This chapter concentrates on a medium that was closely related to central government structures, though the authors detect some possibilities of local (civic) involvement in the design of coinages. Seleucid coin policy was much more heterogeneous than the closed monetary system of the Ptolemies, thus providing better opportunities for establishing patterns of change and transformation. Iossif demonstrates that local control marks displayed continuity and stability in local bureaucracies during political upheaval and change. Lorber, looking at Ptolemaic coins, shows a much more patterned development, related to the metal supply and to fiscal cycles. In the second century, the contrast between Seleucid and Ptolemaic monetary policies converged, whereby the region of Syria-Palestine played an important part. In Western Asia Minor, there are some indications that mint authority was shared between central and local governments. Continuities in local practice under different royal control emphasize the importance of local conditions shaping government responses. This supports their conclusion that the Seleucid and Ptolemaic dynasties adopted two different approaches to similar problems.

This chapter deals with two different types of capital formation. Alexandria was by far the most important royal city in Egypt. Urban centers in the imperial possessions outside of Egypt never conflicted with the centrality of Alexandria. The Seleucids, by contrast, took over a more heterogeneous, mobile and paradoxically more connected empire with a tradition of several royal cities already established. Identifying a political center is more problematic there, but governance was “a network of ever-shifting, personalized relationships between interest groups and powerful individuals based on reciprocal transactions.” There was a particular need to establish a symbolical political center that was Seleucia-Pieria first, and then Antioch. Both authors observe, however, that it was imperial competition, and to a lesser extent local discourse, that shaped the vision of Ptolemaic and Seleucid capitals. Looking at foundation myths as a guide to the symbolic construction of these capitals, they observe a deeply entangled discourse. Each court and population responded to each other and to Rome in an antagonistic interaction that manifested itself in many other forms than war alone.

Using the most up-to-date archaeological evidence, this chapter studies the sack of Athens by the Heruli in A.D. 267 and the city’s subsequent recovery.

The chapter presents the results of the latest excavations at Methone and its capture by Philip II of Macedon. The siege is exceptionally well documented archaeologically, and the city does not recover.

The chapter collects the numismatic evidence for the destruction and survival of cities in Macedonia and Aegean Thrace in the Classical and Hellenistic periods.

This chapter examines the question of precisely why politeumata are not found in other Hellenistic kingdoms. Sänger argues that they were a specific response to the internal and external conflicts faced by the Ptolemies in the second century BCE. By offering the opportunity of founding a politeuma, the kings tightened the loyalty of ethnic groups settling or settled in Egypt and attracted new immigrants. The core members of a politeuma belonged to the army as mercenaries and would identify to a given ethnic group. After their settlement, they formed an “ethnic community” sharing a temple and a quarter of the urban space. Sänger suggests, furthermore, that since poleis in the Greek constitutional sense played a limited role in Egypt (see other chapters in the same volume), constitutional terms connected to the Greek polis were applied freely and allowed derivatives such as the politeuma to develop. The apparent specificity of Ptolemaic politeumata emerges as just a particular case of binding soldiers to urban spaces and attracting them as identity groups. These show altered ruling strategies when compared with the Ptolemaic cleruchies and army organization of the third century BCE.

The case of an African soldier who served with distinction in the Roman army and who retired to his highland home town prompts a consideration of the problems of identity and behavior as they were shaped by an empire with its own fiscal, administrative, and military categories and demands. The question considers the negotiated aspects of identity in which local attachments of language, kinship, and place were made to merge with the categories of name, military rank, language, and armed service imposed by an imperial regime. Rather than one element effacing the other, it is shown how they could coexist in a split sense of identity through many generations over the height of the empire. Perhaps more than is often imagined, it seems that the structure of the empire was itself bifurcated and capable of sustaining such split identities all the way down to the most localized levels of the imperial social order.

The chapter argues against an influential thesis according to which Jews and Judaea were treated with extraordinary harshness in the wake of the Great Rebellion, due to the new Flavian dynasty’s political needs. It is argued that Vespasian enjoyed considerable legitimacy at the beginning of his reign; he did not need to base his legitimacy on a continuous ‘war against the Jews’; nothing he did needs to be explained by attributing this motivation to him. The harshness of the treatment endured by the defeated Jews was, fundamentally, “normal’ imperial harshness.

This chapter examines the involvement of the Roman empire in administrating education in provincial cities during the High Empire, through regulation of exemption from tutelages. It uses the case of Aelius Aristides, who appealed against his own exemption being revoked. The chapter traces the various interests and forces which shaped provincial education both in the civic arena as well as in the imperial one.

Unlike in the West where the Roman municipal model was almost uniformly spread over the various provinces, Greek cities in the East during the Imperial period were very proud of their own centuries-old political traditions and consequently were reluctant to adopt Roman institutions. However, many cities celebrated the emperor as their ‘founder’ or were renamed after a Roman emperor, such as, for example, ‘Kaisareia’. Other cities deliberately chose pictures referring to Roman foundation practices to appear on their coins (e.g. the plowing scene) or took—formally or informally—the title of ‘koloneia’, normally reserved for communities which were part of the Roman State. This chapter aims at examining 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. It argues that the issue of the compliance of Greek cities with the Roman constitutional model of a colony was a way for them to negotiate their position within the Roman empire and was an aspect of cultural interaction.

Historical sources, and epigraphical and archeological finds attest to the presence of the Roman military presence and the establishment of the Roman base at Legio-Kefar ‘Othnay, first by soldiers of the Legio II Traiana, and slightly thereafter by the Legio VI Ferrata. An archaeological survey in the Legio area proposed the precise location of the Roman legionary base. A geophysical survey and excavation seasons allow us to assess that its size resembles Roman legionary bases in other parts of the empire during the second–third centuries CE. In this chapter we discuss the small finds from the site such as roof tiles/bricks with Roman military stamps, coins with countermarks and Roman weapons and assess their contribution to the understanding of Roman military presence by the II Traiana and the VI Ferrata legions at the site from the second to the beginning of the fourth century CE, at the latest.

When Greek historians turned their attention to the Roman Empire, the main question they sought to answer, which they displayed prominently in their introductions, was the reason for the success of the Empire. Success was defined in terms of acquisition, extent, stability and duration of conquest. Polybius, although not the first Greek historian of Rome, was perhaps the first to formulate the question, which he stated like a banner in the introduction to his complex work: his purpose was to explain ‘by what means and under what system of government the Romans succeeded in less than fifty-three years in bringing under their rule almost the whole of the inhabited world, an achievement which is without parallel in human history’. A century later, Dionysius of Halicarnassus did Polybius one better by adding duration of rule to Rome’s achievement: ‘the supremacy of the Romans has far surpassed all those that are recorded from earlier times, not only in the extent of its dominion and in the splendor of its achievements – which no account has as yet worthily celebrated – but also in the length of time during which it has endured down to our day’; and his long preface is filled with other such proclamations. In the second century CE, Appian of Alexandria wrote the same idea in less florid prose: ‘No ruling power up to the present time ever achieved such size and duration’, after stating which he embarked on a long proof. These three historians are representative of a prevailing trend.

This chapter addresses what appears to be a puzzling paradox. The Romans enjoyed a reputation for broad-mindedness in matters of religion. Their empire contained a multitude of diverse peoples with varied and sometimes outlandish rites, beliefs, and gods. Far from suppressing such practices, the Romans even imported alien cults and made them part of their own extended system of honoring divine powers. Acceptance and embrace of a wide range of modes of worship characterized Roman image and practice. Could this liberal attitude toward religious pluralism extend even to the Jews, notorious as an exclusivist monotheistic sect? The evidence, on the face of it, suggests hostility among Roman intellectuals toward Jewish separatism and offers disturbing examples of official actions against practitioners of the religion itself. How does one account for this apparent exception to general Roman policy? This chapter questions many of the assumptions behind this ostensible paradox. It argues that Jews were not as separatist as often thought, that their diaspora communities in the empire were acknowledged and supported by Roman authority, that official actions against the religion were decidedly exceptional and not at all characteristic, and that abusive comments by Roman intellectuals were no more meaningful than those expressed about numerous other cults that flourished in the empire.