Roman reception of Greek cultural tradition was anything but passive or straightforward. After the first wave of translations and adaptations that took place in the third and second centuries BCE, remaking and rethinking Greek sources became the normal practice. This gradually led to their replacement by new literary production cast in the Latin language. Homer was superseded by Vergil; Hesiod by Ovid and Vergil again; Sappho, Pindar, and Callimachus by Catullus and Horace; Sophocles and Euripides by Seneca, and so on.
Still, even when approached against this background, Roman reception of Homer is a special case. On the one hand, it is highly symptomatic that the Odyssia, the translation of the Homeric Odyssey by Livius Andronicus (third century BCE), was the first literary epic to appear in Latin. On the other hand, at approximately the same time or perhaps even earlier,Footnote 1 the Romans, who aspired to acquire a prestigious past by securing a place within Greek heroic tradition, started to identify themselves as descendants of the defeated Trojans. This identification became especially prominent in the middle of the first century BCE, with the rise to power of Caesar and Augustus, who claimed to descend from Aeneas through his son Iulus. The silver denarius of Caesar showing Aeneas leaving Troy, minted in 47/46 BCE, is emblematic in this respect. Aeneas carries his father Anchises on his left shoulder and holds in his right hand the Palladium, the statue of armed Athena from the city of Troy. This was the first time when Aeneas replaced Romulus on a Roman coin. This also signalled the beginning of a new era in the reception of the Trojan War.
Romulus and Aeneas
The starting point of my discussion is an ode that Horace wrote in 27 BCE, the year of Augustus’ rise to power. It is usually supposed that the poem refers to the plan of transferring the capital to the East, which was reportedly being considered at the time;Footnote 2 it seems, however, that the extensive building program launched by Augustus in the city of Ilion (Troy) just a few years later (more later) should also be taken into account here.
Romulus is being admitted to the circle of the Olympian gods. Juno welcomes a descendant of the ‘Trojan priestess’ (Troica … sacerdos, i.e. Rhea Sylvia), but she also issues a warning:Footnote 3
‘As long as the extensive sea rages between Troy and Rome, let them, exiles, reign happy in any other part of the world: as long as cattle trample upon the tomb of Priam and Paris, and wild beasts conceal their young ones there with impunity, may the Capitol remain in splendor, and may brave Rome be able to give laws to the conquered Medes’.
But if these admonitions were not heeded, the following will be fulfilled:
‘But I pronounce this fate to the warlike Romans, upon this condition; that neither through an excess of piety, nor of confidence in their power, they become inclined to rebuild the houses of their ancestors’ Troy. The fortune of Troy, reviving under unlucky auspices, shall be repeated with lamentable destruction, I, the wife and sister of Jupiter, leading on the victorious bands. Thrice, if a brazen wall should arise by means of its founder Phoebus, thrice should it fall, demolished by my Greeks; thrice should the captive wife bewail her husband and her children.’
Note that Horace both leaves room for the Romans’ self-identification as descendants of the Trojans and keeps the Greek tradition of the Trojan War intact. Troy had gotten what it deserved, but Rome inaugurated an entirely new beginning, represented by the figure of Romulus, and its affinity with Troy should not be overemphasized.
Yet Horace, with his characteristically Republican emphasis on Romulus rather than AeneasFootnote 4 and his idea of a single Graeco-Roman civilization, clearly implied in Juno’s warning, was far behind his time. The same can be said of his contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who also worked in Augustan Rome.Footnote 5 In his Roman Antiquities Dionysius not only tried to defend the idea of Greek origins of the Romans but also argued that the Trojans were in fact Greeks. This idea, however, obviously did not seem appealing enough to become universally accepted.
When Horace wrote his ode, Vergil was already working on the Aeneid, a poem destined radically to transform the Romans’ attitude toward the tradition of the Trojan War. Vergil was much better attuned to the spirit of the epoch than Horace or Dionysius. Rather than downplaying the Romans’ identification with the Trojans as Horace did or claiming, together with Dionysius, that the Trojans and through them the Romans were in fact Greeks, Vergil chose to present the Greeks as inferior to the Trojans and, by all too obvious extrapolation, to the Romans as well. Consider, for example, the reaction of the ghosts of the Greek participants in the Trojan War at Aeneas’ appearance in the Underworld:Footnote 6
But the Greek chieftains, and the massed ranks whom Agamemnon had led, trembled in violent panic at the sight of their foe with his armour glittering amid the shadows. Some turned to flee as before they had fled to their ships, while others raised a whispering voice; but their attempt at a battle-cry left their mouths idly gaping.
Greek leaders trembling before a Trojan – such was the perspective on the Troy–Greece relationship that Vergil established.
Above all, however, Vergil’s strategies concerning this relationship are revealed in two prophecies that he puts into the mouths of Jupiter and of the ghost of Anchises, respectively:Footnote 7
‘Time in its five-year spans shall slip by till an age shall come when the House of Assaracus shall crush to subjection even Phthia and illustrious Mycenae, and conquer Argos, and hold mastery there.’
‘Over there is one who shall triumph over Corinth and drive his chariot to the towering Capitol in glorious victory after the slaying of Greeks. And another, there, shall uproot Argos and Mycenae, Agamemnon’s own city, and the Aeacid himself, the descendant of Achilles the mighty in arms; so he shall avenge his Trojan ancestors and Trojan Minerva’s desecrated shrine.’Footnote 8
The change of emphasis in the approach to the Trojan myth that these quotations demonstrate found its expression not only in poetry but also in the very topography of the Greek city of Ilion, founded on the site of Troy somewhere at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. Let us dwell briefly on its history.
The Background: Ilion (ca. 670–20 BCE)
Horace’s picture of Troy, as well as his plea not to restore the city, may create the impression that Troy had lain in ruins since Priam’s times. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The topos of the everlasting ruins of Troy, persistent in both Greek and Latin literary tradition,Footnote 9 finds no corroboration in the historical and archaeological record.
By the early archaic period we already find the Greek settlement of the Troad firmly established. The settlers were Aeolian Greeks, who formed the first wave of Greek colonization in Asia Minor. The new settlement incorporated within its precincts what had remained of the Bronze Age Troy.Footnote 10 These were the monuments seen by the poets responsible for the formative stage of the Homeric tradition. The new landmarks of the Archaic Troad included the city of Ilion itself (Troy VIII), probably with the temple of Athena Ilias (anachronistically introduced in Iliad 6), and the seaport Sigeum, which in the course of the seventh and sixth centuries BCE several times changed hands between the Aeolians from nearby Lesbos and the encroaching Athenians, who sought to establish control over the grain supply from the Black Sea. It is in the context of the fight over Sigeum that the Aeolian settlement of the Troad first emerges in the historical record:
Sigeum, which city Pisistratus had taken by force of arms from the Mytilenaeans. … during very many years there had been war between the Athenians of Sigeum and the Mytilenaeans of the city called Achilleum. They of Mytilene insisted on having the place restored to them: but the Athenians refused, since they argued that the Aeolians had no better claim to the Trojan territory than themselves, or than any of the other Greeks who helped Menelaus on occasion of the rape of Helen.Footnote 11
The Athenian political rhetoric aside, note the double perspective on Troy and the Troad that transpires from this episode. For the Asiatic Aeolians, the Troad was first and foremost the place where they had lived for generations now; for the Athenians, it was a theatre of the Trojan War and, therefore, a Panhellenic domain. This early politicization of the Trojan space was highly symptomatic. As we shall see immediately, the Iron Age city of Ilion continued to serve as a playground of competing ideologies in the subsequent centuries as well.
In the Persian Wars the ideological aspect of the site of Troy became even more pronounced. As Xerxes’ visit to Ilion on his way to Greece (480 BCE) shows, by treating the sack of Troy as Greek trespass on the territory of Asia, the King of Persia symbolically represented the war that he initiated as an act of just retribution for past wrongs – or at least this is how Herodotus saw it. The visit was accompanied by a magnificent sacrifice to Trojan Athena.Footnote 12
At the time of the Peloponnesian War, Ilion was a tribute-paying member of the Delian League,Footnote 13 and it was definitely involved in the naval campaign in the Aegean.Footnote 14 After the defeat of Athens, Ilion, along with the other Greek cities of Asia Minor, became Persian as a result of the King’s Peace (387 BCE).
The year 334 BCE was a turning point in the history of Ilion. The entry of Alexander’s army into the Troad, staged as a symbolic re-enactment of the Trojan War,Footnote 15 not only provided a powerful theme for Macedonian imperial propaganda but also inaugurated an unprecedented surge of urban development in the city of Ilion (Troy IX). All of a sudden, Ilion became important. The reason is clear: its existence legitimized Alexander’s campaign against Persia, helping to represent it as a new Trojan War, that is, another Panhellenic enterprise aiming to avenge the injury inflicted upon the Greeks by the barbarians of Asia. The subsequent growth and prosperity of Hellenistic Ilion was a direct result of its ideological importance in the eyes of Alexander and his successors.
In the Hellenistic period Ilion greatly gained in political importance. It became an autonomous polis and the religious and administrative centre of a koinon.Footnote 16 The temple of Athena Ilias, built under Lysimachus and the Seleucids (the end of the fourth to the third century BCE) is representative of the new status of the city. In material, in structure, in the subjects of the reliefs on the metopes this magnificent edifice deliberately evoked the Parthenon and aimed to establish a meaningful correlation, sanctioned by the tradition of the Trojan War at least since the time of Homer, between Athena Ilias and Athena Polias of Athens. Both temples delivered the same message of an epoch-making confrontation between the Greeks and the barbarians and the eventual triumph of the former. This, however, was not destined to last. A new power arose in the Mediterranean, and it was about to present the Trojan landscape and the Trojan War itself in an entirely new light.
The Transformation: Ilium (20 BCE–ca. 500 CE)
The Roman tendency to approach the site of Troy in the perspective of the Aeneas myth can be traced back to the first entry of Roman troops into Asia at the beginning of the second century BCE.Footnote 17 Yet it was not before 27 BCE, the year of Augustus’ rise to power, that Ilion was placed in the focus of public attention. As we saw, it is in this same year that Horace wrote the ode in which he pleaded not to rebuild Troy. It is not out of the question that while writing these lines Horace also had in mind the events of the First Mithridatic War, in the course of which Ilion had been heavily damaged by the rebellious Roman legate Fimbria (85 BCE). The destruction, however, was apparently not as devastating as some of our sources would have it.Footnote 18 Moreover, the ruins of Troy were evoked in similar terms also by Ovid in 8 CE, after Troy had already been rebuilt on a large scale by Augustus:
[Troy was great in wealth and men … now humbled to the dust, she can but point to her ancient ruins, ancestral tombs are all her wealth.Footnote 19
That is to say, just like their Greek predecessors, Roman poets glorified the imagined ruins of Troy, ignoring the real city that existed in their place.Footnote 20
Politicians were, however, a different matter. In 20 BCE, in the course of his visit to the provinces of Asia and Bithynia, Augustus arrived in Ilion. He stayed in the house of one of the citizens, Melanippides, with whom he had been connected by bonds of ceremonial friendship. A telling testimony of this event is provided by inscriptions on the eastern architrave of the temple of Athena and by the basis of a column representing Augustus’ stay in Ilion and bearing an inscription which styles him a ‘relative’ (suggenês) and ‘protector’ (patrôn) of its citizens. (Let me note in passing that the ‘Trojans’ whom Augustus encountered were of course Greeks, descendants of the Greek colonists who had settled in the Troad at the beginning of the first millennium BCE.) However that may be, the ambitious building program launched in the subsequent years was the direct outcome of Augustus’ visit.
The increasing tendency to see Troy as the antecedent of Rome exerted a visible influence on the city and its surroundings. The myth of Trojan origins of Rome reshaped Ilion into Romana PergamaFootnote 21 and resulted in a thorough reinterpretation not only of the Trojan saga but also of the Trojan landscape itself. The Greek participants in the Trojan War and the monuments associated with them came to be seen in a negative light, whereas the palaces of Assarakos and Priam, the house and the tomb of Hector became firmly established as new landmarks of Roman Ilium. These changes emphasized the image of Troy as the starting point in the history of Rome and legitimized Roman presence in Asia. For all practical purposes, Troy was reborn.
The dramatic turn in the reception of the Trojan landscape that took place in the Roman period is epitomized in an epigram on the tomb of Hector at Ophryneion, composed by Germanicus on the occasion of his visit to the city in 18 CE. The epigram, addressed to Hector, is concluded with the following words:
Look, the glorious Ilios is raised up again, and though the race that inhabits it is not equal to you in the matters of war, it is still a friend of Mars. Hector, tell Achilles that all the Myrmidons have perished, and Thessaly is subject to the great descendants of Aeneas.Footnote 22
In 53 CE, on the occasion of his marriage to Octavia, the sixteen-year-old Nero delivered an oration whose main subject was Troy:
Anxious to distinguish himself by noble pursuits, and the reputation of an orator, he advocated the cause of the people of Ilium, and having eloquently recounted how Rome was the offspring of Troy, and Aeneas the founder of the Julian line, with other old traditions akin to myths, he gained for his clients exemption from all public burdens.Footnote 23
Ilion had never been more popular than in the three subsequent centuries. Emperors visited it; it became a major tourist attraction issuing souvenir coins with Trojan heroes and scenes from the Trojan War.Footnote 24 And yet, since the fourth century CE, probably because the Christianization of the empire stripped the city of its ideological importance, Ilium’s name disappears from the record. This was a signal of its decline. In the middle of the fifth century, the agora began to be used as a cemetery, and after a series of earthquakes circa 500 CE the city was abandoned.Footnote 25 Troy returned to what it had always been in the imagination of the poets – a city in ruins. With time, even the ruins disappeared, not to be seen again till the end of the nineteenth century. Yet the image of the Trojan War carved out by poets and politicians of the Augustan era survived much longer.
Rome and Beyond
One of the results of the revision of the Trojan tradition initiated in Augustan Rome was that the Greek participants in the Trojan War came to be presented as inferior to the Trojans not only in Latin but also in Imperial Greek literature. Thus, in his Trojan Oration, addressed to the citizens of Ilium, Dio of Prusa (ca. 40 – ca. 115 CE) could already afford to represent Homer as a liar and the Trojans as the victors in the Trojan War. According to the Trojan Oration, Troy had never been sacked by the Greeks: in fact, it is the Greeks who had lost the war because of their unprovoked attack on Troy. Dio repeatedly praises the Trojans (read: Romans) and elevates Aeneas, a hero virtually ignored by other Greek authors. Even if the speech was meant as a rhetorical exercise rather than a serious treatment of the Trojan theme, Dio’s pro-Roman orientation is unmistaken, and it is made explicit at the end of the oration, when he asserts that the truth about the Trojan War can now be told because ‘the situation has changed … for Greece is subject to others and so is Asia’.Footnote 26
The Trojan Oration was part of a trend.Footnote 27 The latter produced not only such acknowledged masterpieces as Lucian’s True Stories and Philostratus’ Heroicus but also two accounts of the Trojan War written in Greek prose somewhere between the first and the third centuries CE: the History of the Destruction of Troy by ‘Dares the Phrygian’ and the Journal of the Trojan War by ‘Dictys of Crete’. Although far from masterpieces, these two compositions were to become the foremost sources on the Trojan War for a millennium and a half. Both are presented as eyewitness accounts and therefore as far superior to Homer. The image of the Greek participants that they communicate, although not invariably negative, is far from flattering.Footnote 28 This is especially true of Dictys’ Journal where, for example, Achilles kills Hector in a night ambush (3.15) and kills Memnon when the latter is already wounded by Ajax (4.6). But it is the Latin translations of Dictys and Dares, apparently made in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, that became overwhelmingly influential in the subsequent centuries.
It is true, of course, that such post-Augustan epics as Statius’ Achilleid (96 CE) and the Posthomerica by Quintus of Smyrna (fourth century CE) displayed an attitude to the Trojan War that did not essentially differ from the tradition bequeathed by Homer.Footnote 29 Yet in the late antique, medieval, and early modern West it was Dictys and Dares rather than Statius and Quintus who became, as one scholar put it, ‘the foundational texts of Trojan historiography’.Footnote 30 The fact that Homer was no longer available was far from being the only reason for the enormous popularity these two texts enjoyed.
More than anything else, the popularity of Dictys and Dares was an outcome of the lasting dialogue with the Roman past that ran deeply in the veins of Western tradition. This dialogue involved both identification with Rome and challenge to its authority: the first found its expression in the myth of Trojan ancestry, the second in the adoption of Hector rather than Aeneas as a model hero (more later).Footnote 31 The earliest attribution of Trojan origins to a northern European people is attested as early as the mid seventh century CE: the people in question were the Franks, with the Britons following them one hundred and fifty years later.Footnote 32 Throughout the Middle Ages, more and more peoples, states and dynasties lay claim to Trojan ancestry: Venice, Sicily, Tuscany, Naples, Calabria, the Danes, the Normans, Belgium, the Saxons, the German Emperors, the Capetians, and this is just a partial list.Footnote 33
It should also be taken into account that the idea of the Trojan War promulgated by Dictys and Dares went very well indeed with what could be found in Vergil’s Aeneid (see aforementioned), and the Aeneid continued to be read and imitated throughout the Middle Ages.Footnote 34 Last but not least, as Katherine King put it, ‘the Trojans were considered to be the ancestors of most European peoples, while Achilles and Odysseus were the representatives of the somewhat untrustworthy Eastern half of Christendom’Footnote 35 – so much so that the myth of Trojan ancestry was even mobilized to justify the Latin conquest of Constantinople (1204).Footnote 36
All these created a suitable background for Dictys’ and Dares’ revisionist attitude towards Homer’s picture of the Trojan War not only to be perpetuated but also to be taken further. In 1160, Benoît de Sainte-Maure made the account of Dares and, to a lesser degree, of Dictys the basis for his 30,000-verse-long Le Roman de Troie. The poem consistently presented Hector as a supreme hero and the Trojans as unambiguously superior to the Greeks; Achilles, on the other hand, became an object of vilification.Footnote 37 The popularity of Le Roman de Troie was overwhelming. It was soon translated into Spanish and German, adapted into French prose, and used as the basis for Italian poems. In the East it was translated into Greek as The War of Troy (Ὁ Πόλεμος της Τρωάδος), by far the longest medieval Greek romance. Since the early thirteenth century, Historia destructionis Troiae, the Latin version of Le Roman de Troie by Guido delle Colonne, became no less popular and was adapted as frequently.Footnote 38 In the subsequent centuries, the picture of the Trojan War established in Le Roman de Troie and Historia destructionis Troiae prevailed in both high and popular culture. It influenced Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare. The popular medieval list of the Nine Worthies featured Hector as one of the three foremost heroes of pagan antiquity, the other two being Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.Footnote 39
To recapitulate, Vergil’s idea of the inferiority of Greece before Rome and its imaginary antecedent Troy enjoyed a much longer life than Horace’s and Dionysius’ vision of a single Graeco-Roman civilization, a vision which happens also to be our own. The latter re-emerged only in the wake of the cultural transformation effected by the Renaissance and was not firmly established until the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.Footnote 40 The same would also be true of the picture of the Trojan War found in the poems of Homer, whose authority was re-established at approximately the same period.Footnote 41
Conclusions
Whatever its historical and cultural background, by the time of its being reinvigorated in the mid first century BCE the myth of Trojan origins of the Romans had been universally taken for granted. There was more than one way to negotiate the convoluted relationship between Greece and Rome that it implied. One way was to continue privileging Romulus and the old foundational legend by marginalizing the myth of Trojan origins along with the antagonism between Greece and Rome that inevitably followed from it: this was the way Horace followed. Another way was to neutralize the antagonism by claiming that the Trojans and, consequently, the Romans were in fact of Greek descent: this was what Dionysius tried to accomplish. But it was also possible, rather than avoiding the antagonism, to bring it to the fore by presenting the Trojans and, by implication, the Romans as superior to the Greeks. This was what Vergil did.
On the face of it, Vergil’s solution was the least obvious of the three. But it was the one that suited best the new geopolitical reality and the imperial ambitions of Rome. This transpires not only from the Aeneid references to Roman military victories over Greeks or the epigram of Germanicus amounting to much the same but, especially, from those imperial Greek authors who, similarly to Dio of Prusa, overtly recognized that the old narrative of the Trojan War did not suit any longer the world in which they lived. The revised Trojan narrative they promulgated fit to perfection the distribution of power within the Roman Empire. To quote Dio again, ‘the situation has changed … for Greece is subject to others and so is Asia’. It was this change of situation that was above all responsible for the thorough revision of the Trojan tradition that took place in the Imperial Period.
Much of the discourse about the privileged relationship between Rome and the Greek world, in comparison with other nations and cultures, relied on the alleged kinship and the common origin the Romans were claiming to have with Greeks.Footnote 1 For this purpose, the Trojan myth, since it was first borrowed from the Greeks in the third century BCE, has been continuously reshaped and reinterpreted by the Romans, depending on the immediate context, in order to support the view of a Greek origin for themselves.Footnote 2 But what about the opposite phenomenon? Were there Greek cities explicitly claiming Roman origins? Although most Greeks proved to be quite reluctant to admit that Rome possessed any significant cultural achievement, the acknowledgment of the rise of Roman rule as a shifting point for the Greek world can be observed in various fields. One may mention, for instance, the spread in the Greek world, as early as the beginning of the second century BCE, of the worship of the goddess Roma, as well as of the Roman foundation myths and of the she-wolf iconography, as the consequence of Rome’s interference into the Hellenistic world;Footnote 3 the deliberate reference made by various Greek cities to the alleged kinship between themselves and Rome in order to support requests of privileges in diplomatic intercourse with the Roman Republic;Footnote 4 the celebration by the Greeks themselves of the new era inaugurated by Augustus through his victory at Actium which was supposed to bring happiness and wealth to the entire world according to Augustan ideology;Footnote 5 the early launch in the province of Asia, and subsequently the diffusion throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, of the imperial cult as the expression of the loyalty of Greek cities to Roman power;Footnote 6 finally, the enthusiastic – and to some extent paradoxical – assumption made by Aelius Aristides that Roman hegemony, by unifying the Greek world, would have allowed the Greeks to end internal struggles and to live in peace.Footnote 7
In what follows, I will rather focus on the influence of the political and institutional model of a Roman colony on Greek cities and will assess the use which was made by some cities of colonial symbols and status in order to claim Roman origins. The progressive Hellenization of the political institutions of the Roman colonies which had been settled in the Greek-speaking provinces, due to the cultural influence of their Hellenic environment, is a well-known phenomenon.Footnote 8 But did Roman colonies in the Greek East have conversely any influence on the surrounding Greek cities? Unlike in the West, there were few Roman colonies in those provinces (around thirty by the time of Augustus),Footnote 9 and the Roman municipal model was not widespread in the eastern part of the empire (there were only two municipia of Roman citizens in the Greek East,Footnote 10 contrasting with the numerous occupational associations gathering Roman businessmen in Greek cities from the second century BCE). On the whole, Greek cities did not introduce public offices borrowed from Roman colonies into their constitutions,Footnote 11 and the presence of some Roman colonies in the Greek-speaking provinces did not lead to a Latinization of the surrounding populations, not even at a regional level.Footnote 12 Still, some Greek cities adopted various elements specific to Roman colonies or put emphasis on their refoundation by Roman emperors. Having the rank of a Roman colony meant for a local community to be a part of the Roman res publica within the provinces. This chapter will examine which cities were ready to comply with the Roman colonial model, why they did so, to what extent, and what the meaning of their claim for Roman origins was. I will argue that the issue of the compliance of Greek cities with the Roman constitutional model of a colony was an aspect of cultural interaction.
1 Celebrating Roman (Re)foundation: Roman Colonial Iconography in Greek Coinage
Greek cities in the Imperial period were allowed to continue to mint bronze coins. While the obverse side of the coins typically showed the portrait of the reigning emperor (local communities were probably requested to do so, even if the so-called ‘pseudo-autonomous’ coins suggest that there could have been exceptions),Footnote 13 Greek cities were very proud to display on the reverse symbols of their glorious past and their fame. In most cases, reverses depicted the main deities traditionally worshipped in the various cities as well as mythological themes, or referred to the sanctuaries or to the ceremonies and games for which the cities were known. This trend towards celebration of local patriotism in the coinage was so common and the competition between cities was so high that this practice also influenced the Roman colonies which had been settled in the Greek-speaking provinces. By the early third century CE, most of these colonies had replaced the usual Roman symbols which had been found so far in the coinage of every single Roman colony all over the empire with depictions referring to local cults and myths and in some cases showing indigenous deities.Footnote 14
I would like to consider here the opposite phenomenon and to see why some Greek cities chose to show on the reverse sides of their coins Roman colonial symbols instead of local ones, and what the meaning of those depictions was. I will focus on the most distinctive of the Roman colonial symbols, which is the scene depicting the very foundation of the colony with the founder acting as a priest, leading two oxen and plowing the original furrow which would have delimited the sacred area of the new community. Since it represented the ceremony performed during the formal creation of the colony – repeating the rite performed by Romulus himself when he founded the city of Rome – this scene was very common in the coinage of most Roman colonies, in the West as in the East, since colonies were part of the Roman State abroad.Footnote 15 Now, a similar depiction can be recognized on coins struck by the Carian city of Tralles under Augustus. The obverse side bears the portrait of Gaius Caesar, while the reverse shows a pair of oxen led by a man plowing.Footnote 16 The city of Tralles had been striking coins showing bovines for centuries during the Hellenistic period, and this was still the case under Augustus and even in the second century CE.Footnote 17 But those were humped bulls and they were depicted in a way which was similar to Near Eastern iconography.Footnote 18 This time, however, the presence of a yoke of oxen led by a man clearly hinted at a Roman model.Footnote 19 The same plowing scene can be seen on coins of the city of Thessalonica. In this case, the choice of such a depiction can be explained by the immediate context. At that time, in 48 BCE during the civil war with Caesar, Pompey was staying in Thessalonica. Ancient sources tell us how Pompey acquired land in the town to convert it into a portion of the Roman soil. Such a legal fiction enabled Pompey and the senators who had joined him in Thessalonica to take auspicia and to act in the name of the res publica as if they had been in Rome.Footnote 20 The presence of the plowing scene on these coins seems to have referred to that precise event, when foreign territory was transformed into a part of the land belonging to the Roman people, as was usually done for the creation of a Roman colony.
The context must have been completely different in the case of Tralles. We know that the city of Tralles was severely damaged by an earthquake in 27 BCE and that the emperor Augustus helped the city recover from the destruction through substantial support. It was argued by Thomas Broughton that Augustus seized the opportunity to send Roman colonists to Tralles and to give them lands taken from the territory of the city.Footnote 21 The plowing scene on the coin would have referred to such settlements. This assumption is still the common view on this issue in scholarship.Footnote 22 The problem is that we don’t have any other evidence for the presence of a group of Roman colonists in Tralles. Tralles was certainly not transformed into a Roman colony on this occasion. As far as we can infer from the epigraphic evidence, the city only had Greek institutions in the Imperial period. The possibility that Tralles could have been an example of a double community – that is, a Roman colony existing next to a Greek city which would have been preserved – Footnote 23 should be ruled out, since the coins showing the plowing scene bear a legend in Greek and were struck by the Greek city alone. There was actually a community of Roman citizens in Tralles (οἱ ἐν Τράλλεσι κατοικοῦντες Ῥωμαῖοι), but, as in many cities of Asia Minor, those were gathered into a local association of Roman businessmen run by a curator or ‘chairman’.Footnote 24 The existence of this occupational association in Tralles, even if we consider that it could act as a corporate body along with local Greek institutions, is insufficient to explain why the city chose to have the plowing scene, typical of the colonial foundations, displayed on its coins.
This scene, I think, was intended to stress the symbolic refoundation of the city after the earthquake of 27 BCE. The role of the emperor had been so crucial for the recovery of the city that Tralles was renamed after Augustus.Footnote 25 As shown by inscriptions as well as by the legends on the coins struck by the city, the official name of Tralles for several decades after that was Kaisareia.Footnote 26 Augustus himself was celebrated as the ‘founder’ (ktistes) of Tralles, as shown by the dedication of a statue in his honor by the city.Footnote 27 This points to a wider phenomenon: the use of imperial epithets in order to name Greek cities and the celebration of Roman emperors as founders or refounders of Greek cities. As in the case of Tralles, several other cities also called Kaisareia, like Sardis and Philadelphia, had received help from Tiberius after the big earthquake of 17 CE in the Hermos Valley.Footnote 28 We also know of dozens of cities in Asia Minor which were using, at least for a while, denominations patterned after the names Julius, Kaisar, Sebastos or other imperial names.Footnote 29 But not all these cities had effectively been founded or even rebuilt by Roman authorities. The cases where an entirely new city was created by an emperor, like Nicopolis in Epirus thanks to the synoecism performed by Octavian after his victory at Actium,Footnote 30 were quite rare. Moreover, the honorific title ktistes – and in some cases even the deliberately archaizing title oikistes – were most of the time given to emperors, not because of their material support or because of their completion of a building program but because of their grant of legal privileges, such as tax immunity or the organization of new games.Footnote 31
The use of an imperial epithet as an official title by a local community could not occur without the emperor’s permission. As in the case where Greek cities wanted to give him exceptional honors – like the dedication of a temple – the emperor’s consent was probably requested and ambassadors were sent to him for this purpose, as shown by the correspondence between the imperial power and local communities.Footnote 32 This means that imperial names such as Kaisareia were not imposed upon Greek cities by the central power, but rather were sought by local communities because of the prestige linked to such denominations.Footnote 33 Some Greek cities in Asia Minor were then eager to ask for a name suggesting a Roman origin, thinking it was an appropriate way to show their loyalty to the emperor.
In the case of Tralles, the damages caused by the earthquake of 27 BCE had been so serious and the response of Augustus so prompt (seven senators of consular rank are said to have been sent to Tralles by the emperor to deal with the reconstruction of the city) that the intervention of the emperor was thought to have been a ‘second foundation of the city’ (δευτέρα κτίσις τῆς πόλεως), as shown by an inscription praising one of the ambassadors who were successfully sent from Tralles to Augustus (who was staying in Spain at that time) to ask for his help after the earthquake. The epigram following the dedication celebrates this man as if he had himself refounded the city.Footnote 34 This epigram was later seen and copied by the historian Agathias in the sixth century CE.Footnote 35 On this occasion, Agathias wrongly assumed Tralles had been peopled with ‘Romans’ (Ῥωμαῖοι) after the city was refounded thanks to the emperor’s support.Footnote 36 This was probably, more than five centuries after the event, the only satisfactory explanation he had been able to find for why Tralles changed its name for Kaisareia at that time. In fact, the measures taken by Augustus must have been so massive and decisive in Tralles that the city thought the best way to express its recognition was not only to adopt the name of the emperor but even to display on its coins the distinctive scene of the foundation of a city according to the Roman pattern, in order to show that Kaisareia was now a new city.
The reproduction of the plowing scene on pseudo-autonomous coins minted by Tralles in the late first century, as well as the depiction of the Roman she-wolf together with the twins on coins struck under Gordianus III might be regarded – as in the case of Ilium where the constant presence of the she-wolf on the local coinage was meant to celebrate the kinship between this city and Rome through the Trojan myth – as a further sign of the privileged links the city of Tralles maintained with Rome since its refoundation.Footnote 37 Paradoxically enough, the grant of the status of a free city to Samos by Augustus while the emperor was staying on the island in 20/19 BCE seems to have been commemorated in a similar way, by using the colonial metaphor as a symbol for a new start and a refoundation with the participation of Roman power: Augustus was on this occasion praised as the “benefactor, savior and founder” of the city and an “era of the colony” (ἔτος τῆς κολωνίας), replacing the “era of Caesar’s victory” referring to the battle of Actium in 31 BCE which had been used thus far, was introduced from that time on.Footnote 38
2 Using Roman Phraseology: ‘Colonists’ in Greek Cities from the Hellenistic Past to the Roman Model
As Gellius makes clear in the famous passage of his work where the author makes the distinction between a colonia and a municipium and where he describes the colonies as ‘little Romes’, the Latin word colonia was a technical term and referred to the communities of Roman citizens settled on provincial ground as a result of a decision of the Roman central authorities.Footnote 39 Unlike municipia, which had been pre-existing cities provided only afterwards with institutions patterned after the Roman model, colonies were from the beginning parts of the Roman State. Therefore, the term colonia could not be used in theory to describe a community which would not have been formally created and founded by Rome.
Now, the word kolones transliterated in Greek characters from the Latin coloni occurs among the official titles of two cities from Phrygia Paroreius in Central Anatolia, Apollonia and Neapolis. Several inscriptions mention the Ἀπολλωνιᾶται Λύκιοι Θρᾷκες κόλωνες from Apollonia, as well as the Νεαπολῖται Θρᾷκες κόλωνες from Neapolis.Footnote 40 The few other instances of the transliterated form of colonus in Greek (κόλων) we have in the epigraphical record all refer to citizens of Roman colonies in the East (including ‘honorary’ colonies).Footnote 41 Yet some papyri register koloneiai as a category of lands in Egypt.Footnote 42 In this specific context, the word koloneia might have been used by analogy with the formal Roman colonies involving land allotment to soldiers (if we consider that some of those lands in Egypt seem to have belonged to veterans of the Roman army), or more probably with another meaning of colonia in Latin, which can refer as well to land ownership and especially to imperial estates.Footnote 43 The fact that Neapolis was located in an area surrounded by several imperial estates,Footnote 44 however, does not imply that the term kolones in the official title of the city should in any way be related to the nearby presence of imperial peasants or coloni, whose internal organization was distinct from the Greek city.
In order to explain the presence of the term kolones in Apollonia and Neapolis, it was argued by Stephen Mitchell that Roman colonists had been settled in those cities.Footnote 45 Such evidence was considered one of the major arguments supporting the theory of the existence of the so-called ‘non-colonial colonies’, to use the expression coined by Thomas Broughton in an article published in 1935 I already referred to earlier.Footnote 46 According to this theory, there were in several places throughout the Roman Empire groups of Roman citizens which would have been settled by the Roman State on the territory of foreign communities without enjoying the formal status of a Roman colony, hence the oxymoron ‘non-colonial colonies’. The problem is that this expression doesn’t match any known category in Roman public law. Admittedly Roman citizens, personally or even collectively, could in some cases receive within the territory of foreign local communities land lots which had previously been acquired by the Roman people and declared ager publicus. Thanks to the testimony of Cicero,Footnote 47 this is known to have been the case, for instance, for Pamphylian Attaleia where the recipients of viritane allotments might then have organized in a corporate body known as συμπολιτευόμενοι Ῥωμαῖοι.Footnote 48 This was also the case, as suggested by Benjamin Isaac, in Emmaus near Jerusalem. This place was used by Vespasian to allot land to 800 veterans after the Jewish War.Footnote 49 But in none of these instances is it granted that those communities of Roman citizens were called coloniae, since they apparently did not form autonomous political entities such as ordinary colonies.Footnote 50
To turn to the specific case of Apollonia and Neapolis, neither of these cities were double communities, with a formal Roman colony coexisting with the Greek city, as Stephen Mitchell has very convincingly demonstrated for Iconium or Ninica and as it might well have been the case for further colonies, such as Sinope and Bithynian Apamea, as well as for Nicopolis in Epirus founded as a Greek city, but also maybe along with a Roman colony at the same time, by Octavian.Footnote 51 The word kolones was part of the official title of both cities, and no distinction was made between the kolones, on one hand, and the local population (Apolloniatai/Neapolitai), on the other. We must infer from these expressions that the citizens of Apollonia and Neapolis were at the same time ‘Lykians/Thracians’ and ‘colonists’, or even better that they were described as ‘Thracian colonists’ (in addition to ‘Lykians’ in the case of Apollonia). Each one of these words, in expanding the city’s title, contributed to expressing the identity of the local population. The first two (Λύκιοι Θρᾷκες) were ethnics referring to the alleged origin of the inhabitants of Apollonia. The first settlers of Apollonia in Hellenistic times were thought to have been people who migrated from Lykia to Pisidia and Phrygia, as well as Thracian mercenaries engaged by Seleukid kings. This view is supported by the continued use of Thracian names among local onomastics in Phrygia Paroreius until the Imperial period.Footnote 52 In calling themselves ‘Lykians’ and ‘Thracian colonists’, the citizens of Imperial Apollonia were consciously remembering the Hellenistic foundation of the city as a military colony. The city of Apollonia even struck coins with the portrait of Alexander the Great celebrated as the ‘founder’ (ktistes) of the city in Severan times, although this was a spurious claim, and a cult to Seleukid rulers was kept – or maybe even rather reactivated – during the Imperial period.Footnote 53 Such attention paid to the self-promotion of local identity and of civic pride, as well as to local memories, was very common through Greek cities in the Imperial period, and it even included in some cases the worshipping of Hellenistic rulers.Footnote 54 So, why use the Latin word kolones to refer to the military colonists sent to Apollonia by the Seleukids?
The word kolones was probably borrowed by the cities of Apollonia and Neapolis from the neighboring Roman colonies which were quite numerous in Pisidia.Footnote 55 Pisidian Antioch, which was by far the most influential of those colonies, had common borders with both cities and was linked to them through the Via Sebaste. The colony presented itself in Greek as ἡ Αντιοχέων κολώνων Καισαρέων πόλις, Caesarea being one of the other names of Antioch dating back to the time when the king of Galatia Amyntas probably renamed its capital in honor of Augustus.Footnote 56 The word kolones, used in its official titulature by the powerful colony of Antioch, must have seemed fashionable to the citizens of Apollonia and Neapolis. This can explain why they preferred this terminology to a word like katoikoi, which usually described soldiers settled on land by a king in the Hellenistic period.Footnote 57 A confirmation of such use of Roman colonial terminology as a reference standard can be found in the Near East. As has been recently pointed out by Maurice Sartre, the same word kolonia (or koloneitai referring to some people coming from a koloneia) in Greek characters occurs in inscriptions from Southern Syria.Footnote 58 One of these inscriptions was dated by the era of an unspecified kolonia. The area where these inscriptions were discovered is too far from known Roman colonies (either veteran colonies such as Berytus or ‘honorary’ colonies such as Bosra or Damascus) for us to consider that this word could refer to them. It is more probable that the koloniai referred to in this context corresponded to the military settlements founded by King Herod in order to control the region and to fight against brigands. It is well known how deeply influenced by the Roman model the Herodian kingdom was: Herod’s army was organized according to the Roman one, and the king renamed his capital Caesarea after the emperor.Footnote 59 It is not surprising that Herod would have taken the Latin technical term colonia to decribe the military colonies he was founding in his kingdom. Then, in using the word kolones next to the ethnics ‘Lykians’ or ‘Thracians’, the citizens of Apollonia and Neapolis were seeking to benefit at the same time from the glorious past of their Hellenistic military foundation and from the prestige specific to the most up-to-date Roman terminology as far as colonization was concerned.
3 Becoming a Part of the Roman State: The Promotion of Greek Cities to Colonial Rank
Some cities not only reused Roman colonial symbols and terminology, thus distorting the original meaning of the word, in order to take advantage of the fame linked to the privileged status of a Roman colony, but they even went further and officially bore the title of a colony. Those cities are usually known as ‘honorary colonies’ in scholarship. The so-called honorary colonies were foreign cities which had been granted the official title of Roman colony without necessarily being settled with veterans, as was the case with the military colonies founded during the second half of the first century BCE.
The transformation of a Greek city into a Roman colony was sometimes meant to punish local communities which had supported the defeated enemy of an imperator or resisted Rome, as shown by the cases of the colonies of Sinope, Buthrotum and, above all, of Aelia Capitolina in Jerusalem.Footnote 60 This was never the primary purpose of the creation of a colony, but Roman authorities were encouraged to choose as a place for founding a colony preferably a city which in the past had shown hostility toward them. For most ‘honorary colonies’, however, the grant of colonial status seems to have been a reward rather than a punishment. This is obvious, for instance, for the cities of Selinous in Cilicia and Halala in Cappadocia which were elevated to colonial rank and renamed Traianopolis and Faustinopolis respectively after Trajan and Marcus Aurelius’ wife who died there, as a tribute to the emperor’s and to the empress’ memory.Footnote 61 The same can be said of the birthplace of the emperor Philip, a village of the province of Arabia, which became by decision of the emperor the colony of Philippopolis.Footnote 62 Similarly, Benjamin Isaac has argued that Caesarea Maritima, the capital of the Herodian kingdom, could also have been granted by Vespasian the status of a Roman colony (with the subsequent grant of Roman citizenship to its inhabitants) to thank the local population for its support during the Jewish War.Footnote 63 The grant under Claudius of the colonial status to Caesarea of Mauretania (modern Cherchell in Algeria), the former capital of king Juba, is another example of early concession of colonial rank to a city which was named after the emperor Augustus by a loyal client king, presumably as a reward in this case too.Footnote 64
Most ‘honorary colonies’, however, were Near Eastern cities which were given colonial rank after the civil war Severus had won against Pescennius Niger. While Severus deprived the cities which had supported Niger of their privileges and turned them into villages, like Antioch or Byzantium, some cities which joined Severus were awarded colonial rank, such as Laodicea. In the same way, Heliopolis, which had belonged up to this point to the colony of Berytus, gained its autonomy from that colony because Berytus had supported Niger.Footnote 65 Some other cities were granted colonial rank in the newly conquered province of Mesopotamia, probably because of their support of Roman troops.Footnote 66 It seems then that some cities were actively searching for the official grant of colonial rank by the emperor. The perspective of a general grant of Roman citizenship to the local population and the hope of getting fiscal privileges through the additional concession of the ius Italicum that some Eastern colonies were actually enjoying must have been a strong stimulus for those cities to look for the colonial status.Footnote 67
The adoption of the colonial status typically required a Greek city to display the title of colonia officially and, since it was the original language of the political entity it was now part of, to use Latin for public purposes, especially for legends on coins.Footnote 68 The adoption of the Latin language had been for centuries one of the distinctive characteristics of the integration of a political entity into the Roman State, especially when local communities of Italy were granted the rank of municipium after the Social War.Footnote 69 Even if, unlike in first-century BCE Italy, the use of Latin does not prove to have been systematic in the cities made Roman colonies in Severan times, these were not just cosmetic changes. The conversion of a city into a Roman colony meant the disappearance of the previously existing political entity and the replacement of most Greek institutions by Roman offices and laws. Colonial by-laws patterned after the Roman model (such as the lex Ursonensis)Footnote 70 were probably still given in the Severan period to the cities accessing that status. Werner Eck has recently published copies of the colonial law from Ratiaria in Dacia dating to the reign of Trajan and of the municipal law from Troesmis in Lower Moesia issued under Marcus Aurelius, showing that Roman authorities continued to issue colonial and municipal by-laws matching the Roman norms (and, in that case, respectively the examples known from the lex Ursonensis and from the Flavian municipia in Spain) in the second century CE.Footnote 71 Because they were now part of the Roman State, the ‘honorary colonies’ struck coins not only with legends in Latin, as mentioned earlier, but even with the typical iconography of colonial foundation, especially the plowing scene. Actually, the cities which had been elevated to colonial rank were from a legal point of view full colonies, and no distinction was made, for instance, by the jurist Ulpian between those cities which were given the ius coloniae and the military colonies settled in the second half of the first century BCE by Caesar or Augustus.Footnote 72 Hence the expression ‘honorary colonies’, convenient as it can be, does not reflect any legal reality in Roman administrative practice.
Unlike in the case of Tralles, where we have seen that there is no reason to think a formal colony had been settled, the plowing scene on the coins of the so-called ‘honorary colonies’ should not be simply understood as a metaphor for the promotion of these Greek cities to the rank of Roman colony. Since these cities were effectively given a Roman constitution and integrated into the Roman State, it is perfectly possible and even probable that the creation of those colonies had formally been performed through the plowing ceremony delimiting the borders of the new community according to the Roman rite. What is more, Eduard Dąbrowa has suggested that the vexilla depicted on the coins of some of these colonies, mentioning even the numbers of the relevant legions, were certainly referring to the veterans who had actually been settled in these cities after they were granted colonial status. This must have been the case, for instance, in Tyre, in Sidon and in Damascus.Footnote 73 The settlement of veterans in the territory of some of these cities must have then led to a deep reorganization of land property. The meaning of vexilla for the cities which had been turned into Roman colonies significantly differed from the Roman legion banners which were depicted on the coinage of many other Greek cities through Asia Minor in the Imperial period. In that case, Roman military symbols were simply intended to celebrate the victories of the imperial armies, and they should not be regarded as a clue for any settlement of Roman soldiers on the territory of those cities.Footnote 74
We can infer from the evidence discussed previously that the promotion to the rank of colony was not simply a matter of honor and, in any case, this was never an insignificant event. Becoming a Roman colony meant a heavy price to be paid by the Greek cities willing to enjoy the prestige of what was considered by them a privileged status. The loss of their centuries-long autonomy was compensated for by the possibility of becoming a part of the hegemonic power. This was for a local community the ultimate stage of integration into the Roman Empire.
Conclusions: Rome – An Empire of Many Cities
Scholarship has so far put much emphasis on the reluctance of most Greeks to acknowledge various aspects of Roman rule, especially with regard to cultural issues. One can mention, for instance, the relatively small number of Greeks who were able to speak Latin fluently;Footnote 75 the fact that educated Greeks – such as the orators of the Second Sophistic – deliberately avoided using Latin technical terms in their works even when they were describing Roman institutions; the lack of interest of Greek intellectuals in Roman history – with the exception of Plutarch – even when they were supposed to praise the Roman Empire, as Aelius Aristides in his speech to Rome;Footnote 76 finally, the rather harsh judgment of educated Greeks on Roman rule, such as Dio Chrysostom’s qualifying it as a ‘slavery’.Footnote 77
Despite this, and even if most local communities of the Roman Empire were very jealous of their autonomy, we have seen in this paper that some Greek cities were willing to appropriate the symbolism of Roman colonies and to enjoy the prestige, and even the status, of being a part of the Roman State. If the use of Roman colonial symbols or terminology on coins and inscriptions remained a very limited phenomenon, in each instance due to very specific circumstances – the refoundation of the city after an earthquake thanks to the emperor in Tralles, the regional influence of the colony of Pisidian Antioch on the cities of Apollonia and Neapolis, and possibly the grant of freedom by Augustus in the case of Samos – the promotion of cities to the rank of Roman colony can be noticed on a broader scale, especially in the Severan period.
The appetite of Near Eastern cities and of some cities of Eastern Anatolia for the Roman colonial status sharply contrasts with the situation in Greece, where local communities were eager to keep their old privileges and considered the rank of free city the most enviable status. This also differed from the situation in Western Asia Minor, where cities preferred to compete for various honorific titles granted or confirmed by the emperors, such as neokoros and metropolis, or for becoming the capital of a judicial district or for organizing new games acknowledged by the emperor.Footnote 78 While some cities in the Imperial period tried to prove their antiquity and their Greekness by maintaining their centuries-long autonomy or joining the Panhellenion,Footnote 79 others were ready to give up their autonomy to adopt the Roman colonial pattern and chose to get fame from their formal integration into the Roman State. This contrast shows the wide diversity of situations prevailing in the Roman Empire with regard to political identities and local traditions.
The way each local community saw its own position and role within what was now a world empire explains why some cities were trying to obtain the grant of colonial status by Roman authorities, while others preferred to preserve their ancient rights or to acquire titles which did not imply the loss of their autonomy as a Greek city. This variety of perceptions might lead in some cases to paradoxical claims, like Samos introducing a ‘colonial era’ to celebrate the refoundation of the city by Augustus through the grant of the rank of a free city (if my interpretation of the word koloneia in this context is correct) or, conversely, like Corinth joining the Panhellenion – that is, the institution representing the pinnacle of Hellenism in the Imperial period – although it was a Roman colony.Footnote 80 Significant differences in the way Roman rule was perceived can also be seen between local communities enjoying the same status, such as free cities: the elite of the free city of Rhodes, for instance, had little interest for gladiatorial games and was very reluctant to be designated by Roman names even if it actually was enjoying Roman citizenship (this proves to have matched exactly the attitude towards Romanization recommended by Apollonius of Tyana),Footnote 81 while in Aphrodisias the most powerful citizens competed for organizing gladiatorial shows and the reliefs of the Sebasteion celebrated the military victories of the emperor.Footnote 82 The same applies for the Western part of the empire: Gellius, in the passage I have already mentioned, reports that the citizens of the municipium of Italica in Spain, as the birthplace of the emperor, asked Hadrian to concede them the rank of a colony in order to be fully part of the Roman State, but that the citizens of the colony of Praeneste, on the contrary, requested the emperor Tiberius to permit them to regain the status of municipium they had enjoyed until Sulla settled veterans there after the civil war against Marius and in a way punished the city by turning it into a veteran colony.Footnote 83
As we can see, the problem for the cities of knowing whether or not they should become a Roman colony, whether or not they should adopt Roman colonial symbols, was not only a technical matter of political institutions. The Greek cities, as local communities, had been challenged by the emergence of the hegemonic power of Rome. They had to renegotiate their relationship with Roman power continuously, as made clear by their correspondence with the imperial authorities in order to get confirmation of their privileges. Though not as widespread as in the Western provinces, the Roman colonial model – among the many other titles and statuses local communities could search for – was one of the elements of the debate. This was also a cultural issue: were the cities ready to cope with the cultural influence of Rome? Paradoxically enough, the adoption of Roman colonial symbols or of colonial rank by Greek cities was used to foster and to assert local identities and patriotism: in celebrating its ‘second foundation’ through the plowing scene which was characteristic of the creation of Roman colonies, the city of Tralles was implicitly referring to its antiquity and was showing the favor it got from the emperor as a city; in using at the same time as their official denomination ethnics referring to their Seleukid origins and a Latin word borrowed from Roman colonies, the cities of Apollonia and Neapolis were building for themselves a mixed identity, including Hellenistic memories and up-to-date terminology patterned after the Roman model; finally, in choosing themselves to apply for the rank of colony, some cities were showing that they could decide independently what their position within the Roman Empire should be. These were all strategies for local communities to put themselves forward and to position themselves in relation to Roman power, of course, but also to their peers because of the competition between them. One empire, many cities. In this respect, the Roman Empire, despite the unification of the Greek world under its rule, continued to be a multipolar world.
In Rome, several theologies existed (i.e., several types of discourse and knowledge concerning the gods), for the Romans’ religion had neither revelation nor a Book or a truth set by a god. Only multiple truths existed, connected to this or that context or this or that moment. Even when a deity pronounced an opinion, it related to a specific event or answered a specific question. It did not lay down a global revelation as the God of monotheism does. We thus find ancestral theology implicit in the practice of worship, the themes developed by mythology, and philosophers’ speculations on the nature of the gods. Each of these types of knowledge and discourse had its own autonomy.
*
1
Usually, research on this knowledge addresses only Rome (i.e., the religion of the Roman People, and Roman families) and not the innumerable colonies, municipia or peregrine cities of Italy and the provinces. For the religion of Rome, on the banks of the Tiber, concerned only the Roman State, the Respublica of the Roman People, and, of course, the Roman citizen, wherever he was, as a member of that State. But this religion and this theology did not impose themselves on the second homeland of every Roman citizen – the colony or municipium in which he was born – and where, for the majority of them, he lived. In the framework of this study, I will not consider the peregrine cities.
When a city became Roman, or when a Roman colony was founded, the totality of the Roman state’s religious obligations was not spread. The inhabitants who were already there were not converted, and when a colony was founded by the Romans, they did not install a pure facsimile of the religious system of Rome. Not to mention the fact that these changes did not concern the domestic sects of these cities, which were a matter for each family to decide.
How then can we understand the theologies of the colonies and municipia of Italy and the provinces? Did they show the same theological practices that we observe in Rome itself? And if so, how? For philosophy, the answer is certainly yes, since the elites had the same education as in the metropolis. As for mythology, it is much more difficult because we do not know or understand the local mythology that existed prior to the Roman occupation, to which the inhabitants of the provincial Roman cities allude. I have only to mention the Pillar of the Boatmen in Paris: a mixture of local mythological themes and references to Roman theology, all accompanied by a dedication to Tiberius and Jupiter. This obliges us to wonder how this ensemble functioned: should we imagine it in the Romans’ mythology as related to Greek mythology, which became a reservoir from which the Romans drew themes either to link their mythology to certain Greek myths or to construct new Roman myths? Unfortunately, our ignorance of local myths is such that we cannot answer this question.
On the other hand, it is possible to provide some answers for civic and private theologies. I do not wish to enter into the classic subject of the description of Gallic religions by Caesar or Tacitus.Footnote 1 I prefer to look at what is expressed on the ground. When a colony or a municipium was founded in Gaul or Germania, what took place from a religious point of view? Even if the Romans were not in the habit of converting subjugated peoples or imposing their religion on them, this does not mean that nothing happened. Thus, when the Syllanian colony settled in Pompeii, the altar of the temple of Apollo was redone, which gave rise to a new consecration by the quattuorviri.Footnote 2 We can therefore assume that the rites were celebrated according to the rites of the colony. This corresponded, of course, to a system of worship and theology similar to that of Rome. There are, however, differences between the two types of practices. For example, the local deities are enriched by novelties. Venus had long been worshipped in Pompeii, but she was now also the protector of Sylla, and in the days of the Julio-Claudians, the Venus of the Romans and the Iulii. This was to be understood in the prayers – in the invocations of the goddess. Evolution is not usually seen, since no new epiclesis characterized the great gods. It was only from the time of the Empire that divinities could bear the epiclesis “Augustus,” which is ambiguous and difficult to interpret but which clearly sets the divinities in a Roman context. But from a theological point of view? Was civic theological thought active in the thoughts and actions of the founders?
At Pompeii, I would imagine that, owing to the long relations that had developed between the Osci and the Romans, a code of transposition or translation of the names of the reciprocal divinities had existed for a long time. The Roman colonists had no problem addressing the Pompeian Apollo, Jupiter or Venus. This was certainly more complicated when a remote community became a colony, or a colony was settled there. I would like to examine a number of examples. But let us first take a look at the document I was already inviting to take into account in 1991,Footnote 3 namely the municipal laws of the Genetiva colony at Urso.
Those statutes derived from Roman municipal law in the time of Caesar, which was applied to each foundation in perhaps a slightly different context. In chapter 64, we see the provisions of the constitution that interest us: “Those who will be duumvirs after the deductio of the colony must, within ten days of beginning their position, pose to the decurions – provided not less than two-thirds are present – the question of which and how many feast days there shall be, which rites must be celebrated publicly, and who is to celebrate these rites. What the majority of the decurions that shall then be present decide shall be legal and ratified, and those sacred rites and feast days shall be in force in this colony.”Footnote 4 This text is of great importance for our purposes. It proves that the local public calendar was set by the local authorities, year after year, and could therefore be amended during this procedure. The text does not explicitly say that the first magistrates of the colony proceeded in the same manner (i.e., that they established the calendar within ten days after taking office). Article 70, for example, distinguishes between the first magistrates and their successors, and in chapter 69, which concerns the religious budget, the lex mentions the first magistrates alongside their successors. Therefore, if the constitution does not mention the first duumvirs here, it is most certainly intentional. This is also J. Rüpke’s opinion.Footnote 5 Should one infer that the essential features of the calendar were in fact imposed by the founder of the colony? In my opinion, this is impossible because otherwise article 64 would no longer make any sense, since it stipulates that the calendar must be officially established each year without saying in the least that this calendar must not change the one that had been established “according to this lex.” The situation is not the same as in article 66, which refers to the appointment of the first augurs and pontiffs by the person who had founded the colony. We must therefore conclude that chapter 64 either allows more time for the first magistrates or does not concern itself with this aspect of the question. It is sometimes difficult to see the reason for these differences in the wording. In chapter 70, which prescribes Games for the Capitoline Triad and Venus, the first duumvirs are excluded, probably because during the first year of the colony, it was difficult to organize this Games. However, the calendar’s construction is not linked to immediate budgetary and organizational issues. In any case, it is certain that the first duumvirs built, shortly after the deductio, the essential calendar of the Colonia Genetiva. Additions could be made by their successors, but it was essential that they put the calendar in place at the time of foundation.
What is the scope of all this for our subject? I will pass over the material elements that the choices led to: the places of worship concerned or the location of new places of worship, the choice of an annual date, the financing and the responsibility for worship. Let us focus only on one aspect: the calendar itself and what it immediately implied.
What is the meaning of quos et quot dies festos esse et quae sacra fieri publice placeat (“the question of when the feast days shall be, what their number shall be, and what rites must be publicly celebrated”)? As Rüpke has rightly pointed out, the text speaks only of dies festi (“feast days”), and not of feriae (“holidays”), which were in some way the temporal property of the gods, as if these distinctions did apply, or did not apply any more, to the provinces or colonies. However, it is difficult to rely too heavily on this finding. It’s clear that a colony did not have to keep to the same calendar as the magistrates, the priests and the Senate of Rome. It was, if you will, an obligation of the Roman citizen in relation to Rome, but here we are speaking of something else: the city where the citizen lived his daily institutional and religious life, far from Rome. The districts of Rome themselves did not have the same festive life as the Forum and temples of Rome.
So, what did this citation mean? That at the beginning of each year (and for our direct interests here, ten days after the founding of a colony), the local senate had to consider a motion from the duumvirs to construct the calendar – the public calendar, as the text states. These are the rites that were celebrated publice (i.e., in the name of the populus and for it). We should note that nothing was foreseen, if not indirectly, for private religious life, since the domain of public worship was carefully delimited.
We must insert here an aside regarding documents such as the lex of Urso, which I have just cited. Much has been written on this subject, and I myself have drawn attention to this document to understand the meaning of the creation of a Roman or Latin colony in the Roman Empire. In an article on this law J. Rüpke quite rightly points out that all these rules apply to the public religion of the colony, and he also notes that the lex says little about observed celebrations and rites, called sacra, aside from an indication of the Games in honor of the Capitoline Triad and Venus, patron of the Iulii.Footnote 6 He cites the passage on the calendar, pointing out that it was not necessarily the same as that of Rome, and he imagines it similar to that of the Fasti of Guidizzolo, near Mantua.Footnote 7 In this situation, the individual who had this copy made had available to him, besides the Fasti, a list of the years’ festivals. This is possible, but let us not forget that the Fasti of Praeneste, which date from the Augustan period, even include the annual holidays of the great local temple of Fortuna Primigenia in the Fasti’s text.Footnote 8 There should have been several opportunities to set the local holiday calendar in writing. We shall recall here the arvals’ calendar, which adds a second document to the ordinary Fasti that includes the movable dates of the annual sacrifice of Dea Dia. So, in Rome itself, this sort of supplement to the basic calendar could have existed.
Things are actually more complicated. A document like that of Urso shows us the institutional life of a colony in Caesar’s time, when the document was written for the first time and then, under Domitian, when it was reexamined and engraved. How were the sacra present in public life? For this is indeed what the Romans called public worship. Rüpke considers that this document is ignorant of our concept of religion, but only speaks of sacra, of feast days, of funding, of priests and of magistri. That’s completely correct. But as every Latinist knows, our concept of religion did not exist in ancient cities before Christianization. This disturbs the modern scholar, since the term religio exists in Latin, but it means something else: “ritual obligation, care in ritual practice,” hence “fear, meticulousness in a given practice,” such as spelling, for example. In other words, in the positive sense, religio actually means, in an abstract way, the same thing as sacra, “rites.” It is therefore unnecessary to be surprised by the absence of the modern category of “religion” in this document. It did not exist in the Romans’ language or thinking. This did not present as a religious decadence or incapacity, in the modern sense, which would make it possible to seek elsewhere the religious sentiments of the Romans. It is therefore necessary to bring together the various rules regarding religious practice through the text’s various sections to reconstitute the set of rules concerned. This dispersion is not surprising, as Roman legal documents are never synthetic and reasoned; they often present a series of successive rules, which we modern scholars would set out in a more synthetic fashion. As public worship belonged to the religious duties of the city, their regulations are set out in the same way as the other prescriptions relating to the functioning of the city.
But let us return to the gods. If we are discussing worship and feast days, we must also investigate the target of that worship. In short, we must theologize. Discussing worship and festive days amounted to composing what we call the official pantheon of the city. It was at this time that the decurions also had to make an official decision on the names of their public gods, translating or transposing, adding epicleses or not, including one god and excluding another in accordance with internal political equilibria. We do not know much about this procedure. The law of Urso reveals nothing, except that it provides that the duumvirs celebrate the Games in honor of the Capitoline Triad each year, presumably on September 13, which was in some way an obligation common to all Roman cities;Footnote 9 the aediles also provided three days of performances to the circus or scenic games and a day of performances at the circus or at the forum in honor of Venus.Footnote 10
2
The area I have chosen for this survey of local theologies, namely the western provinces of the North, excludes whether the settlers were Romans from Rome or from Italy and whether they had their own religious traditions that they would have potentially taken with them and transplanted into their new city. I will therefore only consider colonies which were “honorary,” as is often said, partly to deny the reality of the integration policy of conquered peoples. But this is a legal contradiction, because honorary or not, from a legal point of view, they were real colonies.
Therefore, this founding – or re-founding – activity contained a theological activity that was perhaps based on traditions that were already ancient, acquired by these populations over the course of decades of contact with the Romans. The local elites who sat in the colonial senates did not necessarily include Varros and Ciceros, but certain personalities, already Roman knights and charged with public offices of the Empire, may have been largely acquainted with Roman customs and public worship and therefore have been familiar with Roman religion. It was not possible to exercise a command in the Roman army or administration, for example, without being obliged by these functions to fill Roman cult obligations.
How could local senates function when, within ten days of the first magistrates’ taking office, they had to define the new colony’s public calendar? To attempt to uncover the facts, we must make use of examples, and I shall begin with four cases: Trier, Cologne, and the Batavi and the Tungri. We will discuss public theology, and I will add some elements of private theology, as far as is possible. I am well aware of the hypothetical nature of this reconstruction, which we must deduce from sources, albeit direct, but particularly laconic. And in such an exercise, errors are always possible.
Let us begin with Trier, the Colonia Augusta of the Treveri.
We know the gods of this colony, but more of the private gods than the public gods. We must thus make do with what we have – which is not nothing. We have found some dedications addressed to the Roman deities Aesculapius, Bellona, Apollo and Mars Victor, who probably had temples, chapels, or altars in the city. But these inscriptions and deities cannot be related to the theological activities that were carried out at the time of foundation. Not only because their date is often belated in relation to the origins of the Roman Trier, but precisely because they are deities who were probably not “translated”: they represented the Roman part of the colony’s theology such as it was purely and simply transferred. We must not forget that the Latin colony of Trier had a dual identity: local and Roman. In this case, this is the Roman side.
A cult that is nevertheless particularly important for our purposes is that of Lenus Mars. He was the god of the great temple located outside the city, where representatives of the colony’s pagi also gathered for days of collective worship. There were other local Marses: Intarabus, Gnabetius and Loucetios. First, a detail: in a chapter devoted to gods and worship, Greg Woolf wonders about the epicleses.Footnote 11 He wonders, in particular, whether, once the conquest was over, the local deities would not have offered the indigenous peoples the possibility of having their own identity. In Lenus Mars or Hercules Magusanus, does not the presence of the epiclesis suggest the existence of a reserve thus manifested with respect to the Roman gods Mars and Hercules? Why were they not satisfied with Mars or Hercules? G. Woolf’s answer is not very clear; he is content to lay out the problem. But it is significant that he cites Hercules Magusanus, which shows that he is influenced by the ideas of N. Roymans, who refused to accept, at the time those lines were written, the idea that the Batavi could have adopted a Roman way of life. It is also significant that he refers in the page I cited to the god of Jews and Christians as though the situations were the same. That is precisely the problem. Even in the Gallo-Roman or Germanic world, religion was not necessarily identical to Judaism or Christianity. We can see beneath this comparison a number of exaggerated positions adopted for a time by G. Woolf on the religion of the Romans themselves.
But let us return to our Treveran gods. Lenus Mars is interesting. He was doubtless the Treveri’s great god, who had another great place of worship in the territory near Koblenz, at the Martberg,Footnote 12 which was also a public place, considering his importance and historical profundity. Two elements related to this god’s chief place of worship immediately attract attention. First is the position of his temple, which was located outside the ramparts. That of the Herrenbrünnchen, which belonged perhaps to Mars Victor, also was located near the rampart, which was built later. Yet this was a Roman rule of worship. As Trier was founded from 17 BC ex nihilo, the location of Lenus Mars’ temple reflects a clearly theological intention, even though it may have been conveyed by the architects of the Roman army, who were likely involved in the organization of the capital Augusta Treverorum. The fact remains that the members of the elite who were the sponsors apparently saw nothing shocking in the fact that the great local god was located outside the city.
Lenus Mars, whose epiclesis “lenus” is incomprehensible, provides other interesting indications. The first comes from the statue that was found in the temple and represents a young Mars, different from the bearded figure of Mars Ultor used in Mandeure, for example. The personality of the Treveran god from whom Lenus Mars took over is unknown, but the choice of Mars – and Lenus Mars – provides two pieces of information. The territory of Trier has been blessed by archaeology. Its excavators have been excellent professionals for over a century, and to top it all off, the Treveri were great chatterboxes, leaving plenty of inscriptions. Perhaps it is necessary to add, more prosaically, that the tender sandstone of the Treveran countryside is very easy to carve. In any case, if we were to plot on a map all the places where a dedication to Mars has been found, and assuredly placed, we would see a very particular image emerge. In the capital, there were temples, altars, and dedications made to Lenus Mars and Mars Intarabus, who were, according to the current data, gods of the left bank of the Moselle River. On the other hand, Mars Gnabetius and Mars Loucetios are neither represented on the left bank nor in Trier. Also, these gods were not necessarily small local gods. Take, for example, Mars Loucetios, who had a temple with Nemetona near Mainz,Footnote 13 thus on former Treveran territory, cut off from a section after the Roman occupation and various uprisings. And the mention of Aresaces on the first stone refers to the Treveri, since it was during the first c. AD. a local unit of the Treveran people in the Roman Army, the cohors Aresacum, that had been commanded by one of Lenus Mars’ flamines. The social level of those who dedicated a second inscription to Nemetona, the legatus Augusti A. Didius Gallus Fabricius Veiento and his wife, prove that it was an important place of worship. Another dedication should be mentioned here. It comes from Bath,Footnote 14 is addressed to Mars Loucetios and Nemetona, and was placed by a Treveran citizen. Perhaps a Trevir from the Hunsrück or the Mainz region? We also note that the Matronae or Matres, who were apparently removed from the public cults of Trier, received a dedication at Vetera in Germania Inferior, probably from a ciuis Treuir.Footnote 15
I would explain the exclusion of Mars Loucetius from the Trier pantheon by the fact that the Hunsrück Treveri had been underrepresented in the colony’s deductio and had therefore not been able to impose the presence of their local Mars among the public, collective gods, contrary to what the western Treveri did. We may even see in this the effect of an internal conflict, due to the resistance of certain Treveran groups first to the Roman alliance, and then to the course adopted, from 17 BC onwards, to transform the Treveran people into a city of the Mediterranean type. This conflict was expressed in the various uprisings that took place after the conquest. Even though the city did not immediately become a Latin colony – doing so only a generation after its foundation – decisions had to be made that would be given validity on the day it became a colony. It should be borne in mind that archaeological chance can always reverse this type of hypothesis, but for the time being, the number of inscriptions is sufficient to allow it to advance. I would add that, unlike Otzenhausen and Donnersberg, two large oppida of the right bank of the Moselle, those of the left bank, the Titelberg and the Martberg (which likely remained a Treveran property even after the diminution of their territory) were not abandoned under the Empire. This tends to suggest certain pro-Roman Treveran groups’ seizing power on the left bank of the Moselle from 30 BC onwards.
For our purposes, this means that at the time when it was decided to create a collective pantheon for the city and then for the Augustan colony of the Treveri, a list of the public rites to be performed for this or that god was put together, and the choice of the great god of the city was made, according to local political imperatives.
But we can go further by moving to a more strictly theological level. Why choose, from among the names of available gods, Mars rather than some other god? Why not Jupiter, Apollo or Mercury? A word about the epiclesis: It’s a necessity if one wishes to express the local, colonial nature of the god. This was done in the same way in Rome, in neighborhoods and in families, according to historical circumstances, and of course also in Italy. Let us not forget that this was a polytheistic regime, and that there was not a single Roman Mars. To go further, it is necessary to compare the Treveran choice with those made by other cities. Mars, with various epicleses, was chosen by many cities of Gaul: Mars Camulus by the Remi, Mars Mullo by the Redones and by the Aulerci Cenomani. But this was not the case further north, among the Batavi and Tungri. The evidence tends to show that it was Hercules, rather, who was designated there as the great local god. To understand, we must examine the Roman gods involved.
In Rome, Mars was the god of war and of those who made it. What was at issue was violent, brutal war, the violent outbreak of warfare-driven rage, and not the war envisaged from the point of view of the fine strategist’s cunningness (a role that would more be that of Minerva, who was the technician of the military art taught by instructors), or the brutal imposition of sovereignty (Jupiter). But, contrary to the traditions of certain Italic peoples, Mars was not the principal god in Rome, even though mythology had made him the father of the city’s founder. Thus, when the Treveri adopted Mars as their principal god, it wasn’t the figure of the community’s supreme leader, of a sovereign (Jupiter) or guide (Apollo) that they sought, but rather a figure close to the one claimed by those who recognized themselves in him, the armed citizens. But this did not preclude a versed dedication offered by the Martberg presenting Lenus Mars in a very Roman manner.Footnote 16
Let us return to the difference between the Batavi and Tungri and the other Gallic peoples. As T. Derks has shown,Footnote 17 the Batavi made another choice, although their intentions were certainly identical. Instead of Mars, they chose Hercules to be their principal god, a god who by myth (and by Roman topography) was tied to livestock farming and especially to adventure, to the victorious return after successfully carrying out exploits in faraway lands. Another difference separates this choice from the one made by the Treveri: Hercules was a known god, but he did not belong to the first rank of the great Roman gods, unlike Mars. This also reveals the fact that the Batavi sought in Hercules special qualities rather than his status in the Roman public pantheon. On the other hand, Mars refers to a structured universe, a city with a defined space to defend with armed citizens collectively fighting; in short, a universe with institutions. Hercules, on the contrary, participates only marginally in these activities, for example, at the celebration of a triumph. His exploits take place in another setting. According to his mythology, they are accomplished even before the birth of cities and their institutions. Mars is a citizen god and Hercules a civilizing god, accomplishing his exploits alone or with a handful of companions. One might say that the Batavi chose the myth of the solitary hero as a source of inspiration. This was also, according to a recent study by G. Ræpsæt, the choice of the Tungri.Footnote 18 Ræpsæt studies the ethnogenesis of the Ubii, Batavi and Tungri. He also evokes the cult of Hercules as a principal cult, relying on the example of the Batavi. He first quotes Tacitus, who in his text on Germania, mentions the importance of Hercules.Footnote 19 Tacitus also mentions Mars, however. Near Tongeren, a ring was found bearing the inscription, and a bracelet (the Herculi Magusano restitution being certain according to similar specimens found in Germania).Footnote 20 In Jeuk-Goyer,Footnote 21 still in Tongeren country, a series of altars dedicated to Hercules has been discovered, which seem to confirm this fact. What is especially interesting is the dedication made to Hercules and Alcmene, an absolute hapax, which confirms the suspicion that in these regions, the search for a Roman god as a local god’s equivalent had passed through the mythology. In addition, in Millingen,Footnote 22 in Germania Inferior, near Xanten, on another dedication, we find Hercules Magusanus together with Haeva. It was supposed that it could be a local goddess, elsewhere translated by Alcmene, or rather the misspelled version of Hebe, Heracles’ wife, who would be the equivalent of a local goddess, for example Nehalennia, who is connected to a successful journey like those performed by Hercules, and whose certain steles at Colijnsplaat or Domburg also represented Hercules. Finally, on Hadrian’s Wall, an inscription placed by the first cohort of the Tungri dedicated an altar to Hercules, Jupiter, and the imperial numina;Footnote 23 another base had to do with Hercules Magusanus and emanated from a duplicarius of the ala Tungrorum.Footnote 24 On the territory of the neighboring Cugerni we have also a dedication in Xanten,Footnote 25 a ring at Kalkar and a temple in Elfrath, near Krefeld, where the cella is decorated with scenes from the adventures of Hercules.Footnote 26
In this distribution of Mars and Hercules, we also see the opposition between grain-farming regions and livestock-farming ones.
Let’s return to Trier with another question: Why choose Mars as supreme god, and not Jupiter or Apollo? The answer is probably that at the time of the transposition of the name of their god to Latin, at the latest at the time of the city’s foundation or the colony’s deductio, the Treveri still saw themselves as warriors, or at least as armed men. They saw themselves less in the forum’s togati, in civilians, than as men bearing arms. For them, a citizen was essentially an armed man. This was evident in their funerary customs at the beginning of the Empire. Later, apparently, things changed, but the choices made at the beginning of the colony were thereafter definitive and presented as an echo of the past of the Treveran people. The preeminent role of Lenus Mars informs us how the Treveri represented the profession of the citizen, how the city and the colony were founded, and perhaps about the distant political conflicts between clans that the map of the epicleses of Mars hints at in the background. The reflections revealed by these choices suggest that the Treveri were not ignorant of Roman institutions and culture. By having distinguished the role and figure of the god Mars from those of other gods of the Roman pantheon, they revealed their knowledge of Roman theology and religion. In building the temple of Lenus Mars at the gates of the city, they clearly applied a Roman religious rule. They left one more indication that confirms the very conscious way in which their pantheon and their religion were elaborated.
It may be argued that the Gauls perhaps did not have a feminine goddess as their principal deity, like the Junos of Latium and Southern Etruria, or the Fortuna of Praeneste. This is an argument that must be qualified, at least in part.
Located next to the Treveri, Tungri and Batavi was Cologne.Footnote 27 The city’s history is very particular. First, the historical occupants of the space, the Eburones, were largely exterminated by Caesar, notably with the Treveri’s help. The survivors, along with Ubian groups transplanted from the other side of the Rhine, settled in the liberated space and founded at the beginning of the first century a city that was to serve as a metropolis for the new province of Germania. As this city, which was the seat of Germania’s legate, was closely linked to the Julio-Claudian dynasty, the Emperor Claudius transformed it into a Roman colony, which even received the Italic right, meaning that it was legally considered to be city of Italy. Now, if we were to look at the public worship practiced in Cologne, we would find no evidence of either Mars or Hercules as a great local deity. Of course, the city has left fewer cultual remains than Trier, but one noticeable fact emerges from the epigraphic data: One of the public cults was that of the Matronae. It was a mixture of local cults, found mostly in the Claudian colony and marginally in neighboring cities, as well as cults adhered to by legionaries and veterans who, at the beginning of the Empire, were largely from Cisalpine and Narbonese Gaul, where there were similar godesses. The Matronae and Mothers were, for example, attested to at Glanum and Nîmes. Clearly, this cult of the Matronae had developed from the foundation of this peregrine city of Ara Ubiorum and when the Claudian colony was founded around AD 50, this cult was so well established that it belonged to the religious landscape of the colony. One of its great temples was even in the immediate vicinity of the Legio I Minervia camp in Bonn, which was located inside the colony’s territory.
We have thus seen three examples of how public religion developed in new colonies, each of which followed different paths according to their culture and historical context. Of course, these cities also possessed a temple dedicated to the Capitoline Triad, or at least a cult for it, especially on September 13 (the day of the Roman Games), and also other Roman deities, but our purpose here was to follow the way in which they outlined their pantheons.
I have two further remarks to make on this subject. The Treveri’s thought was apparently quite advanced. Thus, as T. Derks has shown,Footnote 28 one would find parents making votive offerings in Lenus Mars’ temple for their children. To explain these rites, Derks refers to those we know from Rome, on the day of the Liberalia, the day when young boys became adults, celebrated with a sacrifice that they offered at the temple of Jupiter. In Trier, the founders, and then gradually the rest of the population, began to celebrate their boys’ reaching the age of majority with Lenus Mars, who held the role of supreme god.
There has also been some progress in the interpretation of divinities. In Cologne and in the territory of Colonia Claudia, a series of dedications has been found that mention curiae associated with the cult of the Matronae (i.e., groups and clans that bore the same name as the Matronae). Chr. Rüger notes that most of these curiae’s dedications are addressed to male deities and wonders if these gods were not the Matronae’s consorts.Footnote 29 Thus he brings the famous Matronae Aufaniae together with the epithet of their neighbor in Bonn, Mercurius Gebrinius, and the representation of a mythical animal (three goat bodies with a single head) on an altar of the Matronae Aufaniae. For Rüger, this would be evidence of the theriomorphic stage of the Matronae, who would originally be goat goddesses, and whose husband would be Gebrinius (*gabro-, cf. caper). Without further emphasizing the fanciful nature of this combination, powerfully inspired by the modern myth of the mother goddess and primitive representations of divinity, Chr. Rüger’s hypothesis poses an additional problem, which also raises the Matronae’s identification with their mythical ancestors that he makes. On the one hand, there would be a single god before a group of Matronae: Who represents whom? Why a single god facing a plurality of mothers connected to a clan? It would be more prudent to remember that finding several deities in the same place of worship is commonplace, even supposing that it is indeed a common place of worship. And if we are dealing with two different temples, there is no reason to connect the Aufaniae and Mercury Gebrinius. On the other hand, how did the Matronae represent the clan’s female ancestor? Which of the three is that famous ancestor? Would not all three of them be the deified matrons of the lineage or group concerned? Add to this the fact that in representations of the Matronae, two wear headdresses and appear older than the middle one, who does not wear the headdress typical of the other two. There is obviously something missing here, and I would be very careful before interpreting this type of collective divinity further.
T. Derks has once again subjected the whole question to criticism, relying on M. Th. Ræpsæt-Charlier’s chronological supplements in particular.Footnote 30 He rightly dismantles the schematic reconstructions developed by Rüger, who presupposes an evolution of the Matronae’s cult from a pre-anthropomorphic stage to an anthropomorphic stage, the beginning of which would be marked by the beautiful sculptures discovered under the Bonn Minster. Derks has especially pointed out that the very form of the matronal names, which are based on the suffix -inehae, meaning “those (f.) of, the women of,” quite evidently refers to an anthropomorphic group. Moreover, the absence of images of the Matronae before the AD 160s does not mean that the cult was aniconic before that date, as Chr. Rüger presumes. The earliest dedication addressed to the Matronae in this region comes from Jülich,Footnote 31 and it dates from the years between AD 71 and about AD 120, which is in agreement with the archaeological data found in exhumed places of worship, such as in Pesch in the Colonia Claudia’s territory.
We are still waiting for a clue that would allow us to decipher the figure of the Matronae or Mothers. Nevertheless, with these cults, we have some evidence of a theological thought that has led us toward clans and groups that seem to belong to the private domain, which are in any case subordinate to the level of the colony. Let us now go further into the theology of individuals.
3
The first example comes from the Altbachtal temple area, the Altbach valley in Trier.Footnote 32 This sacred precinct was developed at the same time as the city, since the main axis of the precinct coincides with that of the city. There were perhaps temples of public worship, but the large buildings are unfortunately anonymous. The divinities represented were largely Treveran, and they were also found to be present on the territory of the Colonia Augusta Treverorum. It was obvious that the families brought these gods with them when they settled in Trier. Associations also chose to install their place of worship in this area. And significantly, in the late period, a Mithraic sanctuary was located there. This set can add two interesting pieces of data to our research.
First, Mercury. Two things are interesting. To begin with, the location of the temple, situated at the western entrance to the sacred precinct,Footnote 33 or in any case just outside. I won’t go into detail. We know that the god Mercury was the god of travelers, of mediation, of commerce. He was therefore often present at borders, at entrances, near gates (in Rome, for example). He was also connected to currency circulation, the production of interest and the reproduction of livestock. There are then inscriptions found in and near the temple, which testify to the fact that the Treveri had become quite capable of thinking of the gods in Roman terms, at least in the second century AD. The first,Footnote 34 by Securius Severus, does not inform us of much, as it is too laconic. The other two are a bit more talkative. The second,Footnote 35 which is later, based on the layers on which the altar was placed (but it may have been displaced), concerns the domain for which the god was best known – commerce – as it comes from an ancient seaman of the fleet of Germania who was a beer trader or brewer and a dyer. The third inscription is the most interesting.Footnote 36 It concerns the Mercury of the peregrini. What’s it about? The god is presented as a sort of patron of the peregrini: deus Mercurius peregrinorum. The peregrini are not pilgrims but foreigners established in the Colonia Augusta Treverorum. They were in all likelihood incolae, residents who did not have full local citizenship, and who often formed associations in Roman cities. However, there is no indication that this temple served as the seat of an association, as is the case for other temples in the Altbachtal. In any case, these associations of residents were often directed toward the Genius peregrinorum, venerating the divine double of the association, which is structurally linked to it. The dedicator of our altar made another choice, which denotes his perfect knowledge of Roman theology, since it refers to the domain patronized by the god Mercury: circulation and passage. Even better than the knowledge of the Genius, who was a typically Roman deity, the ability to analyze Mercury’s domain to relate it to those who are passing through testifies to a theological knowledge that is not merely superficial.
Even less banal is the following dedication. It reads: Deo Vertumno siue Pisinto C. Fruendus VSLM (“To the God Vertumnus, or Pisintus, Gaius Fruendus has fulfilled his vow willingly and properly”).Footnote 37 Pisintus was a local god about whom we know nothing else. But the dedicator, toward the middle of the second century AD, proposed a Latin translation (and the Latin figure in the first place) of Pisintus’ name to Vertumnus. Yet Vertumnus was a well-known Roman god. He was the god of metamorphosis, of change. He was not a very active god in the ritual calendar. He was best known by Varro, Propertius and Ovid. According to certain Roman traditions, there was a desire to make him into an Etruscan god, based on the fact that during the fall of Volsinii, a local god had been installed in Rome under the name of Vortumnus (probably Voltumnus from Voltumna). Yet other sources say that the god had already existed in Rome before Vortumnus’ arrival, who was installed, not on the Forum as Vertumnus, but on Aventine Hill. I refer you to the research that I completed with J. Svenbro on this god.Footnote 38 The altar of the Altbachtal is all the more important in that the dedication, in a way, translates the domain, the fundamental identity of the god, with siue, “either, or”: he’s the “or” god. Vertumnus is one whom certain attributes immediately transform into another character or god. His entire domain is there; Propertius and Ovid provide dozens of illustrations of this, in which the cycle of the seasons, in particular, plays an important role, insofar as the god Vertumnus is associated with gardens and the seasons. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, he courts Pomona, the goddess who made the fruits of the garden grow. Yet a glance at our altar shows that this characteristic was perfectly known and understood by Fruendus or the Treveri, since the four figures that encircle the altar’s crown most likely represent the seasons. We cannot explain the sword or the torch, but perhaps they have to do with other attributes that explain Pisintus’ transformation into Vertumnus, or the opposite. The altar stood inside the small enclosure with altars and dedications consecrated to the Dii Casus or Cassus. If this name properly conveys the chance, the accidental or the fortuitous, we can grasp the reason for which Pisintus-Vertumnus was associated with the Dii Casus: The two types of deities were connected with chance, and the appearance of Vertumnus is a function of opportunity and context.
Another element that is no less interesting is that to know all this, one had to be literate, for the god himself, as I have said, was rare even in Rome, and it was only by reading, for example, the poets that someone in Trier could acquire information on this god, who was here assimilated to Pisintus. This literary knowledge, which serves as a theological operator, is attested to by another inscription, which was found in Raetia.
We now leave Belgica to go first to Raetia, to the city of Cambodunum (Kempten), where a lead curse tablet was found with the following inscription:Footnote 39 “Silent Mutes! Let Quartus be dumb, or be distraught; he wanders like a fleeing mouse or a bird before a basilisk, let his mouth be mute, Mutes! Let the Mutes be dread! Let the Mutes remain silent! Mutes! Mutes! Let Quartus go mad, let Quartus be brought to the Erinyes and Orcus. Let the Silent Mutes remain silent near the golden doors.” A classic curse tablet, but what is less classic is the invocation made to the Mutae Tacitae. This goddess, in the singular, is set by Ovid in the etiological myth of the Feralia, the festival of the dead at the end of February. This is the story that is connected to the birth of the Lares. A talkative nymph, Lara, from Lala, etymologically the “Talkative one,” revealed to Juno that her husband Jupiter was going to woo the nymph Juturna. She was punished and sent by the all-powerful to the underworld, to silence. It was Mercury who took her. Mercury, who was also the god of thieves and thugs, rapes her on the way. She clearly remained there and gave birth to two boys, who became the Lares. On our fragment of a curse tablet, Ovid’s Tacita Muta has become the Mutae Tacitae, following a relatively conventional practice that will not surprise us. The Eileithyiae, the Furrinae, the Camenae and others attest to this, being sometimes in the plural, sometimes in the singular. What is extraordinary, however, is the fact that Tacita Muta was only known to Ovid.Footnote 40 His etiology is a small masterpiece of the kind, to the extent that he could be considered as having invented everything, including the name of the goddess. In addition, we will note the fate reserved for the brave Quartus, sent to Orcus like Lara, and the role attributed to the mouse that already intervenes in the rite as it is described by Ovid (placing incense in a hole dug by a mouse), as if the author of the curse tablet were winking at the poet with these allusions.
But – and this is what interests us – we see the name Mutae Tacitae show up in Raetia! From two things to one. Either Tacita Muta was a real divine figure, or the author of the curse tablet was literate and had composed his invocation according to Ovid, himself creating a specialized goddess intended to silence a rival or an enemy. Which solution to choose? I am inclined toward the first, for the change from the singular to the plural Tacitae indicates in my opinion a religious practice known for decades. This was also the case for Furrina, found in the singular in the name of her lucus, until the time of Varro, in the middle of the first century BC, and then it appears in the plural on inscriptions from the end of the second and third centuries AD found in this sacred wood.
***
We can thus appreciate the value of this brief survey. In Rome, we almost never know how a cult was born, how a divinity was introduced. Not only do the origins explain nothing, as H. Versnel writes, but we never particularly know the origins, especially of the most important divinities. How was the Capitoline Triad installed in Rome? We have at our disposal only myths, and we must deduce the rest of the observations that we can make for the historical period, say in the first century BC and under the Empire. The religious restorations of Octavian/Augustus themselves, for which we have an impressive amount of evidence, are far from clear. Remember the arval brethren and their cult’s reinvention. Situations such as these that enable us to see the new cities of the provinces, especially in the colonies or the municipia, constitute a very privileged field of experimentation, the importance of which is just beginning to be seen. This is partly because we lack a document that suddenly helps us understand everything.
One of the most interesting lines of research is the following: the Roman deities – that is, those of Rome on the banks of the Tiber – were local and connected with their city and the families. They were not expected to be adopted far away and by foreigners, even if these foreigners became Roman citizens. Yet this is what happened. Those responsible for public religious life, family fathers in the settings of family devotions, and even individuals reflected, at the moment when they came into contact with a new institutional context, on how to reconstruct their collective religions. They chose Roman names for their gods – or sanctioned even older traditions – and gave them epicleses: Lenus, Intarabus, and others. They also adopted, qua members of a Roman collectivity, Roman deities. Seen from the Roman side, this new device made it possible to extend the domain of the gods of a Roman city. Somewhat like the provincial government extended, without too much distortion, the jurisdiction of the magistrates of the city of Rome. As the law, which was intended only to regulate relations between citizens in Rome, theology and sacred law were extended by a sort of legal fiction to divinities that were not Roman but henceforth had a vocation to act in a Roman context. It was, incidentally, the extension, according to strict guidelines, of the great Roman principles to the various cities of the empire that made possible the cohesion and the survival of the whole, as a recent study by Clifford Ando shows.Footnote 41 In religion, the question has not hitherto been studied, but it is also more difficult, inasmuch as, when the Roman world was Christianized and then destroyed by the Barbarians, Roman sacred law, the jurisprudence of which perhaps contained important data for this issue, fell into the trash cans of history.
Schoolteachers in the Roman world were a well-defined professional group. They were in charge of the first stages of education. In Latin they were called grammatici and rhetores, each designating a particular stage of education. Another term, praeceptores, referred to both groups, and probably held a vocational rather than scholarly connotation.Footnote 1 The first two terms are transliterations of Greek terms. The praeceptor, though a Latin term, followed a curriculum, which self-consciously found its origin in the Hellenized East.Footnote 2 Schoolteachers flourished during the High Empire.Footnote 3 In fact, from the reign of Vespasian onwards they enjoyed immunity from liturgies. An inscription from Pergamum contains information about an edict of Vespasian that gave certain privileges to grammatici and sophists, in addition to physicians: κελεύω μήτε ἐπισταθμεύεσθαι [αὐτοὺς μήτε εἰ] φορὰς ἀπαιτεῖσθαι ἐν μηδενὶ τρόπωι (‘I order that they will be not liable to have persons quartering with them or that they will be imposed with property tax in any fashion’).Footnote 4 This inscription corresponds to Dig. 50.4.18.30, except for the inclusion of philosophers amongst those upon whom Vespasian bestowed privileges.Footnote 5 It seems that Vespasian was the first to grant immunity for the whole class of teachers. A later inscription from Ephesus, which can be dated to the reign of Trajan, documents some of the financial privileges of grammarians and sophists, alongside physicians.Footnote 6 Knibbe, in his edition of the reconstructed text, argued that this rescript recalls an earlier senatus consultum or an edict of the triumvirs from the years 42–39 BCE.Footnote 7 In addition, their popularity soon became so widespread that Antoninus Pius was forced to restrict the application of immunities for schoolteachers, by setting a quota on the number of teachers each city was allowed to award such immunity.Footnote 8 However, the decision as to which teacher merited immunity was left to the cities themselves. This chapter aims to clarify the motives behind this policy, from both imperial and civic perspectives.
The Roman state offered no definition of schoolteachers or a method for evaluating their merits. The Roman legislator assigned civic institutions the right to choose their own schoolteachers, according to each city’s particular requirements and needs. The choice of teachers was not merely a choice of curriculum. It was a choice of a set of skills necessary for the city’s youth.Footnote 9 In order to explore the involvement of provincial cities in the administration of school teaching, this chapter will look into the identity of the teachers and what this reveals about the cities’ motives in granting them such expensive privileges. The form of the chapter follows the path paved by historians of health care during the High Roman Empire who examined the modus operandi of selecting public physicians. Such an analysis entails collecting relevant evidence concerning the identity of the practitioners and the information their communities left regarding their elections. Much like schoolteachers, immunity was also bestowed upon city-elected doctors, who also bore the title ‘public’.Footnote 10 These public physicians are mentioned in more than sixty papyri and were the recipients of an even larger number of honorary monuments. However, virtually no evidence of this kind exists when it comes to grammarians.
I wish to offer an explanation for this seeming discrepancy. Initially, I will sketch the history of school teaching in the Roman world, its origin, raison d’être, and typical personnel. This inquiry will be pertinent not because it necessarily depicts provincial teachers during the High Empire but because it portrays the image of schoolteachers that the Roman jurists must have had when bestowing privileges upon them. I will then proceed to examine the legal mechanism set by Rome for administrating professional activity in the provinces and try to uncover the grid of interests that guided this policy. Next, I will assume the point of view of the cities themselves who chose which schoolteachers to look after their children and consequently to receive privileges. Finally, I will ask whether schoolteachers fit into the rubric of intellectuals or artisans.
School Teaching in the Roman World: Origin, Raison d’être, and Personnel
According to Suetonius, grammar as a discipline and as a vocation was introduced into Rome by Livius Andronicus and by Q. Ennius who were teaching both at home and in public (domi forisque). Moreover, initially the teaching of grammar was restricted to the explanation of Greek authors and to the public reading of the Latin poems they themselves composed.Footnote 11 The prosopography and history of Rome’s first praeceptores suggests that the discipline of grammatica was likely to have emerged out of professional practice. Suetonius himself had noted that Lucius Aelius, Rome’s first native grammaticus, had a double cognomen. The first cognomen was Praeconius because his father was a praeco.Footnote 12 Kaster reasonably infers that the elder Aelius must have been a praeco publicus in Rome.Footnote 13 This position entailed assisting a magistrate as a herald and auctioneer with responsibilities to summon the assemblies of both the senate and the people for the purpose of the sale of state property and the letting of state contracts.Footnote 14 The vocational background of Aelius, who composed speeches for the like of Quintus Metellus, Quintus Caepio, and Quintus Pompeius Rufus, is interesting. Like all apparitores, the praecones received wages (merces).Footnote 15 Hence, for the purpose of self-promotion, this vocational cognomen must have been emphasized by Aelius himself, in his practice as a teacher, if Suetonius knew about it and deemed it worthy to mention. Aelius’ other cognomen was Stilo because he was in the habit of writing beautiful orations for whoever needed one.Footnote 16 On the evidence of Cicero’s Brutus 169, 205–7, it can be inferred that Aelius was a distinguished speechwriter but was not delivering his orations himself. Other protagonists of Suetonius’ DGR all share two distinctive attributes: a humble background and an aspirational character.
In addition, the growth of the Roman economy and the development of its legal system necessitated literacy, which, in turn, required professionals who would teach it. William Harris reasonably infers from Varro’s recommendation that the overseer of slaves (who was a slave himself) should be literate and that there was a growing demand for literacy, which was accommodated by professional schooling rather than home teaching.Footnote 17 Likewise, Cicero confirms that stipulations like laws and wills were done in writing.Footnote 18 Together with loans and debts, which must have been recorded in writing, these comments of Cicero and Varro exemplify how significant literacy, and the ability to acquire it, was in managing large households and in conducting business transactions. Under such conditions ‘a pervasive system of schools is a prerequisite for mass literacy’.Footnote 19 It is quite possible that lower-class children and even slaves were taught in schools to read and write.Footnote 20 While children of an upper-class background received their initial training at home or from a tutor, members of the lower classes must have attended schools, thus making teachers a necessity.Footnote 21 This hypothesis is further supported by the comment of Suetonius that between the first century BCE and the time of the composition of De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus there were at times more than twenty grammar schools in Rome operating simultaneously: Posthac magis ac magis et gratia et cura artis increvit, ut ne clarissimi quidem viri abstinuerint quo minus et ipsi aliquid de ea scriberent, utque temporibus quibusdam super viginti celebres scholae fuisse in urbe tradantur.Footnote 22 This claim is reaffirmed by epigraphic evidence from cities throughout Italy, which attests to the activity of schools.Footnote 23
With the decline of the Republic and the foundation of the Principate, literacy became a necessity for the imperial government, as can be attested by the emergence of positions such as ab epistulis, and, more generally, ‘the attraction to the immediate service of the emperor of men whose qualifications were essentially intellectual, literary or scholastic’.Footnote 24 These men attended to the various aspects of governing the empire, both from the Roman side and from the side of local communities.
Legal Mechanism of Administering Professional Activity in Provincial Cities during the High Empire
In sharp contrast to its Republican precedent, the Principate showed great interest in professional activity. Grammarians, alongside other professional groups, were encouraged by the Roman state to practice their trade in the cities of the Roman Empire. A series of imperial acts of legislation granted grammarians, alongside teachers of rhetoric and doctors, an exemption from tutelage, curatorship, and various other civic duties. Thus, Modestinus wrote in his treatise on exemptions from tutelage: ‘Grammarians, teachers of rhetoric and doctors who are known as general practitioners are exempt from tutelage and curatorship just as from other public duties’.Footnote 25 However, we understand from the Code of Justinian (10.53.1) that exemptions to professors and physicians were applicable only to those who served the community and were chosen and nominated by its formal institutions. Even more explicitly, Emperor Gordian instructed that ‘it is not unknown that grammarians or orators who have been approved by a decree of the decurions, if they should not show themselves to be useful to students, can be rejected again by the same council’.Footnote 26 Hence, the imperial government saw the raison d’être of these immunities to be practical rather than appreciation of cultural values. The practical aspect of these immunities is emphasized by the explicit exclusion of poets from its recipients.Footnote 27 In fact, it was necessary soon after these immunities were initially introduced for Pius to issue an edict restricting the number of such exemptions each city could issue. According to Modestinus, the cities were not at liberty to extend this number: ‘[F]urther, there are in every city a fixed number who are exempt from public duties, the selection of which is limited by law. This appears from a letter of Antoninus Pius written to the province of Asia, but of universal application.’Footnote 28 They were, however, allowed to reduce it ‘since this will result in a benefit to the public service’. This exemption from public duties could only be enjoyed by a person whom the city council chose, and as long as he was diligent in his work. By so doing, the Roman legislator circumvented any requirement for a licensing system, as the cities themselves acted as barriers against unskilled professionals and charlatans.
It is noteworthy that the Roman legislator understood grammarians and teachers of rhetoric to be a distinct group, separate from teachers of law. Hence the Roman legislator was aiming exclusively at schoolteachers. In fact, provincial law teachers were explicitly prohibited from being exempted, except for those who taught in Rome.Footnote 29 The importance of school teachers to the Roman imperial government is reaffirmed by Ulpian, who emphasized that it is the governor of the province who should settle law suits concerning salaries of teachers of various descriptions, alongside physicians, but not teachers of civil law.Footnote 30 The inclusion of this category of disputes under the jurisdiction of the governor confirms the significance Rome attributed to their work. Though Ulpian is silent as to how Rome perceived the value of the teachers’ work, it might be possible to infer it by noticing the other groups of professionals who were included in the same category as school teachers and had their disputes settled by the Roman governor. Alongside teachers we find masters of elementary schools who are not teachers (Ludi quoque litterarii magistris licet non sint professors), as well as archivists, shorthand writers and accountants or ledger-keepers (iam et librariis et notariis et calculatoribus sive tabulariis).Footnote 31 More generally, the governor should restrict his jurisdiction to professions involving writing or shorthand. Fergus Millar concluded that ‘nothing could show more clearly that the values which informed this system of exemptions were not based on practical considerations of service to the state, but on the prestige within contemporary culture of the various branches of learning’.Footnote 32 I would like to suggest an additional interpretation: that special care is given to those who train future bureaucrats, without whom the imperial government as well as local administration could not operate.
The Cities’ Point of View
It is clear from the work of Philostratus that sophists expected these privileges to be met. Thus, on his appointment as high priest, Favorinus demanded immunity from liturgies to which he was entitled as a philosopher.Footnote 33 A more vivid portrayal is that of Aelius Aristides, who was ordered at the winter of 153 CE by the Roman governor Severus either to take students or forgo his immunities. Though Aristides succeeded in maintaining his status (and perhaps not without taking students), this demand of Severus indicates that the Roman government had practical (rather than cultural) motives when bestowing immunities from liturgies.Footnote 34 Cities must have found the presence of schoolteachers to be attractive. Otherwise there would not have been a need to limit the number of exemptions the cities themselves could have willingly bestowed upon them. Furthermore, as was made explicit by the fourth-century emperor Julian, the imperial government sanctioned local administrative authorities to measure the skills of teachers and professors (magistros studiorum doctoresque) who merited immunities.Footnote 35 Yet an attempted prosopography of those who practiced it is somewhat baffling. Grammatici and rhetores seldom appear in inscriptions. When they do, it is almost exclusively a funerary inscription, where the epitaphs grammaticus and rhetor allude to professional identity. Unlike their equivalent ἀρχιατρόι and δημοσίοι ἰατρόι, the grammatici and rhetores appear with no official title.Footnote 36 The grammatici were not the beneficiaries of honorary monuments. For example, an inscription from the city of Rome was erected in memory of a beloved daughter by her grammaticus father.Footnote 37 A similar inscription, this one from Aquitania, recorded the life of a deceased doctor of the artes grammatices, whose love for his vocation appears on his tombstone: ‘Here lies Blaesianus Biturix, a doctor of the art of language and a teacher of decorum, a constant lover of the Muses, subdued forever by the hands of sleep’.Footnote 38 Similar inscriptions were found in Belgica;Footnote 39 Hispania citerior;Footnote 40 Dalmatia;Footnote 41 Baetica;Footnote 42 and Mauretania Caesariensis.Footnote 43 It is therefore clear that this profession and this form of epitaph existed all over the Latin West (I set aside discussion of the Greek East, where a distinction has to be drawn between praeceptores and sophists, as well as other aspects of Greek culture, which existed independently of Rome). In addition to these eight there are five Latin inscriptions recording a rhetor from Rome, Hispania citerior, Venetia et Histria (Regio X), Germania inferior, and Dalmatia.Footnote 44 These too were all funerary and privately erected.
The humble picture of the grammatici and rhetores, which emerges from the Latin inscriptions, is consistent with the one drawn by Suetonius in his history of these professions in the Roman world. According to Suetonius, teachers of rhetoric initially arrived from the Greek world and were characterized by their humble, and often foreign, origin.Footnote 45 Furthermore, they were artisans teaching for fees.Footnote 46 In fact, the discipline of grammatica likely emerged out of professional practice. The protagonists of Suetonius are often associated with the apparitores of the Roman magistrates in terms of skills and abilities. Scribes (scribae), messengers (viatores), lictors (lictores), and heralds (praecones) all needed an adequate level of literacy.
The Provincial Praeceptor: Between an Intellectual and an Artisan
Immunities and a widespread demand for education made school teaching a lucrative profession. In fact, Domitian had to issue a severe warning against praeceptores and physicians who trained slaves:
Emperor Caesar Domitian, holding the tribunician power for the thirteenth time, saluted imperator for the twenty-second time, perpetual censor, father of the fatherland, to Aulus Licinius Mucianus and Gavius Priscus. I have decided that the strictest restraints must be imposed on the avarice of physicians and teachers, whose art, which ought to be transmitted to selected freeborn youths, is sold in a most scandalous manner to many household slaves trained and sent out, not in the interest of humanity, but as a money-making scheme. Therefore, whoever reaps a profit from trained slaves must be deprived of that immunity bestowed by my deified father, just as if he were exercising his art in a foreign state.Footnote 47
It is assumed that slave owners who had their slaves trained in medicine and schoolteaching did so because these professions were gainful. These schoolteachers and physicians were artisans, not intellectuals engrossed in artes liberales. However, while a prosopography of the medical profession shows that some physicians habitually were part of the educated upper tier of provincial cities, and a study of the role of physicians who were given immunities indicates that their responsibilities extended beyond offering health care into the realm of forensic medicine, a study of schoolteachers indicates no such thing.Footnote 48 Of course, these schoolteachers must be discerned from the protagonists of Philostratus and other so-called sophists who were intellectuals of the highest repute, took part in municipal, provincial and even imperial government, and were recipients of great honours due to their benefactions to their cities. These individuals who were extensively studied were not schoolteachers.
A single papyrus recording a grammarian’s complaint and dated to the middle of the third century CE sheds light on the role of those appointed schoolteachers, on the motives of the city in appointing them, and their motives in wishing to be elected. The papyrus deals with an appeal of Lollianus, a public grammarian (δημόσιος γραμματικὀς) of Oxyrhynchus. Lollianus was appointed to this position by the city’s Boule and expected to receive the customary salary. In reality, Lollianus was rarely paid, and when he was, the wages took the form of commodities rather than money. Lollianus further complained that his duties were all-consuming, allowing him no additional work which would sustain him. It was, therefore, his request that he receive a city-owned orchard within the city walls.
While Lollianus’ title is elsewhere unattested, it could not have been unique.Footnote 49 As Lollianus himself mentioned, this was the title of grammarians who were bestowed with immunities from the city’s Boule: οἱ θεοὶ πρόγονοι ὑμῶν κατὰ μέγεθος τῶν πόλεων καὶ ποσότητα δημοσίων γραμματι[ῶ]ν. The decree of the emperor’s deified forefathers further instructed that the cities that selected public grammarians should give them wages: προστάξαντες καὶ συντάξεις αὐτοῖς δίδοσθαι. Moreover, Lollianus explained why Vespasian set this position and why wages should be paid. The grammaticus should dedicate all his time to educating the city’s children: ἡ περὶ τοὺς παῖδας ἐπιμέλεια. According to Lollianus this salary was habitually paid (τὴν σύνταξιν τ(ὴν) εἰωθυῖαν). This demand of Lollianus, which calls to mind a similar petition of a public physician in a Roman court at Alexandria a century earlier, relies on Roman legislation concerning immunities for these professionals. A physician by the name of Psasnis requested in 141 CE that the court restore his immunities, which were currently disregarded by the city of Oxyrhynchus, although he was an acting public physician: ἰατρὸς ὑπάρχων τὴ[ν τέ]χνην τούτους αὐτοὺς οἵτινές με εἰς λειτο[υ]ρ[γ]ίαν / δεδώκασι ἐθεράπευσα (I am a physician by skill and I cured these very men who assigned me to liturgy).Footnote 50 The ruling of the Roman court, presided over by Eudaimon, was that his immunity should be honoured, if indeed he is a public physician, which means one of those selected by the city’s boule and within the quota of permitted immune physicians by Pius’ rescript: δῖδαξον τ[ὸν στρα-] / τηγόν, εἰ ἰατρὸς εἶ δημοσ[ιε]ύων ἐπιτη[δειως] / καὶ ἕξεις τὴν ἀλειτουργησιαν (the Strategos answered, if you are a public physician you shall get immunity).Footnote 51 These petitions relied on the dual mechanism of Roman legislation and municipal administration, which means that Psasnis and Lollianus did not request that the Roman court recognize him as a public physician and a public grammarian. The status of δημόσιος was the ground of both petitions, and a proof for the common use of this title and institution.
Some Preliminary Conclusions
Schoolteachers like Lollianus were expected to educate the city’s young, an all-consuming task and humbly recompensed. The willingness of the Roman government to exempt teachers who practiced in provincial cities from munera or λειτουργία, which was reciprocated by cities themselves, requires an explanation. An appreciation of certain cultural institutions could have accounted for this act. However, the fact that other agents of this same culture, such as poets, musicians, or sculptors, were not the beneficiary of such privileges, and the complete absence of schoolteachers from all honorary monuments, work against this hypothesis. A second explanation, one which is based on interest rather than good will, might prove more convincing. Civic, municipal, and imperial government, as well as local businesses and the legal system required widespread literacy. Schoolteachers, like their counterpart physicians, offered an indispensable service to the cities. Like physicians, schoolteachers in residence were needed in the cities. Like physicians, schoolteachers gained a privileged place in their unlicensed professional community due to their election to a civic post. Like physicians, schoolteachers offered a service, which the cities recognized as indispensable. However, unlike physicians, schoolteachers remained anonymous throughout the period of the High Empire. They failed to break the glass ceiling for artisans. Unlike the sophists of either Peter Brunt’s Bubble of the Second Sophistic or those of Glen Bowersock’s Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire, Lollianus was not a scholar who also had students. He was a teacher by trade. By escaping the anonymity of his colleagues he merely emphasized the reality of his vocation: an artisan, whose inglorious skill, like that of the archivist, the shorthand writer, the accountant or the ledger-keeper, was much required throughout the cities of the High Roman Empire. Cities endowed schoolteachers with privileges because they needed to pay for their practical skills, not as a token of appreciation for the culture they represented.
Historicizing Ancient Nights
Forty years have passed since sociologist Murray Melbin published his article “Night as Frontier” drawing attention to historical aspects of the night in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and thus setting the foundations for a historical research of the night. Observing that nighttime activities increased as the settlement of new regions came to an end in the nineteenth century, he argued that the night was gradually perceived as another kind of frontier, as an area that should be colonized.Footnote 1 A few years later (1983), Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s Lichtblicke: Zur Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert discussed the dramatic impact of a technological change – artificial lighting that expanded nighttime activities – on the society, culture, and economy of nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote 2 In the decades the followed, especially after the turn of the century, historical research has studied significant aspects of the night in medieval and Early Modern Europe, in the Ottoman Empire, and in the modern world,Footnote 3 focusing on phenomena such as crime, policing, and the maintenance of order, witchcraft and Christian piety, debating, feasting, and entertaining at the royal courts, the rise of street lighting, differences between city and countryside, the emergence of new forms of entertainment, and the relation between gender and nocturnal activities.Footnote 4 Although certain aspects of the night, such as the symposion, dreaming, nocturnal rites, and sexuality, had long attracted the interest of Classical scholars, only in recent years have ancient historians and philologists, and to a much lesser extent archaeologists and art historians, more systematically turned their attention to what happened in the Greco-Roman world between sunset and sunrise, also at dusk and at dawn, and what perceptions and stereotypes are connected with the night.Footnote 5 Subjects that have been treated in this process include sleep, sleeplessness, dreaming, and supernatural assaults,Footnote 6 religious practices and incubation in sanctuaries,Footnote 7 the night as the setting of narratives and images,Footnote 8 nocturnal violence and safety measures,Footnote 9 artificial light,Footnote 10 private and public banquets,Footnote 11 and nocturnal writing and epigraphy.Footnote 12
An important methodological issue in the historical study of the night is the fact that the ‘night’ is a marked word; it is a term that carries special social and cultural connotations, giving emphasis to a statement and enhancing emotional display.Footnote 13 The function of the night as an enhancer of emotions influences the representation of the night in texts; certain aspects – especially, sex, danger, violence, and supernatural phenomena – are overrepresented over more mundane subjects such as resting or working (fishing, watering the fields, going to the market, etc.). As a ‘marked’ interval of time, the night has been enduringly associated with a certain set of perceptions: It is intimately linked with fear, anxiety, and erotic desire; it is associated with death and the communication between mortals and the gods, the living and the dead; and it plays a great part in the creation of a sense of togetherness.Footnote 14 Despite the difficulties and distortions emerging from universal and diachronic perceptions of the night, one may still observe changes triggered by a variety of factors. The clearest changes can be detected in the world of the Greek cities from roughly the mid fourth century BCE to the late second century CE. A close study of the documentary evidence – inscriptions and papyri – reveals a significant increase in nocturnal religious activities and ‘free time activities’ – visiting baths and gymnasia, and attending private and public dinners.Footnote 15 The intensive warfare in the period between Alexander and Actium and the increased nighttime activities in cities, often connected with the presence of women in sanctuaries and public spaces after sunset, forced civic authorities to address in a more systematic manner the perennial problem of nocturnal safety. The principal factors that had an impact on how the night was experienced and lived in Hellenistic cities and in the Roman East were the continuous wars, the mobility of persons that contributed to the growth of voluntary associations and their nocturnal conviviality, the popularity of mystery cults, the existence of incubation sanctuaries, and the financial contributions of benefactors.Footnote 16 The part played by advancements in technology and science was more limited. This general trend, visible in Hellenistic cities and continually growing in the Imperial period, reached its peak in the big urban centers of Late Antiquity. As Leslie Dossey has argued,Footnote 17 one may observe in the cities of the Roman East a clear shift towards late hours for dining, bathing, and routine activities, not only for religious celebrations. This shift increased the awareness of safety issues and ultimately contributed to the spread of street lighting.
Understandably, the attempts to sketch a ‘history of the night’ in the Hellenistic World, the Roman East, and Late Antiquity that I summarized here do not consider local peculiarities and possible short-term developments. Comparing nighttime cultures in the Mediterranean territories of the Roman Empire is an important task. However, it is severely impeded by the imbalance in the source material. There is no Pompeii in Asia Minor; private documents in papyri and ostraka survive only in Egypt and, in limited numbers, in Israel and Syria; civic honorific decrees for benefactors are a phenomenon connected with the civic traditions of Greece and Asia Minor; we only have limited narrative sources about North Africa, Gaul, or Spain; the evidence from Rome is shaped by its role as an imperial capital and the overwhelming presence of the emperor, and so on. This imbalance renders comparisons a hazardous undertaking. The scope of this chapter, which is not based on a systematic study of all available sources, is very limited. I will examine the extent to which the creation of an empire of many nations contributed to convergences in nightlife.
The Realities behind the Nocturnal Stereotypes
The representation of the night in the textual sources is dominated by stereotypes shaped by diachronic and universal experiences. The darkness challenges vision and alerts other senses, especially listening, touching, and smelling. Emotional responses are no less enhanced than sensory. This was already known to Achilles Tatius (second century CE). In his novel Leukippe and Kleitophon he presents the protagonist explaining how all wounds are more painful by night and all our emotions burst out – the grief of those who mourn, the anxieties of those who are troubled, the fears of those who are in danger, and the fiery desire of those who are in love.Footnote 18 A man in the Arsinoite nome, a contemporary of Achilles Tatius, describes his torments when his wife abandoned him with these words: ‘I want you to know that ever since you left me I have been in mourning, weeping at night and lamenting during the day.’Footnote 19 In the late first century CE, Statius addressed his wife in almost exactly the same way – asking her why she sorrows by day and fetches painful sighs in the night, passing it with him in sleepless worry.Footnote 20 And a metrical graffito in the domus Tiberiana in Rome describes how the soul finds no peace as burning erotic desire chases sleep away.Footnote 21 Because of the night’s emotive impact, the explicit reference to the night in a narrative was often intended to magnify emotional arousal.Footnote 22 This is why we have direct references to the fact that an earthquake occurred during the night in Greek and Latin inscriptions.Footnote 23
Consequently, references to the night in literary sources, inscriptions, and papyri are likely to be influenced by the function of the night as an intensifier of empathy. Nevertheless, stereotypes reflect real experiences. References to nocturnal activities in Juvenal’s satires of the late first and early second century CE are a case in point. His nocturnal themes cover a limited thematic range that principally concerns sex, danger, and entertainment. There are references to nighttime lovers and the nocturnal escapades of Messalina in brothels;Footnote 24 to noisy drunks and to a wealthy woman who goes to the baths at night, keeping her dinner guests waiting and overcome by boredom and hunger; to parasites that party all night long;Footnote 25 to a millionaire who, terrified for his valuable belongings, keeps a team of slaves watching all night;Footnote 26 and to such a variety of dangers, that
if you go out to dinner without making a will, you might be regarded as careless, unaware of those tragic events that occur: there are as many opportunities for you to die, as there are open windows watching you, while you walk by at night.Footnote 27
Tiles can fall on one’s head from the highest roof; a cracked and leaky pot plunges down, pots are emptied over you – not to mention the thieves.Footnote 28 And when the Pontine Marsh or the Gallinarian Forest are temporarily rendered safe by an armed patrol, the ruffian vagabonds skip out of there and head for Rome.Footnote 29 Only the wealthy can afford to walk with a long retinue of attendants, and plenty of torches and lamps of bronze; they despise anyone who, like Juvenal, walks by the light of the moon or the flickering light of a lamp.Footnote 30 Those who do not fall into the group of the drunk, the oversexed, the terrified, and the dangerous are the literati, whose identity is shaped precisely by their lack of sleep and their nocturnal dedication to letters: They are the poets scribbling sublime verses all night in their tiny attics, and the young men urged by their fathers to quit sleep and turn to their wax tablets and the study of law.Footnote 31
Although Juvenal’s verses are clearly dominated by stereotypes, they still evince certain historical dimensions of the night and reflect realities. The night is experienced in a different manner by the poor and the rich, the urbanites and the country folk, the young and the old, the men and the women, the masters and the attendants, the educated and the common people, the owners of wealth and those who want to relieve them of it. The prevailing feelings are those of fear and erotic desire.
Despite the lack of street lighting in Rome,Footnote 32 there is a lot of traffic in Juvenal’s verses: people returning from dinner parties or going to the baths, guards patrolling dangerous places, and criminals ambushing inattentive victims. The first impression, that Juvenal’s people are mostly engaged in leisurely activities – dining and drinking, visiting the baths, and having sex – is deceiving. Apart from the usual practitioners of darkness – the criminals – we encounter a young man studying the law, slaves guarding private houses and accompanying their masters in the dark streets, and night watches patrolling dangerous places; and of course the dinner parties, the brothels, and the baths presuppose not only those who enjoy themselves but also cooks, musicians, prostitutes, and bath attendants.
Juvenal’s references to nighttime activities are shaped by the themes of his poetry, exactly as centuries earlier Sappho’s praise of the potential offered by the night for erotic encounters and celebrations was shaped by the themes of her poetry.Footnote 33 But they are also shaped by the historical context: As we can judge from other sources, the background of the nocturnal scenes painted by Juvenal is the contemporary awareness that the night is more than the privileged territory of criminals, conspirators, magicians, and uncontrolled, ecstatic, or secretive worshippers as it had been in the Republican period.Footnote 34 One generation earlier, in Seneca’s times, a certain Sextus Papinius was known as lychnobius (‘living under the light of the lamp’), because he had reversed the functions of day and night. He went over his accounts in the third hour of the night, exercised his voice in the sixth, went out for a drive in the eighth, visited the baths before dawn, and dined in the early morning.Footnote 35 Admittedly, such a behavior was noted as an abnormality, exactly as an imaginary city in Iberia, described by Antonius Diogenes in his novel The Incredible Things beyond Thoule, where people could see during the night and were blind during the day.Footnote 36 But the lychnobius’ anomalous timetable still required a bath that was accessible before dawn. Surely, not every bath was accessible in the night,Footnote 37 but both Seneca and Juvenal (see note 25) make clear that some were. We can neither generalize from such references nor quantify the evidence because of the imbalances of the source material available. Questions such as ‘Were there more people awake during the night in Imperial Rome than in Republican Rome?’ or ‘Was there more nightlife in the Roman East than, say, in Roman Spain?’ are meaningless. The historical question that one can ask with a higher chance of a response is whether the creation of an empire and the social and cultural forces that this process unleashed had an impact on the night and contributed to a nocturnal koine in the Roman Empire. In this chapter I will consider two important factors of convergence in the Roman Empire: the emperor and his administration, and the increased mobility of people, cultural practices, ideas, cults, and rites. The establishment of the Principate and the emperor’s bundle of powers had an impact on the administration and the society of Imperium. How did it affect the nightlife of the population in Rome and the provinces? With this question I am not concerned with the extreme behavior of some Roman emperors, such as Nero’s idea to burn Christians as human torches in 64 CE,Footnote 38 or Elagabal’s reversal of the functions of day and night, criticized by the author of the Historia Augusta.Footnote 39 I mean primarily the impetus for policing measures and celebrations after sunset.
Policing the Night
Although night guards are attested as early as our earliest textual sources,Footnote 40 the proliferation of evidence for nyktophylakes in the eastern provinces, especially in Asia Minor Egypt, and Palestine,Footnote 41 and for vigiles in the western provinces (see note 50) is likely to be connected, at least in part, with the attention given by Augustus to this matter. In 6 CE he established a regular service of vigiles, replacing the earlier system of tresviri nocturni,Footnote 42 and according to Appian he had already introduced nyktophylakes by 36/35 BCE.Footnote 43 In a letter to Knidos (6 BCE), the princeps explained his interest in public and private safety during the night. The letter concerns a man accused of the death of an enemy who, alongside some companions, had been harassing the accused man for three nights; when a slave tried to empty a chamber pot on the assailants who were besieging the house, the pot fell and killed one of them. Augustus unambiguously expresses his indignation that someone was put on trial for defending his own house during the night.Footnote 44
I learned that Phileinos son of Chrysippos had attacked the house of Eubulos and Tryphera for three nights in succession with violence and in the manner of a siege … I am amazed that you do not show indignation against those who deserved to suffer every punishment, since they attacked another’s house three times at night with violence and force and were destroying the common security of all.
Beyond this general interest in security that may be attributed to influence exercised by imperial authority, there were local peculiarities. For instance, a regulation limiting the selling of wine during the night is only attested in Roman Palestine. The Leviticus Rabba narrates the following incident:Footnote 45
It happened once that a certain man, who used regularly to drink twelve xestes of wine a day, one day drank [only] eleven. He tried to go to sleep, but sleep would not come to him. [So] he got up in the dark and went to the wine-shop, and said to [the wine-seller]: ‘Sell me one xestes of wine.’ [The latter] replied to him: ‘I cannot, for it is dark.’ He said to him: ‘If you do not give [it] me, sleep will not come to me.’ [To which the wine-seller] replied: ‘Just now the watchmen have passed from here, and I am afraid of the watchmen and can [therefore] not give [it] to you.’ [The man] raised his eyes and saw a hole in the door. [So] he said to him: ‘Hold the bottle up to this hole; you pour from the inside and I shall drink from the outside.’ He was insistent. What did the wine-seller do? He put the spout [of the bottle] through the crack in the door and poured from the inside, while the other drank from the outside. As soon as he finished [drinking], he fell asleep in a corner in front of the door. The watchmen passed by him before the door, and thinking him a thief, beat him.
We cannot always determine whether policing measures were taken on a permanent basis, or only temporarily, in order to meet an emergency. Whether they were effective or not depended on numbers, budget, and competence.Footnote 46
Another area in which impulses for safety came from Imperial Rome was firefighting. The city of Rome had fire squads,Footnote 47 and at the time of Cassius Dio, the guards of apartment blocks in Rome carried bells (kodonophorein) in order to signal alarm in case of an emergency.Footnote 48 Pliny was shocked to find out that when a fire destroyed private houses as well as the Gerousia and the Temple of Isis in Nikomedeia, the city had no fire engines, no buckets, no other implements to fight the fire. It was at his initiative that these would be procured.Footnote 49 In his letter to Trajan he alludes to the existence of guilds of firefighters in other cities, admitting that under certain conditions such guilds presented a threat. Praefecti vigilum existed in some cities of the western provinces; firefighting duties were also undertaken by collegia.Footnote 50 Of course, firefighting is not exclusively a matter of nocturnal security, but it is instructive with regard to the impact of imperial authority and administration on security measures in the provinces.
An issue related to public order is the use of water of public facilities by private individuals. An inscription of Stratonikeia (ca. mid first century BCE) lists the people who had acquired the right to use the water of a fountain ‘day and night’.Footnote 51 Although the management of water resources had been a concern of Greek cities since early times,Footnote 52 this is the earliest attestation of a regulation concerning access to water during the night. The aim must have been to avoid the use of water resources without the payment of a fee and also to avoid conflicts. The explicit reference to the night is related not to the possibilities offered by darkness for illicit actions but perhaps rather to the preference to use water for irrigation after sunset. This certainly is the case in two documents of the Imperial period that explicitly refer to nocturnal access to water, showing a similar concern for nocturnal activities. An inscription from Tibur records the water rights of two landowners ab hora noctis … ad horam diei.Footnote 53 A contract of sale in the Babatha Archive (Maoza) determines the exact time of the night that irrigation of a piece of land was allowed (120 CE).Footnote 54
Nocturnal security is a concern as old as humankind. The evidence summarized here reveals, however, an increased awareness of this issue. The similarity of practices and the uniform terminology suggest a certain degree of convergence. A variety of factors, ranging from the imperial ideology of security and the existence of an empire-wide administration to the movement of Roman officials and, with them, of experiences and practices (as revealed by Pliny’s letters), may have contributed to this.
Emulating the Imperial Generosity and Imperial Afterlife
The display of imperial munificentia is another new development with an impact on the nocturnal cityscape. It was thanks to the initiative and generosity of emperors that public banquets and spectacles that in earlier periods ended around sunset now continued into the night. In the capital of the Empire, the emperors organized public banquets that allowed for the participation of representatives of different classes. Although these inclusive events could momentarily create the illusion of equality, they ultimately confirmed social barriers by explicitly referring to the participants’ unequal social and legal statuses, making special spatial arrangements, and providing varied portions to different groups.Footnote 55
The secular games in Rome included nocturnal performances. The most magnificent celebration was staged by Augustus in late May/early June of 17 BCE.Footnote 56 In accordance with an oracle, the people were to enjoy festivities and banquets ‘day and night without interruption’.Footnote 57 A sacrifice to the Moirai in the Campus Martius took place in the evening of May 31, followed by torchlight entertainment that was presented on a stage without auditorium seats for the spectators. A select group of 110 wives of citizens held a procession and a ritual banquet symbolically attended by the gods, whose images were placed at the site; young people were allowed to attend if accompanied by an adult relative.Footnote 58 This model was followed by later emperors.Footnote 59
Although Domitian’s private entertainments were purportedly never prolonged after sunset,Footnote 60 the emperor also organized nocturnal banquets that drew large numbers from all ordines.Footnote 61 Furthermore, his munera in Rome included hunts of wild animals and gladiatorial combats that continued into the night, while the circus was illuminated with artificial light (venationes gladiotoresque et noctibus ad lychnuchos).Footnote 62
Such imperial events, experienced by huge audiences, talked of and commemorated in texts, may have served as a model for local benefactors, naturally on a smaller scale.Footnote 63 Public dinners for the entire population, held in connection with religious festivals, were not a novelty in Greek culture.Footnote 64 From the late Hellenistic period on, they were among the events that offered members of the elite an opportunity to show off their generosity by extending invitations to a broad cross section of the population – male citizens, married and unmarried women, freedmen and slaves, foreign residents, and the people of the countryside; this trend continued into the Imperial period.Footnote 65 Traditionally, public banquets took place in the afternoon and were completed before sunset, but in the Imperial period, the continuation of festivities into the night was not uncommon.Footnote 66 For instance, in second-century CE Bithynia, inscriptions listing benefactors regularly include the purposes for which money had been offered: drinking parties (oinoposion) and concerts (symphonia). The lighting of lamps (lychnapsia) suggests nocturnal feasts.Footnote 67 In Stratonikeia (second century CE), a priest and his wife
offered a complete banquet in the gymnasium to all the citizens, the foreigners, and the slaves and [- -]; they also offered a banquet to all the women, those of citizen status, the free women, and the slaves [- -]; … they organized a contest at their own expense, paying for the most celebrated shows, throughout the day and for a large part of the night.Footnote 68
Such services, unattested before the Imperial period and possibly influenced by imperial largesse, remained an extraordinary phenomenon.
An imperial impulse of an entirely different nature is the influence that the apotheosis of the emperor had on the widespread perception of death as an ascent to the skies. In the Imperial period, a significant number of grave inscriptions report that a deceased individual had become a star.Footnote 69 An epigram from Albanum in the early third century CE presents a boy addressing his father from the grave:
Cry no longer, sweetest father, and no longer feel pain, carrying in your heart inconsolable grief. For subterranean Hades is not hiding me under the earth, but instead an eagle, Zeus’ assistant, snatched me away, when I was enjoying the fire and the torch, to take my place next to the morning star and the beautiful evening star.Footnote 70
We can imagine the parents turning their gaze to the sky at dusk and dawn, looking for their son or daughter among the stars. Such concepts gave the starry sky a new quality.
Cultural Transfer and the Nocturnal Cityscapes of the Empire
The degree of homogenization and persistence of local peculiarities differed greatly in the Roman Empire, depending on a variety of factors that cannot be discussed here. But all differences notwithstanding, we can still observe certain common features, of which I only mention two that had an impact on the nightlife of urban centers: the diffusion of voluntary associations and nocturnal religious celebrations.
Private clubs are already attested in Athens in the early sixth century BCE, and sodalitates are mentioned in the Twelve Tables.Footnote 71 But the spread of voluntary associations in every major urban center is a phenomenon first of the Hellenistic period, for the Greek world, and of the Imperial period for the Empire.Footnote 72 In the main urban centers of both East and West, guilds became a primary mediator of social and economic interaction. Private cult associations were also the basis of religious worship for larger groups within the urban populations than before the conquests of Alexander in the East and the Roman expansion in the West. Regular banqueting and convivial drinking were common activities of koina and collegia.Footnote 73 Some of these gatherings occurred after sunset. In Rome, the leges conviviales mentioned in literary sources defined rules for nocturnal drinking parties in connection with the Saturnalia. An example of such norms survives in the lex Tappula from Vercellae, a parody of a plebiscitum. The statutes are stated to have been approved in the eleventh hour of the night in a shrine of Hercules.Footnote 74 Hercules was also the divinity to whose worship an Athenian club of the second century CE was dedicated. Its officials, the pannychistai (‘those who conduct service during the all-night celebration’), were possibly responsible for order during the club’s nocturnal gatherings.Footnote 75
As we can infer from member lists of associations, membership was often open to representatives of the lower social strata. Voluntary associations accepted foreigners, craftsmen, slaves, and in some cases women as members; of course, professional koina and collegia consisted of craftsmen and the representatives of various trades. With the diffusion of private associations, a nighttime activity typically associated with the propertied classesFootnote 76 was opened on specific days to larger groups of the population. The diffusion of the regular nocturnal conviviality of the private clubs coincides with – and was probably influenced by – conviviality in the circle of the Roman nobilitas and the imperial court.Footnote 77
Although nocturnal religious ceremonies are not an innovation of the Hellenistic period, the Late Republic, or the Principate, their number certainly increased along with the diffusion of cults with a soteriological or initiatory aspect.Footnote 78 The main celebrations of a variety of religious groups were either nocturnal – enhancing emotional arousal, engendering feelings of exclusivity and a sense of identity – or took place just before dawn. The unprecedented connectivity created by the Empire favored the diffusion of cults, religious practices, and religious ideas,Footnote 79 and can, therefore, be regarded as an important factor for the frequency of nocturnal rites. I cannot present here an inventory of such rites in the Empire, but a few examples may illustrate how cult transfer had an impact on the night.
Mystery cults are a case in point, since they are often associated with nocturnal rites and the conscious use of darkness and artificial light. This is known to have happened in Eleusis, one of the oldest and most revered mystery cults, already in the Archaic and Classical period and continued in later periods.Footnote 80 In the mid second century CE, the Eleusinian mysteries served as a model for the mystery cult of Glykon New Asklepios in Abonou Teichos, which included a sacred drama that took place during the night.Footnote 81
The use of lamps was an important feature of Egyptian cults, and Achilles Tatius (second cent. CE) characterizes the Serapis festival of lights as the greatest spectacle that he had ever seen.Footnote 82 As the Egyptian cults spread in the Mediterranean, so did their nocturnal celebrations. Processions under torchlight (λαμπαδεία) are attested in Athens, Delos, Priene, and Maroneia,Footnote 83 and in the tenth book of the Metamorphoses Apuleius describes nocturnal initiation rites associated with Isis.Footnote 84 We may attribute the introduction of the office of the lychnaptria – the female cult servant who lit the lamps – into the cult of Meter Theon in Leukopetra, near Beroia in Macedonia, and into the cult of Dionysus in Philippopolis to the emulation of Isiac practices.Footnote 85 Rites during the night are also attested in Samothrace, a sanctuary that in the Imperial period was visited by initiates from many different regions.Footnote 86
Nocturnal ceremonies of an orgiastic nature were traditionally associated with the worship of Dionysus.Footnote 87 When introduced into Italy in the late third century BCE, they were met with suspicion by the Roman authorities and contained by the senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus of 186 BCE.Footnote 88 By the Imperial period, associations of Bacchic initiates were no longer regarded as a threat to safety, and were free to perform their nocturnal rites and celebrations.Footnote 89 Philo of Alexandria explicitly attributes to Dionysiac influence the introduction of nocturnal spiritual activities and wine consumption among the Jewish therapeutai in Egypt in the early first century CE.Footnote 90
After the supper they hold the sacred vigil … They rise up all together and standing in the middle of the refectory (symposion) form themselves first into two choirs, one of men and one of women … Then they sing hymns to God composed of many measures and set to many melodies, sometimes chanting together, sometimes taking up the harmony antiphonally, hands and feet keeping time in accompaniment, and rapt with enthusiasm reproduce sometimes the lyrics of the procession, sometimes of the halt and of the wheeling and counter-wheeling of a choric dance. Then … having drunk as in the Bacchic rites of the strong wine of God’s love they mix and both together become a single choir … Thus they continue till dawn, drunk with this drunkenness in which there is no shame.
An interesting feature of religiosity in the Imperial period is religious service at dusk and before sunrise, unattested in earlier periods. The custom of regular prayer at dawn is attested for the worshippers of Theos Hypsistos. An oracle of Apollo Klarios, associated with this cult, pronounced ‘that aether is god who sees all, gazing upon whom you should pray at dawn looking towards the sunrise’.Footnote 91 An essential feature of the cult of Theos Hypsistos was the lighting of fire on altars and lamps.Footnote 92 For instance, a family in Magnesia on Sipylos dedicated to Theos Hypsistos an altar and a candelabra (λυχναψίαι).Footnote 93 Numerous bronze objects from the Roman East dated to the third century CE have been shown to be lamp hangers used in the cult of Theos Hypsistos (λύχνος κρεμαστός).Footnote 94 One of the few things that Pliny was able to discover about the Christians in the early second century CE is that they gathered to pray before dawn:
they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food – but ordinary and innocent food.Footnote 95
Regular ceremonies after sunset and before sunrise are also attested for the sanctuary of Asclepius in Epidaurus through a fragmentary inscription (second or third century CE). In the preserved text, one recognizes references to the services that the torchbearer had to perform in the shrines of the Mother of the Gods and Aphrodite, to duties involving lamps (lychnoi) and the ‘sacred lamp’ (hiera lychnia), and to rituals at dusk (ὅταν ἑσπέρας αἱ σπον[δαὶ γίνωνται]) and dawn ([ὁ ἕω]θεν ἀνατέλλων̣).Footnote 96 In early first-century CE Teos, the priest of Tiberius was responsible for rituals that took place when the temple of Dionysus was opened and closed, that is, at dawn and dusk; these rituals included libations, the burning of incense, and the lighting of lamps.Footnote 97
As mystery cults served as trendsetters, nocturnal ceremonies became more common than ever before. Among those which are unattested in early periods and seem to be either new rituals or revivals of old ones as the result of the broader trends of the Imperial period, I mention the embassy sent by Lykian Termessos to the Moon, consisting of members of the city’s elite,Footnote 98 the cult of the star-god Astros Kakasbos in the same polis,Footnote 99 the cult of Nocturnus and the Nocturni in Pannonia,Footnote 100 and the nighttime sacrifices for Saturnus in Numidia.Footnote 101
Euergetic Nights
I have already mentioned the role played by benefactors in the organization of public banquets. A leisurely activity that in the Imperial period took place after sunset more often than before was visiting public baths. Bathing culture was significantly enlarged, diffused, and transformed in the eastern provinces and introduced into the western ones during the Imperial period.Footnote 102 Emperors and local benefactors, more than local authorities, made the greatest contribution towards the construction, upkeep, and improvement of bathing facilities in both Rome and the provinces.Footnote 103 Although baths were typically visited before sunset and dinner,Footnote 104 in large cities like Rome, baths were also accessible after sunset. As cited earlier, Juvenal mentions a lady who visits the baths in the night, keeping her dinner guests waiting. The regulations concerning the operation of a bathhouse at Metallum Vipascense in Lusitania provide for the opening of the facility until the second hour of the night.Footnote 105 The operation of public baths during the night was not a common phenomenon in the Roman East, but it is nevertheless attested in connection with festivals and as a result of the public services of benefactors. It was thanks to euergetic generosity that in Stratonikeia the baths of men and women remained open for a significant part of the night during the festivals of Zeus and Hera.Footnote 106
In the Roman East, the bathing facilities were usually associated with gymnasia. Typically, gymnasia were open from sunrise to sunset.Footnote 107 For instance, the recently published ephebarchical law of Amphipolis (23 BCE) obliged the ephebarchos to make sure that the ephebes did not leave their home before daybreak and returned before sunset; they clearly were not allowed to be at a gymnasion after sunset;Footnote 108 in Magnesia on Sipylos someone was honored for providing oil to all men, young and old, but until the night, not during the night.Footnote 109 To the best of my knowledge, all evidence for gymnasia that were in operation night and day (νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας) or for a large part of the night (τὸ πλεῖστον/ἐπὶ πολὺ μέρος τῆς νυκτός) concerns the generosity and initiative of wealthy supervisors of gymnasia in Asia Minor (first to third century CE).Footnote 110 This was not to be taken for granted. But still, the largesse of some men could become a model and inspiration for their successors.
The Night as a Frontier
The phenomena that I briefly discussed in this chapter are but a small part of what filled the nights in the Roman Empire with life. I have intentionally avoided the discussion of evidence whose existence or abundance in the Imperial period might be attributed to the ‘epigraphic habit’ or to the increased number of inscriptions and papyri. Such evidence, relevant for a comprehensive study of the night but connected with specific methodological problems, includes changes in private dining,Footnote 111 Latin inscriptions of the Imperial period that record the time of death as during the night,Footnote 112 the custom of setting up dedications in accordance with a divine command received during a dream (κατ᾿ ὄναρ, ex visu),Footnote 113 and the existence of incubation sanctuaries.Footnote 114
A shared feature of some nocturnal phenomena that can be observed in many parts of the Empire is that activities that typically ended before or at sunset were extended beyond the ‘boundary’ of darkness: partaking of food and wine, celebrating, bathing, training in athletic facilities, organizing processions. The ‘boundary’ of darkness was crossed thanks to the human agency of the emperor, local benefactors, and religious officials. This was regarded as a service worthy of mention in honorific inscriptions and, in the case of the emperors, record by historians. We can understand the mentality behind the commemoration of such achievements – offering hunts of wild animals and gladiatorial combats under artificial light, having a contest last ‘throughout the day and for a large part of the night’, offering olive oil ‘to every property and age class in both baths, both day and night’, leaving the gymnasia open ‘for a large part of the night’ and so on – if we compare them with the praise for the pancratiast Tiberius Claudius Rufus: While pursuing victory in Olympia, ‘he endured to continue the fight until the night, until the stars came out, as his hope of victory encouraged him to fight more vigorously’.Footnote 115 What the emperors and the benefactors did was similar: Displaying motivation and engagement, they crossed a frontier that others hesitated or were not accustomed to cross. This is why their services were extraordinary. But extraordinary services can become trendsetters.
Another group of the phenomena that I discussed – improving the security during the night and improving the communication between mortals and gods – also perceive the darkness of the night as a ‘boundary’: the boundary of a world that either needs to be tamed and become secure or to be placed in the service of humans, facilitating their communication with divine or superhuman powers. There is a whole range of activities in the Roman Empire that fall under this category and could not be discussed here: going to sanctuaries to dream of the gods, interpreting and inducing dreams, understanding the movement of the stars through astrology, and recruiting the chthonic powers against adversaries through magic. The circulation of handbooks of dream interpretation, astrology, and magic contributed to a certain homogeneity of practices that primarily took place during the night.Footnote 116
Despite their criticism against those who reversed the functions of day and night, intellectuals of the Imperial period reveal a similar attitude towards the night. They regarded it as a frontier that confronts people with challenges and requires efforts in order to place it under control. Seneca’s treatise On Darkness as a Veil for Wickedness evidences a strong interest in the rational use of the night. After complaining about the fact that some people in contemporary Rome had reversed the functions of light and darkness, passing their evenings amid wine and perfumes and eating dinners of multiple courses, he goes on to advise his readers to lengthen their lives by cutting the night short and using it for the day’s business.Footnote 117 In his recommendations to orators, Lucian alludes to the necessity of nighttime work, when he writes that the Classical statues reveal sleepless nights, toil, abstinence from wine, and simple food.Footnote 118 The Paedagogus of Clement of Alexandria, written around 200 CE, prescribes to Christians a nocturnal behavior that is contrasted to what we must regard as a common practice. Clement recommended to fill the night with activities other than banquets accompanied by music and excessive drinking. His readers should often rise by night and bless God, and devote themselves to literature and art; women should turn to the distaff. People should fight against sleep, in order to partake of life for a longer period through wakefulness.Footnote 119 The gradual improvement of artificial lighting, which reached its peak in Late Antiquity with the development of glass lamps and the introduction of street lighting,Footnote 120 is part of the same process of facing the challenges of the night.
So, how do we answer the question implied by the title of this chapter: many nations, one night? The diffusion of sources is uneven, reflecting local differences in institutions, cultural practices, the persistence of older traditions, and the levels of literacy and urbanization. Wherever and whenever sufficient numbers of relevant sources survive – especially honorific inscriptions and dedications – we observe the same trend: the night was a frontier that invited the adventurous and the inventive, the generous and the ambitious, the faithful and the hopeful to cross it.Footnote 121
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