The Massacre of 88
The behavior of Roman magistrates in the provinces was not uncommonly marked by arbitrariness, brutality, venality, and other types of corruption.[106] Of that there is no doubt; but these sins had not been entirely unknown in the world of the Hellenistic kings. There is perhaps a tendency to stress overmuch the effects of Roman misgovernment particularly in Asia Minor before the Mithridatic War. For example, to quote one scholar, "it is not difficult to understand why the peoples of Asia massacred some eighty thousand Roman citizens in one day at the bidding of Mithridates Eupator; it is less clear why such horrors were not repeated"[107] —or, we are left to wonder, why they had been so long in coming. The notorious bloodbath of 88, in which thousands of Romans and Italians, regardless of
age, sex, or status, were slaughtered by the Greeks of Asia Minor,[108] is not uncommonly understood as a harsh but in some sense authentic verdict upon Roman imperial conduct in Asia Minor. The massacre is worth our closer attention in connection with this discussion of the impact of proconsuls and publicani on local communities, and of Greek attitudes toward their activities.
The brutality of the massacre makes it easy to interpret the event as a spontaneous outburst that gave vent to hatred pent up over a generation. Although universally noted in passing (as in the quotation above), insufficient weight has been given to the fact that the massacre was carried out in accordance with an order of Mithridates, who had by that time already established his presence in Ionia,[109] or to Mithridates' care to lay down severe penalties against those who disobeyed the order and promise of rewards for those who carried it out.[110] Appian himself regarded the "fear of Mithridates"—a phrase rarely noted by modem commentators—as a major motive for Greek obedience to the order, although he also believed that the manner in which it was carried out proved that the Greeks' hatred of the Romans was even greater than that fear.[111]
Yet surprisingly little blame is assigned by our near-contemporary source, Cicero, to the Greek cities that had carried out the massacre. In the speech for the Manilian law the responsibility appears to be Mithridates' alone; Greek complicity is not mentioned even where the orator wishes to stress the hatred aroused in the Eastern provinces by the rapacity of Roman officials.[112] Nor does Cicero ever recall the event as an exemplum of the disastrous results of corrupt administration in the long advisory letter to his brother Quintus on the governance of Asia.[113] Cicero chooses to take explicit note of the guilt of the Asiatic Greeks on only one occasion, in order to undermine the authority of the testimony of the city of Tralles against his client, L. Valerius Flaccus, in a case of extortion.[114] In Plutarch's
account of the settlement of the war, Sulla's soldiers were displeased at the lenient treatment of the man (Mithridates) who had caused the massacre of so many Romans; Greeks are given no share of responsibility for the act (Sull . 24.4). In Appian's version of Sulla's settlement of Asia after the defeat of Mithridates, the Roman general assigns culpability for the atrocity above all to Mithridates and certain individuals in the towns, whom he put to death; the cities in general he blames only for obeying and carrying out the order—sufficient justification in any case, in his view, for the levying of a devastating fine that helped to resolve his financial difficulties.[115] Sulla punished the Ephesians particularly severely—not for throwing themselves into the bloody work with special enthusiasm, although we are told that suppliants were dragged from the Artemision to be killed, but for having previously overthrown Roman statues, thus expressing their adherence to the Pontic cause at the time of Mithridates' invasion of Ionia.[116] Similarly, it is the Mytilenaeans who are singled out by Velleius for their "treachery"—not indeed for their role in the slaughter but for a previous act, apparently immediately following the Pontic invasion of Asia: their handing over to Mithridates, as a gesture of goodwill and adherence to his cause, the Roman refugees to their city, among them Aquillius himself.[117] The lack of strong evidence for abiding Roman outrage against the Greeks of Asia Minor for the massacre of some thousands of Italians and Roman citizens implies just the reverse of Appian's judgment[118] : that their complicity in the crime was recognized at the time
to have been due after all more to the "fear of Mithridates" than to "hatred of the Romans."[119]
Further considerations point in the same direction. Mithridates, having already taken control of Ionia and preparing for the expedition against Rhodes, set a date one month in advance for the carrying out of his order throughout Asia.[120] Before that fixed day no conspicuous case is recorded of violent attacks on Romans in the cities of Asia; the worst we hear of is the betrayal of Romans to Mithridates by the Mytilenaeans and Laodiceans upon his first arrival in the west.[121] Many Romans and Italian—even the austere Stoic exile P. Rutilius Rufus—who had hitherto advertised their association with the ruling power by wearing the toga quickly shed this badge of hegemony when western Asia Minor fell under the control of Mithridates and his partisans.[122] Those who made this concession to discretion seem to have escaped immediate reprisals, and in the intervening time large numbers of Romans were allowed to escape to Rhodes, no doubt in more than one case with the active help of local notables such as Chaeremon of Nysa.[123] What was the purpose of the secrecy of the order and its execution on a single day if not to catch the victims unawares?[124] It is difficult to reconcile the view of the massacre as a passionate outburst against Roman rule with the fact that no such act is known to have been perpetrated upon Romans and Italians when the defenses of the province first collapsed or even when Mithridates first established himself in Ionia. The evidence is incompatible with the view that the Asian Greeks chafed to avenge themselves upon their Roman masters at the earliest opportu-
nity. That is not to suggest that any great love was lost between the two peoples; the brutality of the slaughter that Appian recounts at Ephesus, Pergamum, Adramyttium, Caunus, and Tralles suggests no surfeit of scruple in at least those places.[125] Rather, my point is simply to emphasize that when the massacre came, it was a deliberate act of policy in accordance with an order given by a third party rather than a spontaneous expression of latent but bitter hostility.[126]
It is presumably because of the modern tradition of emphasizing Greek emotion rather than Mithridatic initiative in considering this event that so little attention has been paid to the Pontic king's purpose in issuing the order. The fact that the order was given during preparations early in 88 for the expedition against Rhodes and not before,[127] when the province first had fallen into Mithridates' hands, must be kept in mind. This would suggest that it was motivated by some development since the initial victory over Roman and allied forces. Possibly the order is to be linked directly with the campaign against Rhodes: it might be useful to prevent the Italian contingent on the island from being reinforced with men and resources. On the other hand, now that Mithridates was running up against the first strong resistance to his march, the Italian populations in the Greek cities might encourage defection from the cause after the passing of the first flush of Pontic triumph and the return of sober reflection on the chances of a Roman victory in the end, very likely induced by news of the passing of the Italian crisis.[128] Therefore, I suggest, Mithridates determined to secure his hold on the rest of the Greek cities of western Asia Minor and remove all possibility for time-serving prevarication by demanding of them an act that would place them irrevocably in the control of his partisans and preclude all rational hopes for accommodation with Rome in the near future. If that was Mithridates' purpose, he was on the whole successful. The massacre did not, of course, prove an ironclad guarantee against revolt, as subsequently the inevitability of Mithridates' defeat sank in, and the king resorted to increasingly repressive measures against the wretched cities. The Greeks who had participated in the slaughter of 88
might revolt, but they could expect no reward from Rome for doing so. That did not stop Ephesus from trying to restore its link with the now-victorious Romans in late 86 or 85, when the city professed in a public decree its undying loyalty to Rome, tactfully leaving out all mention of the massacre. This shameless revision of history, however, seems to have fallen on deaf ears, and Sulla ultimately punished the Ephesians along with the others, indeed with special severity for Ephesus's early adherence to Mithridates.[129]
It has recently been argued persuasively, against previous orthodoxy, that the initial adherence to Mithridates of the Greek cities of Asia Minor and, subsequently, of parts of Greece was due on the whole less to anti-Roman sentiment than to calculation of local and individual interest under the conditions of the moment.[130] I would suggest a similar interpretation of the massacre of 88. It would be naive to ignore the role of Mithridates and to take it as a clear expression of the attitude of the Asiatic Greeks to Roman hegemony and administration. Appian's view that it revealed the hatred of the Greeks for Rome even more than it did their fear of Mithridates is a debatable interpretation in view of the attribution of overwhelming culpability in our sources to Mithridates (with the easily explained exception of Cicero's Pro Flacco ), whereas Greek complicity is not even noted with regularity. But certainly the timing of the massacre and the lack of prior incidents indicate that it was not the work of a populace driven half-mad by Roman oppression, waiting only for the official nod to wreak its vengeance, but a deliberate act, the initiative for which came from Mithridates and his agents for strategic purposes of their own.
Conclusions regarding the impact of a proconsular presence upon the communities of the East must remain tentative, given the nature of the evidence. Yet certain patterns seem clear and allow the formulation of a number of working hypotheses. Above all, I have tried to show that the impact the presence of successive proconsuls made upon the communities of the East depended above all on various concrete factors—for instance, the presence or absence of Roman officials and semiofficials such as the publicani in a community, the presence of a significant community of
Roman citizens, the military duties of the proconsul, and the specific privileges enjoyed by cities and their readiness to defend them—rather than on comprehensive legal schemata such as leges provinciae , if they even existed in the form often imagined.
By taking such factors into consideration we arrive at a substantially different picture of "provincial administration," depending on where we look. There can be little argument about the degree to which Rome's proconsuls assumed supreme administrative authority over the unprivileged, tributary communities of Macedonia, Mysia, and Lydia, although the proconsul of Macedonia's military tasks must have diminished his direct supervision, and it is worth recalling that the Macedonian republics were apparently not abolished (see chap. 1). It is probably no accident that these were all parts of former kingdoms that were not, on the whole, structured around the polis, a useful locus of self-government. However, outside these core areas of the Eastern provinciae the proconsuls' responsibilities and rights were sharply reduced. We have already noted that although the proconsul of Macedonia was not formally barred from involvement in Greece, particularly when Roman interest demanded it, his primary and normally fairly onerous duties of defending the Balkan frontier must have made him a rare sight indeed south of Macedonia and the line of the via Egnatia . Evidence of Greek appeals to Roman arbitration, to be surveyed in the next chapter, tell the same story: as a rule, with few exceptions, Greek appeals for the settlement of internal disputes went before the Senate, and proconsuls seem typically to have been left only the minor details of the settlement or simply to have passed on the Senate's instructions to foreign authorities (see chap. 6). The limited role of proconsuls of Macedonia in mainland Greece is a sign that there the norms of international diplomacy were still observed. The proconsul of Asia seems to have played a similar role with regard to the "free" Greek cities of Asia Minor. Here, however, certain factors conspired to make Roman encroachment a more persistent and problematic phenomenon. Unlike the proconsul of Macedonia, the Roman commander of Asia had no significant military duties to distract him, while, on the other hand, the substantial numbers of Roman citizens in the provincia and the activities of the publicani meant that much of his business inevitably involved dashes of rights between Romans and provincials. Furthermore, he was quite regularly present in the "free" states themselves, which, as we have seen, will have been at the very least burdensome upon local finances. On the other hand, most Greek cities of the coast that had paid tribute to the Attalid kings were now free of that drain of resources and affront to local pride, and Rome's proconsul may
have given no more offense to local autonomy than the Pergamene
and appointed in subject cities.[131] And, as we have seen, Greek complaints about proconsular intervention in local jurisdiction or the encroachments of the publicani were likely to get a sympathetic hearing in the Senate, particularly as recognition of the usefulness of perceived fairness toward the allies spread in the curia around the turn of the century. The massacre of 88 was not, as often thought, directly linked to the intrusiveness or unpopularity of Roman administration in Asia Minor. An imperium upheld under normal, peacetime conditions by the presence of no more than two legions over the entire Aegean world was necessarily one that did not disrupt too deeply the established patterns of Hellenic political life.
