Asia Minor was a vital question—Magnesia on the Maeander calls itself on the coins the “seventh city of Asia” —and above all the first place was one so much desired, that the government ultimately agreed to admit several first cities. It fared similarly with the designation of “metropolis.” The proper metropolis of the province was Pergamus, the residence of the Attalids and the seat of the diet. But Ephesus, the de facto capital of the province, where the governor was obliged to enter on his office, and which boasts of this “right of reception at landing” on its coins; Smyrna, in constant rivalship with its Ephesian neighbour, and, in defiance of the legitimate right of the Ephesians to primacy, naming itself on coins “the first in greatness and beauty;” the very ancient Sardis, Cyzicus, and several others strove after the same honorary right. With these their wranglings, on account of which the senate and the emperor were regularly appealed to—the “Greek follies,” as men were wont to say in Rome—the people of Asia Minor were the standing annoyance and the standing laughing–stock of the Romans of mark.228
Bithynia.Bithynia did not stand on a like level with the Attalid kingdom. The older Greek colonising had here confined itself merely to the coast. In the Hellenistic epoch at first the Macedonian rulers, and later the native dynasty which walked entirely in their steps, had—along with a regulation of the places on the coast, which perhaps on the whole amounted to a changing of their names—also opened up in some measure the interior, in particular by the two successful foundations of Nicaea (Isnik) and Prusa on Olympia (Broussa); of the former it is stated that the first settlers were of good Macedonian and Hellenic descent. But in the intensity of the Hellenising the kingdom of Nicomedes was far behind that of the citizen prince of Pergamus; in particular the eastern interior can have been but little settled before Augustus. This was otherwise in the time of the empire. In the Augustan age a successful robber–chief, who became a convert to order, reconstructed on the Galatian frontier the utterly decayed township Gordiou Kome, under the name of Juliopolis; in the same region the towns Bithynion–Claudiopolis and Crateia–Flaviopolis probably attained Greek civic rights in the course of the first century. Generally in Bithynia Hellenism took a mighty upward impulse under the imperial period, and the tough Thracian stamp of the natives gave a good foundation for it. The fact that, among the inscribed stones of this province known in great number, not more than four belong to the pre–Roman epoch, cannot well be explained solely from the circumstance that urban ambition was only fostered under the emperors. In the literature of the imperial period a number of the best authors and the least carried away by exuberant rhetoric, such as the philosopher Dio of Prusa, the historian Memnon of Heraclea, Arrianus of Nicomedia, Cassius Dio of Nicaea, belong to Bithynia.
Pontus.The eastern half of the south coast of the Black Sea, the Roman province of Pontus, had as its basis that portion of the kingdom of Mithradates, of which Pompeius took direct possession immediately after the victory. The numerous smaller principalities, which Pompeius at the same time gave away in the interior of Paphlagonia and thence eastward to the Armenian frontier, were, after a shorter or longer subsistence, on their annexation partly attached to the same province, partly joined to Galatia or Cappadocia. The former kingdom of Mithradates had been far less affected than the western regions either by the older or by the younger Hellenism. When the Romans took possession directly or indirectly of this territory, there were, strictly speaking, no towns of Greek organisation there; Amasia, the old capital of the Pontic Achaemenids, and still their burial–place, was not such; the two old Greek coast–towns, Amisus and Sinope that once commanded the Black Sea, had become royal residences, and Greek polity would hardly be given to the few townships laid out by Mithradates, e.g. Eupatoria (iv. 152). But here, as was already shown in detail (iv. 151 f.)iv. 146., the Roman conquest was at the same time the Hellenising; Pompeius organised the province in such a way as to make the eleven chief townships of it into towns, and to distribute the territory among them. Certainly these artificially created towns with their immense districts—that of Sinope had along the coast an extent of 70 miles, and bordered on the Halys with that of Amisus—resembled more the Celtic cantons than the Hellenic and Italian urban communities proper. But at any rate Sinope and Amisus were then reinstated in their old positions, and other towns in the interior, such as Pompeiopolis, Nicopolis, Megalopolis, the later Sebasteia, were called into life. Sinope obtained from the dictator Caesar the rights of a Roman colony, and beyond doubt also Italian settlers (iv. 574)iv. 544.. More important for the Roman administration was Trapezus, an old colony of Sinope; the town, which in the year 63 was joined to the province of Cappadocia (p. 324, note), was both the station of the Roman Black Sea fleet and in a certain measure the base of operations for the military corps of this province, which was the only corps in all Asia Minor.
Cappadocia.Inland Cappadocia was in the Roman power after the erection of the provinces of Pontus and Syria; of its annexation in the beginning of the reign of Tiberius, which was primarily occasioned by the attempt of Armenia to release itself from the Roman suzerainty, we shall have to give an account in the following section. The court, and those immediately connected with it, had become Hellenised (iii. 59)iii. 57., somewhat as the German courts of the eighteenth century adapted themselves to French habits. The capital, Caesarea, the ancient Mazaca, like the Phrygian Apamea, an intermediate station for the great traffic between the ports of the west coast and the lands of the Euphrates, and in the Roman period, as still at the present day, one of the most flourishing commercial cities of Asia Minor, was, at the instigation of Pompeius, not merely rebuilt after the Mithradatic war, but probably also furnished at that time with civic rights after the Greek type. Cappadocia itself was at the beginning of the imperial period hardly more Greek than Brandenburg and Pomerania under Frederick the Great were French. When the country became Roman, it was divided, according to the statements of the contemporary Strabo, not into city–districts, but into ten prefectures, of which only two had towns, the already–mentioned capital and Tyana; and this arrangement was here on the whole not more changed than in Egypt, though individual townships subsequently received Greek civic rights; e.g. the emperor Marcus made the Cappadocian village, in which his wife had died, into the town Faustinopolis. It is true that the Cappadocians now spoke Greek; but the students from Cappadocia had much to endure abroad on account of their uncouth accent, and of their defects in pronunciation and modulation; and, if they learned to speak after an Attic fashion, their countrymen found their language affected.229 It was only in the Christian period that the comrades in study of the emperor Julian, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea, gave a better sound to the Cappadocian name.
Lycia.The Lycian cities in their secluded mountain–land did not open their coast for Greek settlement, but did not on that account debar themselves from Hellenic influence. Lycia was the only district of Asia Minor in which early civilising did not set aside the native language, and which, almost like the Romans, entered into Greek habits without becoming externally Hellenised. It is characteristic of their position, that the Lycian confederation as such joined the Attic naval league and paid its tribute to the Athenian leading power. The Lycians not merely practised their art after Hellenic models, but probably also regulated their political organisation early in the same way. The conversion of the cities–league, once subject to Rhodes, but which had become independent after the third Macedonian war (ii. 325)ii. 307. into a Roman province, which was ordained by the emperor Claudius on account of the endless quarrels among the allies, must have furthered the progress of Hellenism; in the course of the imperial period the Lycians thereupon became completely Greeks.
Pamphylia and Cilicia.The Pamphylian coast–towns, like Aspendus and Perga, Greek foundations of the oldest times, subsequently left to themselves, and attaining under favourable circumstances prosperous development, had either conserved, or moulded specially on their own part, the oldest Hellenic character in such a way that the Pamphylians might be regarded as an independent nation in language and writing not much less than the neighbouring Lycians. Then, when Asia was gained for the Hellenes, they found gradually their way back into the common Greek civilisation, and so also into the general political organisation. The rulers in this region and on the neighbouring Cilician coast were in the Hellenistic period partly the Egyptians, whose royal house gave its name to different townships in Pamphylia and Cilicia, partly the Seleucids, after whom the most considerable town of west Cilicia was named Seleucia on the Calycadnus, partly the Pergamenes, of whose rule Attalia (Adalia) in Pamphylia testifies.
Pisidia and Isauria.On the other hand the tribes in the mountains of Pisidia, Isauria and western Cilicia substantially maintained their independence down to the beginning of the imperial period. Here hostilities never ceased. Not merely by land had the civilised governments continued troubles with the Pisidians and their comrades, but these pursued still more zealously than robbery by land the trade of piracy, particularly from western Cilicia, where the mountains immediately approach the sea. When, on the decline of the Egyptian naval power, the south coast of Asia Minor became entirely an asylum of the pirates, the Romans interfered and erected the province of Cilicia, which embraced also, or was at any rate intended to embrace, the Pamphylian coast, for the sake of suppressing piracy. But what they did showed more what ought to have been done than that anything was really accomplished; the intervention took place too late and too fitfully. Though a blow was once struck against the corsairs, and Roman troops penetrated even into the Isaurian mountains, and broke up the pirates’ strongholds far into the interior (iv. 47)iv. 44., the Roman republic did not attain true permanent establishment in these districts reluctantly annexed by it. Here everything was left for the empire to do. Antonius, when he took in hand the East, entrusted an able Galatian officer, Amyntas, with the subjugation of the refractory Pisidian region,230 and, when the latter proved his quality,231 he made him king of Galatia,—the region of Asia Minor which was best organised in a military point of view, and most ready for action—and at the same time extended his government from thence as far as the south coast, and so as to include Lycaonia, Pisidia, Isauria, Pamphylia, and western Cilicia, while the civilised east half of Cilicia was left with Syria. Even when Augustus, after the battle of Actium, entered upon rule in the East, he left the Celtic prince in his position. The latter made essential progress as well in the suppression of the bad corsairs harbouring in the lurking places of western Cilicia, as also in the extirpation of the brigands, killed one of the worst of these robber–chiefs, Antipater, the ruler of Derbe and Laranda in southern Lycaonia, built for himself a residence in Isauria, and not merely drove the Pisidians out from the adjoining Phrygian territories, but invaded their own land, and took Cremna in the heart of it. But some years after (729 U.C.)25. he lost his life on an expedition against one of the west Cicilian tribes, the Homonadenses; after he had taken most of the townships and their prince had fallen, he perished through a plot directed against him by the wife of the latter. After this disaster Augustus himself undertook the difficult business of pacifying the interior of Asia Minor. If in doing so he, as was already observed (p. 324), assigned the small Pamphylian coast–district to a governor of its own and separated it from Galatia, this was evidently done because the mountain–land lying between the coast and the Galato–Lycaonian steppe was so little under control that the administration of the coast region could not well be conducted from Galatia. Roman troops were not stationed in Galatia; yet the levy of the warlike Galatians must have meant more than in the case of most provincials. Moreover, as western Cilicia was then placed under Cappadocia, the troops of this dependent prince had to take part in the work. The Syrian army carried out the chastisement in the first place of the Homonadenses; the governor, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius, advanced some years later into their territory, cut off their supplies, and compelled them to submit en masse, whereupon they were distributed to the surrounding townships and their former territory was laid waste. The Clitae, another stock settled in western Cilicia nearer to the coast, met with similar chastisements in the years 36 and 52; as they refused obedience to the vassal–prince placed over them by Rome, and pillaged land and sea, and as the so–called rulers of the land could not dispose of them, the imperial troops were on both occasions brought in from Syria to subdue them. These accounts have been accidentally preserved; numerous similar incidents have certainly been lost to remembrance.
Pisidian colonies.But Augustus attempted the pacification of this region also by way of settlement. The Hellenistic governments had, so to speak, isolated it; not merely retained or seized a footing everywhere on the coast, but also founded in the north–west a series of towns—on the Phrygian frontier Apollonia, alleged to have been founded by Alexander himself, Seleucia Siderus and Antiochia, both from the time of the Seleucids, further in Lycaonia, Laodicea Katakekaumene, and the capital of this district which doubtless originated at the same time, Iconium. But in the mountain–land proper no trace of Hellenistic settlement is found, and still less did the Roman senate apply itself to this difficult task. Augustus did so; and only here in the whole Greek coast we meet a series of colonies of Roman veterans evidently intended to acquire this district for peaceful settlement. Of the older settlements just mentioned, Antiochia was supplied with veterans and reorganised in Roman fashion, while there were newly laid out in southern Lycaonia Parlais, in Pisidia itself the already–mentioned Cremna, as well as further to the south Olbasa and Comama. The later governments did not continue with equal energy the work so begun; yet under Claudius the “iron Seleucia” of Pisidia was made the “Claudian;” while in the interior of western Cilicia Claudiopolis, and not far from it, perhaps at the same time, Germanicopolis were called into life, and Iconium, in the time of Augustus a small place, was brought to considerable development. The newly–founded towns remained indeed unimportant, but still notably restricted the field of the free inhabitants of the mountains, and general peace must at length have made its triumphal entrance also here. As well the plains and mountain–terraces of Pamphylia as the mountain–towns of Pisidia itself, e.g. Selga and Sagalassus, were during the imperial period well peopled and the territory carefully cultivated; the remains of mighty aqueducts and singularly large theatres, all of them structures of the Roman imperial period, show, it is true, only mechanical skill, but bear traces of a peaceful prosperity richly developed.