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

256 Pages·2020·6.006 MB·English

by  Jesper Majbom Madsen

From Trophy Towns to City- States
EMPIRE AND AFTER
Series Editor: Clifford Ando
A complete list of books in the series
is available from the publisher.
From Trophy Towns
to City- States
Urban Civilization
and Cultural Identities
in Roman Pontus
Jesper Majbom Madsen
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book
may be reproduced in any form by any means without
written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104- 4112
www .upenn .edu /pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
ISBN 978- 0- 8122- 5237- 8
Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The Eternal Hunt for Glory 15
Chapter 2. Building Cities from the Ground 48
Chapter 3. Introducing Civic Life 96
Chapter 4. Eager to Be Both Greek and Roman 152
Conclusion 199
Notes 209
Bibliography 227
Index 239
Acknowledgments 245

Introduction
In 66 bce, in the woods of Armenia Minor, Pompey the Great defeated Mithri-
dates VI Eupator, making Pompey one of the most successful Roman generals
of all time. At the same time, this presented him with the enormous challenge
of organizing not only Mithridates’ kingdom but also large parts of Anatolia
and the Near East that were now placed under direct Roman rule. His answer
was to expand the province of Cilicia and found two new provinces: Syria in
the heartland of the Seleucid kingdom, and the province of Pontus at the core
of Mithridates’ kingdom, which he then joined to Bithynia. It was a brave
and difficult choice. Three provinces in hostile country would stretch Rome’s
administrative means to their very limit; the dangers of riots from within and
of invasions by both ambitious neighbors and far- from- reliable friends were
factors Pompey needed to take into account in his plans.
In the case of Pontus, the name the Romans gave to the province, the
decision to place the region under direct Roman rule was further challenged
by the size of the area—stretching from Paphlagonia in the West to Arme-
nia Minor in the East—and by the lack of a civic culture in the hinterland
on which the organization of the province could be based.1 In addition, the
new province was culturally diverse, the home of various different Anatolian
people, and geographically varied, with large rivers and high mountains that
divided the coastal areas from the hinterland and that considerably compli-
cated communications. Pompey’s solution was to found six new cities, and to
convert the two existing centers—Zela, the temple community dedicated to
the goddess Anaïtis, and Amaseia, the former royal residence—into cities too.
There would then be eight city-s tates, each with the responsibility of organiz-
ing considerable territories.
To found a province in a very hostile area and simultaneously to estab-
lish eight city-s tates all within a few years was a complicated task, on a scale
that Rome had never carried out before. Considering the manner in which
Pompey assumed the command against Mithridates VI and Tigranes II, using
2 Introduction
his influence with the tribunes in Rome and his popularity among the people,
the general was running a considerable risk. If the province proved impossible
to defend or if the cities failed to thrive, he would be the one to blame and
could expect harsh allegations from members of the political elite in Rome,
who would do what they could to weaken the victorious general by politically
attacking him with his status as the one who conquered the East.
There were other options available. A safer but surely less glorious solu-
tion would have been to follow Rome’s strategy elsewhere in the East and place
the entire region in the hands of various client kings whose loyalty could be
reasonably predicted. It is worth bearing in mind that Pompey did in fact keep
a considerable part of the province under the rule of client kings. Tigranes II
continued as king of Armenia just as Cappadocia carried on as a client king-
dom under Ariobarzanes II. The decision to turn the kingdom of the Mithri-
datic kings into a province with the administrative challenges caused by a
lack of a civic culture stands out as particularly ambitious. In comparison,
the decision to found a province in Syria and enlarge the territory under the
jurisdiction of Cilicia, although a considerable administrative task, was still
less demanding. A Syrian province would be vulnerable to ambitious neighbor
states such as Parthia, but the web of well- established cities, particularly those
in Syria, offered the kind of legal and institutional framework and civic cul-
ture that were familiar to Rome—something that would have to be supplied
largely from scratch in the province of Pontus.
Pompey’s plans for Pontus and Bithynia and the reorganization of the East
have occupied scholars for generations. They have discussed both the motives
behind the urbanization and the types of civic communities Pompey wanted to
establish. It is generally agreed that the web of cities that the general founded
in the hinterland represents an attempt to break the previous royal organization
of the region, in which a large rural population living in villages worked on
the land as serfs overseen by the trustees of the king. There are, however, many
different views on what Pompey wanted to achieve with the urbanization per se
and on what kind of community the general hoped to establish.
One school of thought sees the foundation of the urban network as an
attempt to civilize the hinterland of Mithridates’ old kingdom by introducing
what are believed to have been civic communities modeled on Greek urban tra-
ditions and a form of political organization that was based on Greek thought. In
his Römische Geschichte, first published in the 1850s, Th. Mommsen argues that
the urbanization of Roman Pontus was a way to move the population toward
the West and replace what Mommsen saw as oriental military despotism with
Introduction 3
an urban culture modeled on Greek and Italian traditions. According to Mom-
msen, Pompey was keen to establish a civic culture in the sparsely urbanized
parts of Anatolia and was responsible for the spread of Greek culture through-
out the region.2
In his Roman Republic of 1923, T. Rice Holmes shares Mommsen’s thought
that the cities were intended to draw the people in the East toward Rome. Like
Mommsen, Rice Holmes sees Pompey as one who promotes the spread of
Greco- Roman civilization.3 A similar view is found in the 1932 contribution to
the Cambridge Ancient History series by H. A. Ormerod and M. Cary, who
wrote that Pompey’s cities are said to have provided new impetus to the diffu-
sion of Hellenic civilization in Syria and Asia Minor.4 J. G. C. Anderson and
A. H. M. Jones also believed that Pompey’s cities were founded on a Greek
model. In his treatment of Pompey’s reorganization of Pontus, Anderson sug-
gests that as a result of the Greek population already living in the cities, Ama-
seia was fairly Hellenized by the time Pompey won the war. Jones argues in his
The Greek City: From Alexander to Justinian (1940) that the new settlements
followed Greek traditions in order to promote Greek civilization in what he
calls the “backwater regions” of Asia Minor and the Near East.5
In his Roman Rule in Asia Minor: To the End of the Third Century After
Christ (1950), D. Magie sees Pompey’s choice of government as a form of
constitution that was inspired by Greek traditions of self-g overnment but
one in which ex-m agistrates’ right to lifelong membership of the city councils
and the introduction of the censorial institution to oversee council members
are recognized as characteristically Roman elements. However, much focus
is devoted to the Greek terms for the cities’ political institutions and to how
the city names included the term polis, from which Magie concluded that
Pompey aimed to Hellenize the region.6 In his From the Gracchi to Nero (1959),
H. H. Scullard saw the urbanization of Pontus as a deliberate attempt to turn
the region toward Rome and away from Parthia; Pompey is thought by Scull-
ard to have aimed for a continuous line of provinces “around the coast of Asia
from Pontus on the Black Sea in the north to Syria in the south.” Inspired
by Alexander the Great, Pompey is seen as having introduced city- states with
institutions modeled on Greek urban traditions.7
What constituted these so-c alled Greek communities is often far from
clear, but they are sometimes defined as self-g overning entities, where the
political power was divided between the assemblies, councils, and magistra-
cies, and as a political structure in which a comparatively large part of the
civic body was eligible to participate in the decision-m aking process. While
4 Introduction
the latter element may differ from the oligarchic nature of Roman or Latin
cities—at least when the Greek cities were organized along democratic princi-
ples—it does not differ from a form of organization with the same division of
political power that Rome introduced in Italy and the West. From a constitu-
tional point of view, it is therefore difficult to draw a clear distinction between
what is a Greek city and what is a city modeled on Roman norms. This will be
discussed in Chapter 2.
Another school of thought has questioned whether Pompey really did
establish city-s tates with developed civic landscapes. Instead, the cities are seen
as legal frameworks with the necessary political institutions needed to admin-
ister and, more importantly, tax the newly conquered region. Even if the cities’
institutional landscape seems to have been modeled on Greek traditions, it
is not generally believed that the introduction of cities was motivated by an
attempt to introduce Greek culture into the rural parts of Anatolia. In their
Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire, F. F. Abbott and A. C. John-
son maintain that the urbanization was an attempt to facilitate taxation by
letting the local magistrates help settle standards for how much tax was to be
collected.8 The same line of thinking was followed by T. Frank in his Roman
Imperialism of 1914. Frank sees the urbanization and the foundation of the
new provinces in the East as an attempt to increase the area under Roman rule
and so to extend the land that the publicani, Pompey’s alleged supporters, were
allowed to farm.9
Frank argues that Pompey continued Alexander’s strategy by inviting
Greek settlers to live in the most fertile parts of the hinterland in order to form
a nucleus of civilization. Even if the civilization of the hinterland was not the
main objective, this settlement provided, along with improved cultivation of
the land and a system of taxation, the spread of Hellenic culture and a model
of how to live in a civic culture.10 On the other hand, W. G. Fletcher sees no
indication that Pompey tried to introduce an urban culture when he turned
the kingdom of Mithridates into a province. Once again, the purpose of the
cities is mainly described as an attempt to ease the collection of tax and as a
way to split up Mithridates’ kingdom into smaller parts. In order to tackle the
administrative challenges, the rural population had to be set free and the tax
collection had to be placed in the hands of local institutions in order to admin-
ister the region by Roman standards.11 J. Van Ooteghem also identifies finan-
cial and administrative motives behind the settlements. In his Pompée le grand,
bâtisseur d’empire of 1954, he does not see the cities as intended to promote
Greek civic culture, though he agrees that the administration was modeled on