The second chapter provides an analysis of the Ionian Koinon, the association of the thirteen cities of Ionia, as one of the most direct and explicit channels for expressing Ionian cultural identity. Its festivals and ritual gatherings served both internally and externally as the most important means for making Ionianness visible. By discharging a koinon office, the civic elites of the koinon’s member cities were able to showcase their loyalty to a shared cultural affiliation and at the same time to engage in an inner-Ionian competition for euergetic prestige. This chapter also includes the first prosopographical study of all attested officials of the Ionian Koinon. It is concluded by a comparison with Hadrian’s Panhellenion as another institutionalised confederation which united Greek cities and fostered an ethno-cultural definition of Greekness in the 2nd c. AD.

The first chapter provides a brief historical overview of Ionia as a region, discusses its geographical extent as represented in the works of the authors Strabo and Pliny from the Roman Imperial period, and analyses its place in relation to the superimposed administrative units of the conventus districts and, on a larger scale, within the framework of the province of Asia: both of these transcended the traditional boundaries of Ionia and thus potentially challenged its perceived coherence. The use of city-titles making explicit reference to Ionia is highlighted at the end of the chapter as part of the intercity rivalries consciously imitating references to the larger frame of the province of Asia.

We cannot be sure when Ionianness ceased to be employed as a form of cultural capital altogether. The last extant testimonies from the period covered by this monograph stem roughly from the mid 3rd c. ad: I.Priene2 61 refers to the city as ἡ λαμπροτάτη Πριηνέων Ἰώνων πόλις (‘the most splendid city of the Ionian Prieneans’), while coins from Teos bear the inscription ΤΗΙΩΝ ΙΩΝΩΝ on the reverse (‘Of the Ionian Teians’, under Severus Alexander and Valerian II), and coins from Samos the inscription ΠΡΩΤΩΝ ΙΩΝΙΑΣ (‘first of Ionia’, under Decius). The last attestation of the Ionian Koinon is the coin series issued in its name at Kolophon (under Trebonianus Gallus and Valerian, discussed in Chapter 3.1.2). The lack of later similar testimonies must certainly also be ascribed to the general decline of the epigraphic habit and of civic coinage in this period, which can be seen as symptoms of the profound changes in Greek civic culture occurring from the mid 3rd c. ad onwards.2

That Ionianness was used as a form of cultural capital also outside of Ionia is demonstrated in the sixth chapter which turns attention to the littorals of the Black Sea, where a number of colonies from the Ionian cities founded in Archaic times cultivated their distinct cultural identities even in the Roman period. Further, the cities of Isinda in Pisidia and Synnada in Phrygia started to call themselves Ionians on their civic coins from the 2nd c. AD on. These examples of mythological kinship affiliations demonstrate that Ionianness remained a valid cultural resource in the Roman Imperial period employed to bestow prestige on cities in the competitive environment of the Roman provinces.

The first part of the third chapter investigates the role that Ionianness played in the cultic life of cities in Roman Ionia, and examines whether there were religious elements (cult epithets, festivals, rituals) which the Ionian cities had in common and which distinguished them from the other Greeks, particularly those in Asia Minor. The second part of the chapter is dedicated to the study of Ionian (foundation) myths as attested in the Roman period; it contextualises them within the discourses of their contemporary society in order to establish their significance for the construction of Ionian identities. Juxtaposing the analyses of the two complementary aspects of ritual and myth allows us to uncover projections of cultural identity in different contexts and media, and to better understand the place Ionianness occupied in the individual, civic, and regional collective imagination.