Greeks on Greekness: Viewing the Greek Past under the Roman Empire

Karl Marx observed that ‘just when people seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves... they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service’. While the Greek east under Roman rule was not revolutionary, perhaps, in the sense that Marx had in mind, it was engaged in creating something that had not previously existed, in part just through the millennia-long involvement with its own tradition, which was continually being remodelled and readapted. It was an age that was intensely self-conscious about its relation to history, a consciousness that manifested itself not only in Attic purism and a reverence for antique literary models but also in ethnic identities, educational and religious institutions, and political interactions with – and even among – the Romans. In this volume, seven scholars explore some of the forms that this preoccupation with the Greek past assumed under Roman rule. Taken together, the chapters offer a kaleidoscopic view of how Greeks under the Roman Empire related to their past, indicating the multiple ways in which the classical tradition was problematised, adapted, transformed, and at times rejected. They thus provide a vivid image of a lived relation to tradition, one that was inventive rather than conservative and self-conscious rather than passive. The Greeks under Rome played with their heritage, as they played at being and not being the Greeks they continually studied and remembered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cambridge Philological Society
• Release date: Aug 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781913701352

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INTRODUCTION

Socrates (discussing performers of epic poetry): ‘Can we say, Ion, that a man is in his right mind when, though he is adorned with embroidered robes and golden crowns, he weeps amidst sacrifices and festivals …?’ Ion: ‘To tell the truth, Socrates, why no’ (Ion 535D)

Ion: ‘I must pay strict attention to the audience, since if I make them cry, I’ll laugh when I take their money, but if I make them laugh, I’ll be crying at the money I’ve lost’ (Ion 535E)

Ion: ‘You speak well, Socrates, but I’d be surprised if you could speak well enough to persuade me that I am possessed and mad when I laud Homer’ (Ion 536D)

‘Olivier is not Hamlet, but also not not Hamlet’ (Schechner (1985) 110, quoted in Webb p. 40 n. 57 below)

Actors – and we may include among them the great orators, declaimers, rhapsodes and rhetoricians of classical antiquity – have a complex relationship to the rôles that they enact. On the one hand, they identify at least to some extent with the feelings and attitudes of the characters they play; on the other hand, they do not do so to the extent of merging entirely with the persona – were this to occur, they would be raving, not acting.

Role-playing is not restricted to public performers. All people imagine themselves in the guise of others, whom they take as models or as objects of identification. We suppose that when Romans donned the imagines or masks of distinguished ancestors in funeral processions, there was some sense of entering into the personality of the deceased. This perhaps is an extreme case, but the Romans were highly conscious of their relationship with the past. So too the Greeks, and never more so than under the sway of the Roman Empire, when they might look back to the brilliant and dramatic era of the independent city-states and fancy themselves kin and heir to the figures who strode the stage of history half a dozen centuries earlier.

Not all epochs are equally given to such play-acting in relation to the past. Different conditions elicit different styles of self-representation. Moments of crisis, in particular, may evoke a tendency to imitate one’s forebears. As Karl Marx observes in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, ‘just when people seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language’ (Marx and Engels (1958) 247).

While the Greek East under Roman rule was not revolutionary, perhaps, in the sense that Marx had in mind, it was engaged in creating something that had not previously existed, in part just through the millenia-long involvement with its own tradition, which was continually being remodelled and readapted. Continuities were perceived or invented, differences were grafted onto the past or interacted with it in such a way as to create new figures, in the way that grids on two superimposed transparencies produce elaborate and unexpected moiré patterns. It was an age that was intensely self-conscious about its relation to history, a consciousness that manifested itself not only in Attic purism and a reverence for antique literary models but also in ethnic identities, educational and religious institutions, and political interactions with – and even among – the Romans. This supplementary issue of PCPS explores some of the forms that this preoccupation with the Greek past assumed under Roman rule. Above all, the several contributions seek to show how these Greeks both identified with and distanced themselves from the tradition, how they spoke their own language even as they imitated the ancients – how they were, in a phrase, both not and yet not not their ancestors.

The articles that follow represent a selection of the papers that were presented and discussed at the colloquium ‘Greeks on Greekness: the construction and uses of the Greek past among Greeks under the Roman Empire’, organised by David Konstan and Suzanne Saïd and held at the Center for Hellenic Studies on 25–28 August 2001. Abstracts of all the papers may be found on the website of the Center, at http://www.chs.harvard.edu. The eleven participants who presented papers included (in addition to those listed below) Sue Alcock of the University of Michigan, Francesca Mestre of the University of Barcelona, Ineke Sluiter of the University of Leiden, and Giusto Traina of the University of Lecce; they were joined by David Konstan and Massimo Fusillo of the University of L’Aquila, as commentators.

Participants in the colloquium were invited to examine how Greeks imagined Greekness in relation to the past during the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, addressing the question on the basis of a wide variety of sources, including literary, archaeological, and artistic. Among the topics suggested were: Why the focus on the past? How did Greek ideas of their past reflect Roman images of classical Greece? Did the past serve as a vehicle to express dissatisfaction with the present? Was it a way of resisting Roman rule or Romanisation? Did it serve the interests of local Greek élites in their bid for power? Participants were asked also to consider such questions as the construction of a common, usable past; the rôle of the Greek language as an artificial construct; the idea of a Greek territory; the status of a common Greek religion; values associated with an imagined Greek past; Greek political identity; becoming and remaining Greek; Greekness as a style; the search for a ‘present’ past; and reproducing the past.

All the papers were thoroughly revised in the light of the conversations that took place during and after the colloquium. What emerged as a common theme was not just a sense of continuity-in-difference, a theme which has been well investigated recently in several important books and articles, but also the element of performance and the enactment of culture in relation to the past.

The first paper, by Tony Spawforth, looks at the play and formation of ethnic identities under the Roman Empire. Spawforth examines references to Macedon and Macedonians in the Hellenistic and Roman periods with a view to determining the extent to which Greeks identified themselves not just with classical Hellas in general but more specifically with the image and tradition of Macedon – playing at being Macedonians, we might say.

The next two papers focus on Greek oratory. Ruth Webb shows that Greek declaimers in the Second Sophistic tended to emulate contemporary rather than classical models, and that when they did draw on models from the past, they did so in a creative, combinatory way rather than in a spirit of slavish imitation: here more than anywhere else one perceives how identification intersects with a consciousness of difference. Suzanne Saïd, in turn, shows how Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaicus both imitates and at the same time radically transforms classical representations of Athens, for example Isocrates’ Panegyricus, adapting – even as it appeals to – the parochial model of the Greek city to the new ideal of a universal Roman empire.

The two chapters that follow examine how traditional Greek ideals and practices assumed new forms and entered in new ways into the fashioning of the Greek self under Roman rule. Ewen Bowie assembles the evidence for choral performances under the Roman Empire, and considers the extent to which they served to maintain an uninterrupted sense of Greekness over the centuries. Tim Whitmarsh, in turn, explores how the old egalitarian idea of friendship was transformed under the hierarchical societies of the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, where the flatterer’s mask was often indistinguishable from the (presumed) naked face of the true friend; here again, the relationship between acting and authenticity is very much at stake, as Greeks sought to make classical philia a reference point in a world where values seemed to have become ontologically insecure.

The last two papers emphasise the problematic nature of our evidence for Greek identity in the age of Rome: just where we imagine that we see continuity, difference emerges – and vice versa. Simon Goldhill surveys the several ways in which Artemis was conceptualised under the Roman empire, and shows that she eludes all the traditional systematisations of Greek myth and worship – there was more messiness than system in the way Greek religion was imagined over the course of centuries. Greg Woolf concludes the set with an examination of how the celebration of Greek games in a Roman city could be a point of controversy on many levels, including local politics, views of the emperor, and the complex rôle of Greekness in the construction of the Roman sense of self; Romans played at being Greek, Greeks adapted Roman games, and identification took place in a continually contested arena.

Taken together, the papers in this volume offer a kaleidoscopic view of how Greeks under the Roman Empire related to their past, indicating the multiple ways in which the classical tradition was problematised, adapted, transformed, and at times rejected. The papers thus provide a vivid image of a lived relation to tradition, one that was inventive rather than conservative and self-conscious rather than passive. The Greeks under Rome played with their heritage, as they played at being and not being the Greeks they continually studied and remembered. They were, like Plato’s Ion, both possessed by the past they enacted and fully conscious of the world they were playing to.

DAVID KONSTAN

1

‘MACEDONIAN TIMES’: HELLENISTIC MEMORIES IN THE PROVINCES OF THE ROMAN NEAR EAST

1. Introduction¹

A body of evidence, discussed in more detail below, reveals behaviour among the Greek-identified communities of the Roman near east – here defined in the first instance as the regions of Flat Cilicia, Syria and Egypt – which reflects, in different ways, their sense of identity with, or historical roots in, what we call the Hellenistic period. These were the centuries of Greek history which some Greek writers under Roman rule called the ‘Macedonian times’ (Makedonikoi chronoi or kairoi)² after the dominant ethno-class (to borrow Pierre Briant’s formulation)³ in Hellenistic Asia and Egypt, the Macedonians.⁴ During this era, from the reign of Alexander down to the Roman conquest, Macedonian rulers had founded the majority of the Greek-style poleis in which the Greek-speakers of these regions lived in Roman times and laid the basis for their Roman-period socio-economic preeminence; in the case of a minority of these Greek-speakers who were of Greco-Macedonian, rather than indigenous, ethnic ancestry, these same rulers had created the favourable climate in which Aegean forbears had settled in the near east and, with their descendants, come to constitute the dominant group in the rich and powerful successor-states of the Seleucids and Ptolemies.

This evidence, which has not been collected in one place before, raises various questions of interpretation. Firstly, much of it belongs in the context of the projection of civic tradition, a purely local phenomenon at first sight. But the material raises the issue, when taken as a whole, as to whether somewhere here any sign should be recognised of a broader identification, among Greek-speakers in these regions, with the old Macedonian dispensation. Secondly, what relation does this body of evidence have to the phenomenon of Roman Alexander-imitation, the public and political manipulation of the myth of Alexander, the architect of the Makedonikoi chronoi, by successive emperors from Augustus on, in a climate of power-relations in which Greek cultural trends cannot be viewed in isolation from the comportment of central Roman governance?⁵ Thirdly, if the ‘Macedonian times’ can be shown to have been in some ways a historical touchstone for parts of the Roman East, how should this sensibility be understood in relation to the pride of place which contemporary Greek paideia gave to Classical Greece – with its implicit downgrading of the cultural standing of Hellenismus – as a focus of élite-Greek identity in imperial times?⁶

2. The Macedonian identity of the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east

This section is by way of a brief survey of how far the two major Hellenistic powers in the east, the Seleucid state, inheritor of the bulk of Alexander’s Asian conquests, and Ptolemaic Egypt, saw themselves, and were seen by others, not just as Greek but specifically as Macedonian in their primary identity. Its temporal focus, however, is not the heyday of these states in the third century, but their twilight years leading up to the Roman take-over of each in respectively 64 and 30 BC. Since both states had contracted territorially in their decline, the one to the Nile valley, the other effectively to Syria and Flat Cilicia, these areas will be the geographical foci of this section.

The purpose of this survey is to assess how meaningful it still is to talk of a Macedonian identity in regard to these states at the closest point in time to their incorporation into the Roman Empire. This groundwork is necessary in order to gauge and evaluate the historical and temporal distance beween the latest expressions of even a residual Macedonian identity in the core-territories of these states in their declining phases and the assertions of aspects of their Macedonian past in these same regions much later in the very different political and cultural climate of the high Roman Empire (second to third centuries AD). How reasonable is it, in other words, to suppose the existence at this later date of sections of society in the Greek cities of Egypt and Syria who saw themselves as the heirs, socially or even genealogically, of the dominant ethno-class of these regions in Ptolemaic and Seleucid times?

Charles Edson has shown how classical writers from the mid-first century BC onwards looked back on both the Seleucid state and dynasty as Macedonian, the continuation of Alexander’s empire in Asia, right down to their disappearance in 64 BC.⁷ This way of thinking, as Edson recognised, was linked in part to the ancient notion of a cycle of empires and succession of imperial races, a schema in which, as Roman power extended over the Hellenistic East, the ‘imperium Macedonicum’ was made to fall neatly between the empires of the Persians and Romans. That this ancient perception was something more than a historiographical formula is suggested by the Jewish historian Josephus, a native of Judaea born and raised in the Roman near east a century after the final Seleucid collapse. Josephus repeatedly presents the ‘Macedonians’ and ‘Greeks’ as distinctive ethnic components of the Seleucid state, even if they were so closely linked as to be regularly paired,⁸ and in his account of the struggles of the Maccabees and the Hasmoneans (second century BC) he repeatedly characterises the Seleucid enemy as ‘the Macedonians’.⁹ It is not easy to gauge the ethnic or political realities behind this perception of Josephus (or his earlier Greek sources),¹⁰ although it cannot be said that Josephus himself was unaware of the nuances of Greco-Macedonian ethnicity in the near east, since, for his own day, he carefully distinguished, in the ‘Macedonian’ bodyguard of the Commagenian crown-prince in AD 70, between the majority who were not ethnic Macedonians but merely trained in the Macedonian manner, and (by implication and au pied de la lettre) the minority who were.¹¹ This usage, whereby ‘Macedonian’ and ‘soldier’ became synonymous, is found in Ptolemaic Egypt and (probably) the Seleucid state,¹² whence neighbouring Commagene no doubt took it over, and it conceivably provides a partial explanation for the perception in Josephus that the Seleucid enemy of the Hasmoneans was ‘Macedonian’. Whether this perception also reflects the broader involvement in the running of the later Seleucid state of quantitatively significant numbers of people who called themselves Macedonian, might seem a riskier conjecture, although it is supported by a unique insight from Josephus into the social organisation in his own day (he uses the present tense) of the former Seleucid royal capital, Seleucea-Tigris, now Parthian, where the population comprised ‘many Macedonians’, ‘a majority of Hellenes’, and ‘not a few Syrians’.¹³ It is not necessary to have to pronounce on the thorny and insoluble (on the present evidence) question of the precise basis (customs, ethnicity, juridical status, military service, spatial apartheid, a mix of these?) for the social distinctiveness of Parthian Seleucea’s Macedonians, in order to accept the likelihood that this corporate identity must have been a survival (after some two centuries) from before the final Seleucid loss of Babylonia in 126 BC, since it is hard to see it as a creation of the Parthians themselves. It seems reasonable to ask whether similar concentrations of Macedonians might not have continued to exist in other parts of the later Seleucid state. The obvious place to look would be northern Syria. On a rough estimate about 25,000 Macedonians may have settled in Asia under Alexander and the Successors.¹⁴ Of these there was a large concentration – perhaps the largest – in the new city-foundations of this region. Strabo, for instance, says that ‘the majority of the Macedonians who made the expedition [with Alexander]’ eventually settled at Apamea, one of the new foundations of Seleucus I on the Orontes. Such was the dominating presence of Macedonian colonists in this and the other Seleucid cities nearby that the traditional local toponymy – rivers and districts as well as settlements – was recast into a ‘new Macedonia’ around the Orontes valley;¹⁵ this same region, in the second century BC, has produced rare evidence for the transposition of Macedonian institutions to the near east, in this case the peliganes or council of elders.¹⁶

As for the later dynasty itself, how much importance its rulers attached to their Macedonian ancestry is not directly attested, although, right to the end, the Seleucids continued to employ the same small handful of ‘Macedonian’ personal names, among which ‘Philip’ first appears only late in the dynasty’s history.¹⁷ A better clue is provided by the dynasty’s claim not just to be Macedonian, but specifically to descend from Heracles and the Argeads, the royal house of Philip and Alexander, a claim now known to have been in official circulation by 206/5 BC at the latest.¹⁸ One might predict that the last Seleucids would not have neglected such a claim as their ancestral inheritance shrank and they struggled to maintain even the semblance of royalty. Royal portraiture provides a pointer in this direction: according to a recent study, ‘the late Seleucids portrayed themselves as increasingly Alexander-like in the twilight of their rule’.¹⁹ Another clue is the resurfacing of the same genealogical claim among the Roman client-rulers of the region after the final Seleucid collapse in 64 BC. Thus Glaphyra, daughter of the Augustan Archelaus of Cappadocia, claimed a royal Macedonian (‘Temenid’) ancestry,²⁰ and so did the neighbouring kings of Commagene, as shown by the inclusion of Alexander the Great (along with earlier Seleucids) in the sculptured ‘ancestor-gallery’ of Antiochus I on Nemrut Dağ (c. 40 BC).²¹ It seems unlikely that the Hellenistic royal trope of an Argead ancestry should have lived on among these regional kinglets had it been neglected by the last Seleucids themselves.²²

One reason why this claim should have remained active to the last is that the rivals of the Seleucids, the Ptolemies, made precisely the same claim to Argead ancestry, one which by 206/5 BC was sufficiently well-known to be in official circulation outside (as well as within) the Ptolemaic state.²³ Pausanias observed of the early Ptolemies generally that they ‘liked to be called Macedonians, as in fact they were’,²⁴ and this insistence is eloquently attested to by inscriptions under Ptolemy III (246–221 BC).²⁵ A ‘Macedonian’ royal guard is attested for the Ptolemies as late as 34 BC (below), and the kausia, or ‘Macedonian brimmed beret’, is found as an item of apparel for a trumpeter in the Ptolemaic royal guard in the Palestrina mosaic (on the usual view, dated to the late second or early first century BC).²⁶ The Macedonian identity of the last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra VII, is affirmed by Plutarch, who famously describes her impressive knowledge of languages, ‘although the kings of Egypt before her had not even made the effort to learn the Egyptian language, and some actually gave up their Macedonian speech’. The clear implication of this passage is that the polyglot queen not only spoke Egyptian, but also Macedonian.²⁷ Whether at this date Macedonian was still a living argot, even in Macedonia itself, is unknown.²⁸ But such a prospect seems far more remote in late-Hellenistic Alexandria, where the loss of Macedonian by some of her royal ancestors suggests that some time had lapsed since the Ptolemies had been in the habit of speaking Makedonisti to their ethnic Macedonian troops, as once they may have done.²⁹ But one might conjecture the ossified survival of Macedonian as a marker of Macedonian identity in certain court-contexts – as with the preservation of its ancestral Manchu tongue by the Ch’ing dynasty as late as 1911.³⁰ Whatever the case, Cleopatra’s knowledge of Macedonian suggests her strong sense, in appropriate contexts, of her dynasty’s Macedonian heritage.

Her most public assertion of this identity took place at the grand pageant in Alexandria known as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’ (34 BC). On this occasion, according to Plutarch, Antony conferred on Ptolemy Philadelphus, one of his sons by Cleopatra, the title of king and ruler over Hollow Syria and Rough Cilicia (gifts from Antony to his mother in 37 BC). To mark his regal destiny, the boy (aged two) was dressed ‘in boots, short cloak and kausia surmounted by a diadem’, all this being ‘the dress of the kings who followed Alexander’, and, to cap the effect, was assigned a bodyguard of ‘Macedonians’.³¹ In historical hindsight this was indeed ‘all show’,³² although the fact that the toddler’s putative realm comprised regions formerly disputed by the Ptolemies with the (equally Macedonian) Seleucids, suggests a certain hard-nosed astuteness in this legitimating emphasis on his Macedonian-royal credentials. But this elaborate projection of the dynasty’s links with Alexander is perhaps best understood as addressing a domestic audience of those Egyptian (and above all Alexandrian) Greeks, who saw themselves as Greco-Macedonian. Greek migration into Ptolemaic Egypt has recently been estimated as ‘unlikely ever to have formed more than 20 per cent of the total [population] – and probably much less’,³³ and within this group the total number of Macedonian settlers may not have been much larger than the 5000 imported, on one recent estimate, by Ptolemy I.³⁴ These Macedonians and their descendants, however, have been characterised as ‘in many ways, the élite of Ptolemaic Egypt’,³⁵ and their sense of ethnic pride emerges with startling clarity in the self-referential doodle, ‘Apollonius the Macedonian … a Macedonian, I say’, penned by the Greek author of an Egyptian papyrus of 158 BC.³⁶ Almost nothing is known of these Macedonians under the last Ptolemies, and the picture is complicated because ‘Macedonian’ status in Ptolemaic Egypt became as time passed less an ethnic indicator and more a social rôle, that of soldier.³⁷ But the well-to-do ‘Macedonians’ attested in Alexandrian legal papyri of Augustan date, such as Ptolemaeus, son of Ptolemaeus, Alexander, son of Nicodemus, and Laodice and her brother M. Sulpicius Protarchus, children of Lysias, have good Greek and Macedonian names, and perhaps can safely be recognised as members of post-conquest Alexandria’s Greco-Macedonian colonial élite.³⁸

3. ‘Macedonian times’ remembered: Roman Syria and Egypt

This section starts with Roman Syria and neighbouring Cilicia and looks at ways in which Alexander and the Seleucids were evoked in the public spaces of the cities of these regions by works of art, inscriptions and cult.

In early-Hellenistic times the Cilician plain had see-sawed between the Ptolemies and Seleucids, after the peace of Apamea (188 BC) remaining in the Seleucid sphere until passing to Tigranes in 83 BC,³⁹ before finally falling under Roman provincial rule about 63 BC. The coastal city of Aegeae only enters history in the late Republic but it went on to become an important centre in imperial times. Its origin is unclear, although the Macedonian geographical name suggests a royal foundation, and the Alexander Romance claims Alexander himself (improbably) as the city’s founder. In the first century BC the city placed the head of its unidentified royal founder on coin-issues.⁴⁰ Much later, in the early third century, its coin legends included the juxtaposed words ‘Macedonian’ and ‘noble’, surely to be taken together, implying a claim to colonial Macedonian ancestors.⁴¹

On the other side of the Amanus range but inside Roman Cilicia, the city of Nicopolis in the second or third century set up a statue of Alexander, of which the base survives. Presumably this had to do with the Roman city’s claim, known only from a late source, to have been founded by Alexander in memory of his victory at Issus – on geographical grounds alone almost certainly an invented tradition, one competing with the same claim by Alexandria-by-Issus.⁴² On the north coast of Roman Syria, this Alexandria (modern Iskenderun) is (again) of unknown origin, although by the second century BC it could be claimed as a foundation of Alexander (again improbably), and in imperial times as a ‘trophy and monument’ of Alexander’s nearby victory. No doubt the Roman city encouraged this belief, as suggested by the statue of Alexander on show there in the historian Herodian’s time (early third century), and by its coinage, if the unidentified king who appeared on issues dated AD 43/4 really is Alexander.⁴³

In imperial times the two great cities of northern Syria were Antioch and Seleucea, along with Apamea and Laodicea making up the so-called tetrapolis founded by the architect of the Seleucid state, Seleucus I Nicator,⁴⁴ whose memory was being evoked here in the second and third centuries. At Antioch the theatre, the most prominent possible location for an artwork in any Greek city, was the setting for a civic statue-group depicting Seleucus and his son, the eponymous Antiochus I, in the act of crowning the city’s personified Tyche. According to the Antiochene historian Malalas, the Roman emperor Trajan was the donor of the group as part of his completion of the theatre during his stay at Antioch in 115. The group seems to have copied the figure of Tyche from a famous Hellenistic statue by the sculptor Eutychides, but the incorporation of the two Seleucid kings was evidently a Trajanic novelty.⁴⁵ Downstream of the Orontes in Seleucea Pieria stood the so-called Nicatoreum, the temple (neos) and precinct (temenos) of Seleucus built by Antiochus I to mark his father’s tomb. Appian’s description presupposes an original tomb cult, and, since he refers to the complex in the present tense, both monument (and cult?) were evidently maintained in his day (the AD 160s).⁴⁶ In the same period, down the coast at Laodicea, an honorific inscription dated by the Seleucid era to AD 164 records a member of the urban élite with a good Macedonian name, one Julia Berenice, who is described as ‘the descendant of King Seleucus Nicator’.⁴⁷ Local reverence for Nicator is further suggested by the find, from Heraclea (Borg es Sleyb) in the city’s hinterland, of a Roman pilaster-capital carved with a relief (dated to the third century on style) depicting Seleucus I in military dress, and crowned by a winged Nike, making the bull-sacrifice which (in later sources) marked the foundation of Antioch.⁴⁸

In southern Syria, the poleis of the Decapolis (Transjordan), which since 106 had been divided between the provinces of Syria, Arabia and Judaea, were populated in the main by hellenised indigenes, although there may also have been a small colonial element in Hellenistic times.⁴⁹ In the second and third centuries these cities chose to emphasise a Greek identity by projecting their origins as Macedonian royal colonies. Alexander’s bust appears on coins of Capitolias (first in 189/90 and again under Septimius Severus), with a legend claiming ‘Alexander the Macedonian’ as the ‘genarch’ or ancestor of the citizen body.⁵⁰ This was a claim fanned, as in northern Syria, by local rivalries, since nearby Gerasa to the south likewise claimed ‘Alexander the Macedonian’ as its founder on issues coined under Severus and Elagabalus.⁵¹ Roman Gerasa also set up a statue of Perdiccas, Alexander’s chiliarch, in this same period, perhaps claiming him as the officer charged with the actual foundation.⁵² Just as the Nicopolitans felt that ‘Alexander, son of Philip’ was enough to identify a statue of Alexander, so here a bald reference to ‘Perdiccas’ was sufficient: these were well known figures locally. In reality Gerasa seems to have been a Seleucid (re?)foundation (by Antiochus IV?),⁵³ and the city was also one of at least three in the Decapolis which officially reverted to their Seleucid dynastic names under imperial rule. Of these three (the other two were Hippos/Antioch and Abila/Seleucea, on coins from Nero to Elagabalus), Gerasa did so in a peculiarly explicit way by proclaiming itself as ‘Antioch on the Chrysorrhoas, formerly Gerasa’, a formulation which appears for the first time in the building inscription on a city-gate dated to late in Trajan’s reign (114/5).⁵⁴ This Decapolitan play with civic origins had a local background which Axel Gebhardt has recently elucidated – notably the need to be seen to identify with the hegemonic Hellenism of the eastern Empire in the wake of the Bar-Kokhba revolt, and a reaction against the indigenous identities of rival centres such as Bostra. As Gebhardt also saw, the presence of Hadrian in the vicinity (he visited Gerasa in person in 129–131) was a stimulus;⁵⁵ so too, I suggest below, was the earlier interest of Trajan in the Seleucids.⁵⁶

On the Syrian province’s eastern frontier, finally, Greek and Macedonian memories also characterise Roman Dura-Europus, which is described in a late source (Isidore of Seville) as a ‘Macedonian foundation’, and where Macedonian names such as Arybbas and Antigonus identify a Macedonian element in the second century BC.⁵⁷ There are numerous signs that a Greco-Macedonian identity appears to have survived the Parthian occupation (about 100 BC-AD 165), such as the persistence of Macedonian personal names in this period,⁵⁸ and the appearance of Seleucus Nicator in the cult-centre of the local Palmyrene residents. Here a relief-slab has been found, dated by an Aramaic inscription to the year 470 of the Seleucid era (AD 159), depicting the Palmyrene Gad or tutelary deity of Dura being crowned by a military figure (corselet, military cloak, sword) with diadem, identified in Aramaic as ‘Seleucus Nicator’, whom by this date (and no doubt earlier) the inhabitants of