historian Memnon of Herakleia to life before our eyes and shows how, despite living in a vast Empire divided between Greek and Roman, Memnon is first and foremost Pontic and Herakleian in his outlook. For all the cosmopolitism of a world empire, parochialism was still a powerful force.
More literary figures make their appearance in the following chapter by Jesper Majbom Madsen. Was the literary revival of the first and early second century known as the Second Sophistic a reaction against the spread of Roman influence in Greece and Asia Minor (Swain 1996; Goldhill (ed.) 2001) or an attempt on the part of the Hellenised elite to demarcate themselves from their social inferiors? Madsen takes a two-stage approach to the problem. In the first half of his paper, he critically examines the case for the second Sophistic as an example of cultural resistance, and in the second part, he uses epigraphic behaviour to diagnose the cultural preferences of the literate middle and upper classes. As we have already seen in Højte’s paper, names are important; to name something is to appropriate it. The voluntary acceptance of Roman names by the Greek elite implies that they had been appropriated by the dominant Roman culture. Abandoning a perfectly good Greek name in favour of a Roman or Latinised one was a serious matter, and though well received by the Romans, it could earn the disapproval and derision of one’s peers – Apollonios is credited with the witty remark that “it is a disgrace to have a person’s name without also having his countenance” (Letters, 72). While intellectuals such as Plutarch or Dion viewed the spread of Roman mores with some scepticism, the onomastic evidence indicates that their sentiments were hardly representative of the provincial elite as a whole.
Thomas Corsten addresses the same source material as Madsen, but with a different point of departure and a different interpretation. To Corsten, the transition from Greek to Latin names in the Bithynian inscriptions does not reflect the enfranchisment of the elite and the adoption of Roman names by Bithynians, but a wholesale replacement of the old Thraco-Bithynian gentry by a new class of Roman entrepreneurial landowners. The idea that Romanisation was carried into the conquered provinces by a class of immigré kulaks has respectable antecedents; it was central to the analysis of the western provinces by Rostovtzeff (1926/1957) but rejected by Hatt (1959). It addresses complex issues concerning the social structure and ethnic differentiation of provincial society, a subject that would merit a conference or a volume of its own.
While the preceding contributors have seen the Roman Black Sea from an indigenous perspective, Greg Woolf and Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen try to view Bithynia et Pontus through the eyes of a Roman recently arrived, Pliny the younger. Woolf strongly warns us against the perils of treating Pliny’s correspondence as a slice of Roman gubernatorial life. Pliny shows us his province and the Roman Black Sea region as he wants us to see it, and himself as he would like to appear to our eyes. Bekker-Nielsen is less concerned with what meets the eye, or what Pliny wants to meet our eyes; instead he searches for the invisible factors of local politics, rooted in the twilight world of back-room deals, rumour-mongering and pasquinades.
Conceptualising cultural interaction as a process between cultural traditions that are themselves developing and changing introduces an extra dimension into the model and reveals the limitations of the classical theories of Romanisation. It also leads to the realisation that cultural change is rarely a zero-sum process: becoming more Roman does not necessarily mean becoming less Greek (or less Gaulish, less Scythian, less Bosporan, etc.). The last two contributions in the volume, by Anne Marie Carstens and Jørgen Christian Meyer, both deal with such (in Meyer’s phrase) “multi-identity cultures”. Modern populist-xenophobic politicians see cultural diversity as a threat to the stability of society, but the analyses of Carstens and Meyer indicate that the social resilience of Achaemenid and Roman structures of dominance owed much to their cultural diversity and the readiness of the dominant population to accept and even adopt the mores of their subjects when the situation called for it; the “ability to have several identities” (Meyer) and the possibility of “creative negotiation” (Carstens).
Reading through this volume, the reader will find diversity, multiple cultural identities and occasional disagreement. It is hoped that it will provide food for creative reflection on cultural change in the traditionalist and parochial, yet dynamic and cosmopolitan environment that was the Roman Black Sea region.
University of Southern Denmark, Esbjerg
| September 2006 | Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen |
From Kingdom to Province: Reshaping Pontos after the Fall of Mithridates VI
Jakob Munk Højte
After the final collapse of the Pontic forces and the flight of Mithridates VI in 66 BC, Pompey was faced with the problem of reorganizing the former dominion of Mithridates. This was no easy task since much of the territory, particularly the interior of Asia Minor, differed significantly in respect to its organisation and infrastructure from most of the other areas incorporated into the provincial system in the Greek East. Only along the coast could the Roman administration build on already existing polis structures. As a result, Pompey only joined a manageable portion of the western part of the Asian domains of Mithridates with Bithynia to form the new province, and the rest he parcelled out to client kings. The difficulty of this operation is attested by the fact that nearly a century and a half would pass before the remaining part of Pontos was brought under direct Roman control. Some of the cities founded by Pompey to create a continuum of urban territories later dwindled and disappeared under the rule of the local dynasts who had been installed by Caesar and Marcus Antonius, and who showed little interest in supporting an urban culture; these cities had to be refounded later.
The long and very complex historical process of transforming the territory of the Pontic Kingdom into the Roman provinces of Bithynia and Pontos, Galatia and Cappadocia in their more or less final form in the later first century AD has been treated thoroughly by Syme, Magie, Jones, Mitchell, Marek and others, and will only be dealt with in passing.1
Instead, I intend to look more closely at some of the archaeologically visible changes that occur during the Roman period on a somewhat smaller scale. First, I will undertake an examination of settlement patterns – made possible thanks to two recent survey projects – then investigate the use of eras and the reckoning of time, and finally look at what dated inscriptions can reveal about the chronology of changes in epigraphic habits and the use of personal names in northern Asia Minor, changes which may all be associated with the effects of Romanisation.
Settlement patterns
We know relatively little about how the Mithridatid kingdom was organized. It seems clear that apart from the coastal strip, the level of urbanisation was low in Pontos; at least there was nothing like the Greek polis, neither in physical appearance nor in the sense of an administrative unit. The royal residence of Amaseia may be an exception since the needs of the court would have attracted a whole range of specialised labour.2 The temple states of Komana Pontike, Zela, and Ameria also supported quite large populations, but whether the temple slaves and the devotees lived around the precinct or were scattered throughout the territory remains uncertain. The account of Strabon (12.3.36-37) suggests that some form of urban structure did exist around the temples. Eupatoria, founded by Mithridates VI in Phanaroia, may have been a first attempt by the kings to encourage the formation of cities in the interior.3 Symptomatically, he destroyed the city himself after it had sided with the Romans during the Third Mithridatic War.
Central to the royal control of the land was a large number of castles scattered over the whole territory.4 Many of these served as treasuries of the king, but the commander (φρούραρχος) of the castle may equally well have served as governor of the surrounding district (έπαρχὶα). This system of control has analogies throughout eastern Asia Minor, and also seems to have been exported to the northern Black Sea area after Mithridates
