The fall of Tralles, ad 1284

In the spring of the year ad 1280, the young future emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus led an army south from Constantinople into Asia Minor. Twenty years of Palaeologan rule had not been kind to the old Byzantine heartlands. After the recovery of Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, the emperor Michael VIII Palaeologus had kept his attention firmly trained on the European west. The Anatolian borderlands, the fertile coastal valleys of the Hermos, Cayster and Maeander, had largely been abandoned to their fate at the hands of the nascent Turkish warrior beyliks. Only at the very end of his life, between 1280 and 1282, did Michael make any concerted attempt to restore Byzantine authority in western Asia Minor, and by then, as would rapidly become apparent, it was far too late.

Arriving in the valley of the river Maeander, and travelling eastwards along the north bank of the river, Andronicus passed the ruins of the ancient city of Tralles. Struck by the charms of the place, and the natural defensibility of the plateau on which the city stood, Andronicus decided to restore the ruined town as a place of refuge for the local Greek rural population (Fig. 1.1). The new city was to carry his own name: Andronicopolis or Palaeologopolis. Work proceeded at speed, and the city was soon ringed with strong fortifications. Worn down by the constant assaults of the Turks, and all too ready to believe that the arrival of the young emperor-in-waiting marked a new dawn for the embattled Greeks of Asia Minor, as many as 36,000 men, women and children came to settle in the new city. The hopes of the new settlers were raised still higher by the discovery of a marble stele buried in the ruins of the ancient town, discovered by Andronicus’ workmen, on which was inscribed an ancient oracle in hexameter verse.

1. The beauty of this city of Tralles shall be dimmed in time,

2. And in the last days, those few that remain

3. Shall live in fear of a leaderless barbarian tribe;

4. But the city will never fall.

5. A nobleman, whose name is Victory, shall restore her.

6. He shall live for seventy-two years in splendour,

7. And at the age of twenty-one, he will glorify this city of Attalus.

8. To him, the cities of the west will bow their heads,

9. And the proud, like children, shall bend their knee to him.

This chapter discusses (in roughly alphabetical order) democracies located on the coasts and islands of the Aegean, as well as on Rhodes and the Black Sea coasts, from 480 to 323 bc. Of the city-states considered below, all either certainly or probably experienced at least one period of democratic government during this era. While it is always possible that further examples of demokratia cropped up on occasion in these or other communities of the eastern Greek world, the following represent the cases for which we have the strongest evidence.

Briefer summary treatments follow the main entries at the chapter's end.

This chapter discusses democracies located in Sicily and southern Italy, as well as Corcyra, Epidamnus, and Cyrene, from 480 to 323 bc. The treatment covers all the examples for which there is strong evidence of demokratia at some point during this period, resulting in certainty or probability of democracy in each case. Further cases (for which there is less available evidence) could have existed as well, of course.

Sicilian cities come up first for discussion, followed by Italian ones, then Corcyra, Epidamnus, and Cyrene. Within the subsections a roughly alphabetical order will be followed, though I begin the chapter with Syracuse owing to its importance.

Preface

Men and women make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They make it not under circumstances that they have chosen themselves, but under conditions inherited from the past and imposed on them by the material world. The most fundamental of these conditions is the physical environment in which people live. Geology, botany and climate offer possibilities, and impose limits; how people respond to those possibilities depends on a wide range of social factors, including the personalities and choices of individuals. Uncovering this dialectical relationship between men and women and their environment over time is the proper task of historical geography.

This book is a study of the historical geography of the valley of the river Maeander in western Asia Minor. Its main contention is that the economic relationships, social structures, cultural identities, and ritual behaviour of the human communities of the Maeander valley in Graeco-Roman antiquity and the Byzantine middle ages were specifically and contingently affected by the fact that those communities were situated in a particular physical space, a valley fringed by mountains on either side, with a major perennial river running down the middle of it to the sea. After describing the physical space itself (Chapter 1), I focus on six separate aspects of the relationship between the peoples of the Maeander and their local environments: sacred geography (Chapter 2), markets and mobility (Chapter 3), mental maps and conceptual boundaries (Chapter 4), pastoral dynamics (Chapter 5), elite behaviour and interaction (Chapter 6) and the productive rural landscape (Chapter 7). In the course of these six chapters, we shall also travel slowly down the course of the river, from its source at Apamea-Celaenae (Chapters 2–3), through the upper Maeander valley (Chapter 4) to the Çal highlands and the plain of Denizli (Chapters 5–6), and into the lower Maeander floodplain (Chapter 7). The final chapter (Chapter 8) is an extended description of dynamic interaction between men and women and their landscape, focused on the changing responses of the inhabitants of the lower Maeander valley to the advance of the delta front (itself the result of human activity), from the Hellenistic period to the present day.

The plain of the Maeander

‘Concerning the alluvium from the rivers of India,’ Strabo reports, ‘Nearchus gives the following parallels: that the Hermos plain and the Cayster plain, and those of the Maeander and Caïcus, are similarly named because they are all increased, or rather created, by the rich and soft silt which is carried down from the mountains into the plains. It is the rivers that carry it down, so that the plains are as it were their offspring, and it is right that the plains should be named after them, and said to be “theirs”.’ The geographical expression ‘the plain of the Maeander’, often used by ancient authors to refer to the lower Maeander valley, and above all to the Maeander delta, is more eloquent than it might at first appear. The phrase does not simply refer to the plain which happens to have the Maeander river flowing through it, but specifically designates the area understood in antiquity to have been created by the Maeander river. This, I suggest, expresses a certain way of conceptualising the region. As Egypt was, for Herodotus, the ‘gift of the Nile’, so the territories of Priene, Magnesia and Miletus, were all the gift of the Maeander. It was the advance of the Maeander delta, uniquely swift and catastrophic as it was, that led Pausanias to his famous hypothesis concerning the causes of alluvial deposition (that the rapidity of deltaic progradation in the first millennium bc was the result of anthropogenic process further upstream). It is no coincidence that it is here in the delta that we find the only attested cult of the Maeander river, at the small town of Thebes on Mycale, overlooking the plain visibly spreading outwards into the waters of the Aegean sea.

In this final chapter, I shall explore the effects of this process on the communities of the Maeander delta. The focus throughout will be on economic realities; but it was by these realities that the social and religious mentalities of the inhabitants of the Maeander delta were shaped, and I shall from time to time try to make this relationship explicit. I begin with the practical consequences of the constant creation of new land, and the means by which the legal and economic problems arising from this were resolved. From this I turn to the exploitation of the delta environment through the characteristic industries of the Maeander wetlands, with an attempt to assess their significance for the micro-regional economy.

In his reflections on the republican constitution, Polybius emphasizes the power of the consuls as typical of a monarchical government. According to the Greek author, consuls were, on the one hand, commanders-in-chief of the Roman army with full decision-making powers, and as such, spent long parts of the year away from Rome. On the other hand, during their stay in Rome, before taking command of the legions, the consuls were the heads of the Roman administration. In this sense, Polybius mentions a series of tasks assigned to them involving both the senate and the people. Paradoxically, Polybius does not mention the religious duties performed by the consuls, despite the fact that some of these functions were compulsory for them and that their fulfilment was, according to Roman belief, of great importance to the welfare of the community.

In fact, the religious duties performed by the consuls during the first few weeks in office were among their most important functions. Roman religion was national and civic, and its practice was a political issue since it concerned the entire civitas. Most religious activities were performed in public, according to stringent rules, and their main purpose was to maintain or to restore the pax deorum. There were experts grouped into various priestly collegia who served as essential, qualified advisers, but the management of religious affairs was in the hands of the senate and the maintenance of the direct relationship between the community and the gods was assigned to the magistrates, particularly to the consuls as supreme magistrates of the civitas.

There are two opposing views in modern scholarship on the Roman praetura. According to our sources the praetorship was established in 367 bc by the Licinian-Sextian Laws. One camp of scholars accepts this basic picture, the other group criticizes it strongly. Two questions are particularly contentious: if the picture of the sources must be revised, how do we place the two consuls, and what were the original duties of the praetor?

The most prominent proponent of the first school of thought is Theodor Mommsen. In his Staatsrecht, Mommsen developed the theory of imperium, which the consuls inherited from the kings and which conferred authority in three fields: military, political and legal. The one-year limitation of the term and the potential rivalry of a second consul tended to mitigate the overwhelming power of the office. Establishing new magistracies also helped to relieve the consuls. The assignments of censor and praetor were derived from the authority of the consuls without the consuls actually ceding this authority: the consuls could always prevail over all the other magistrates, thanks to their superior imperium. In this perspective, the detailed report of Livy and the additional hints in other authors can claim some credence.

This volume is primarily the result of the work carried out by an international research network, which was established in 2004 with the main purpose of studying the consulship in the Roman republic. The editors formed the core group of this network: Hans Beck (Montreal, Canada), Antonio Duplá (Vitoria, Spain), Martin Jehne (Dresden, Germany) and Francisco Pina Polo (Zaragoza, Spain), the last acting as Principal Investigator. The core group met on various occasions in Spain, and a large international conference was held at the University of Zaragoza in September 2007, where most of the papers presented in this book were delivered. These papers were significantly revised for publication. Other contributions were added as this volume took shape, to fill in the most significant gaps. The result is by no means a comprehensive study of the consulship, let alone a complete one. Rather, we look at the present volume as a contribution to an ongoing debate on Roman republican politics. That debate is more vibrant than ever. Branching out into the realms of other societies in the ancient Mediterranean, we feel that its applied models, concepts and thought paradigms are also relevant to the general discussion of elite power in antiquity.

We are grateful to the Ministerio de Ciencia y Educación of Spain for its sponsorship of two consecutive funding cycles of “Consuls, Consulars and the Government of the Roman Republic” (HUM2004–02449 and HUM2007–60776/HIST), which was vital to the work of our team. When the volume entered the publishing pipeline, Margherita Devine and Brahm Kleinman helped with the challenge of editing the work of scholars from so many different linguistic backgrounds and academic cultures. Special thanks go to them, as to Fabian Knopf, who took on the laborious task of compiling the index of persons. As so often, the editorial work took longer than anticipated, and the editors would like to thank the contributors not only for their willingness to participate, but also for their patience. Finally, we are grateful to Michael Sharp, Commissioning Editor for Classics at Cambridge University Press, for his support and guidance in bringing this publication to light.

Striving hard for decades to win the consulship was the way of life most acceptable for members of the Roman elite. This seems to be one of the very few facts which is not contested in modern research on Roman politics in the middle and late republic. But what happened when these men succeeded? The term in office, often prolonged for fulfilling some additional tasks as proconsuls at some distance from Rome, kept the proud magistrates busy. But what came afterwards when they returned to the city? Traditionally, we tend to see the consulares in the centre of Roman politics as embodying the common good in contrast to the incumbent consuls, dominated by personal ambition. But we must ask when this habit came into existence and how the consular role changed over time. What I want to present here are only some reflections on the origins and the rise to eminence of the consular as a social type in the third and second centuries.

Evidently, we should not expect the perspectives of magistrates to be the same from the beginning of the republic to its end or even further. The significance of office for personal rank should not be estimated too highly for the patrician state, when the primores were probably the leading members of patrician families, perhaps with some prerogatives for the gentes maiores in relation to the gentes minores. They were well known and resourceful, whether they served as magistrates or not. Some impression of how the life of a Roman aristocrat could have unfolded in archaic Rome may be extracted from the anecdote of Cincinnatus. According to Livy, Cincinnatus was busy ploughing his fields when some prominent Romans arrived to announce his appointment as dictator. Whether this actually happened is not my concern here, nor am I interested in the highly moralistic colouring of the episode in later reports, praising the simple life of the ancestors. In this context, it is only relevant that later Romans saw the lives of their forefathers as oscillating between public obligations and private activities outside Rome. This could have been the normal pattern of life for the leading men until at least the third century bc. Between offices a successful nobilis took care of his economic interests and lived the social life of the landed gentry. Temporary retirement from the business of the res publica was certainly not unusual or a reason for criticism. Senators stayed in their villae outside Rome and were called to senate meetings by viatores. Cicero and the rest of the later tradition explicitly characterized this way of life as a peculiar habit of the past. The elder Cato still praised hard work with his own hands as an honourable deed even for wealthy landowners, but in his lifetime this was already rather old-fashioned. In the early republic, however, the Roman patrician did his public service as a magistrate and a senator just as the Roman small farmer made his contribution as a soldier: regularly, but not continuously.

1. How could communities,

2. Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

3. Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

4. The primogenitive and due of birth,

5. Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,

6. But by degree, stand in authentic place?

7. Take but degree away, untune that string,

8. And, hark, what discord follows!

9. Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, i, 3, 105–12

Roman culture was always a culture of spectacles – in the concrete as well as abstract or metaphorical sense of the concept. To begin with, the religious calendar was packed with regular rituals and ceremonies, processions, games, festivals and other truly ‘spectacular’ occasions of all kinds – such as the run by the Luperci around the Palatine in mid-February and the carnival fight between Subura and Sacra via over the tail of the equus October (October Horse). The spectacular splendour of the ludi – in the late republic, the six most important of them, the ludi Romani, Apollinares, Megalenses, Plebei, Ceriales and Florales alone lasted for no less than 57 days every year – gave Livy reason to observe that by his own day this splendour had turned into utter craziness that would be hard to bear even for rich royalty. This culture revolved around, or was defined by, ‘spectacles’ as ‘ritualized performances that communicated, restored, consolidated, and sometimes helped change the communal order’ of the populus Romanus and their res publica.

The populares and the crisis of the republic

The optimates–populares conflict is one of the distinctive events of the last century of republican Rome. From the mid-second century until the civil wars of the 40s, the ancient authors describe a series of critical episodes that allow a degree of continuity to be established.

At relatively regular intervals, we witness popular movements led by the plebeian tribunes, socio-economic demands (whether to do with agrarian reform, the corn supply or the founding of colonies), disputes between the senate and the assemblies about their respective powers, an abundance of laws and proposals as well as of assemblies (especially contiones), and even repressive mechanisms of doubtful “constitutionality,” such as the so-called senatus consultum ultimum. In this sense, the harmony (concordia), real or imaginary, that the ancient authors attribute to other republican periods appears to have been lost: the citizens and the ruling classes frequently appear divided and the mechanisms of consensus and social cohesion function less effectively.

That war was a consul's primary road to riches seems beyond question. Ideological and legal impediments precluded direct aristocratic involvement in commerce and finance while the profits in commercial agriculture were surprisingly slim. Despoiling the republic's provincial subjects had by the first century become an important means of aristocratic self-enrichment. But even here, the money to be made could pale in comparison to the spoils of war. Pompey returned from his eastern conquests “richer than Crassus,” indeed the richest Roman ever, at least until Caesar began plundering Gaul. But Pompey and Caesar were exceptional in this regard as in so many others, and the question is rarely posed, “How much money did ordinary consuls typically make out of successful wars?” Put in these terms of course the question is unanswerable. We lack even the most basic data out of which to begin formulating an answer. But it may be possible to approach the problem from a somewhat different angle by asking, “What were the limits on a consul's or proconsul's ability to profit from the wars he waged?”

The existence of such limits is no longer in doubt, despite the long-standing belief that generals were free to help themselves liberally to that portion of the spoils termed the manubiae and to use it as they pleased: to build monuments in fulfillment of vows to the gods for victory, to present games as acts of thanksgiving to the deities, to distribute donatives to their soldiers when they celebrated a triumph, or simply to line their own purses and those of their favorites. However, while it is clear that the Romans drew a distinction between the praeda generally, which was whatever the soldiers looted and which belonged to them, and the manubiae, Churchill has argued persuasively against Shatzman that generals did not “own” the latter. Churchill draws attention to a passage from Polybius praising Scipio Aemilianus’ behavior at the sack of Carthage in 146. Scipio, the historian notes, “took absolutely nothing from it [i.e. the booty] for his own private use, either by purchase or by any other manner of acquisition whatever” and he “not only abstained from the wealth of Carthage itself, but refused to allow anything from Africa at all to be mixed up with his private property.” As Churchill points out, the fact that Polybius believed that Scipio would have had to resort to purchase or unspecified “other means” to acquire anything out of the spoils from Carthage is completely at odds with the notion that, as the victorious general, Scipio in any sense “owned” the manubiae from his victory. Likewise, the distinction Polybius draws between Scipio's personal property and “anything from Africa” strongly implies that spoils from that country did not already belong to Scipio by virtue of their status as manubiae. The difference between manubiae and a general's personal property is further emphasized in an exchange between Aemilianus’ great uncle, Scipio Nasica, and the senate during the latter's consulship in 191. Nasica asked the patres for funds to celebrate games that he had vowed as praetor three years before in connection with a victory in Spain. To this demand the senators responded that Nasica should fund the games from his manubiae, if he had kept back any money for this purpose; otherwise he himself should pay for them at his own expense. Again, it is difficult to make sense out of this episode if the manubiae from Nasica's victory were identical with his personal property.

Introduction

It has long been known, if not always plainly stated, that the Roman elite commonly described in our sources as optimates acted in support and defense of the Sullan constitution, interpreted as the traditional republican settlements centered on the senate. However, what scholars have failed to see is that such support for the Sullan arrangements could be justified in the political conflicts of the first century bc by recourse to Stoic language, which in this period was widely familiar to the educated elite and informed Roman political discourse. The aim of this paper is to show that Stoicism provided the basis for many of the conventional ethical assumptions held by the Roman optimates and constituted an important part of their ideological tradition, which could indeed be mobilized to support and defend the Sullan constitutional settlements. To demonstrate this, I shall attempt to reconstruct and articulate the ideological premises of the language that politicians such as Catulus employed in their political careers.

Throughout his career, Catulus sought to preserve the Sullan political order against those forces that threatened its existence. In his consulship in 78 bc, he opposed his colleague Lepidus, who, after initial hesitation, dedicated the rest of his year in office to opposing and dismantling the Sullan constitutional arrangements.