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2 The Status of Greece after the Achaean War
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2
The Status of Greece after the Achaean War

Not only does the more flexible view of Macedonia provincia presented in the previous chapter best fit the evidence for the conclusion of the war with Andriscus, but it also gives us the key to a novel and quite simple solution of the vexed old question of the formal status of Greece after the Achaean War of 146.

In 146 L. Mummius took command of the war against the Achaeans, crushed the forces of the Achaean League at the Isthmus, captured and sacked Corinth, and received the surrender of the Achaean cities. Thebes and parts of Boeotia had sided with the League; they had yielded without a fight to Q. Caecilius Metellus on his lightning march south from Macedonia in the first stage of the war. Mummius settled the affairs of Greece with the help of a decemviral commission in six months of 146-145 and returned to celebrate a brilliant triumph Achaia capta Corinto deleto .[1]

"Provincialization"?

The traditional emphasis on the notion of "annexation" has engendered a long controversy, dating back to the nineteenth century, over whether Mummius now "converted" Greece into a province. For more than a generation the view of Accame has held the field: part of Greece, consisting specifically of the states that fought Rome in the Achaean War, was formally annexed in 146-145 to the Macedonian province.[2] There are, how-


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ever, authoritative dissenters.[3] Extended discussion is again required. A good deal of negative argumentation will unfortunately be necessary in order first to clear the ground.

The foundation of the prevailing view has been a letter from a Roman magistrate, dating to the second half of the second century, which grants privileges (freedom from taxation, billeting, and special levies) to the Isthmian-Nemean guild of Dionysiac artists.[4] It has been supposed that lines 2-3 of the inscription, as restored by G. Klaffenbach (

), prove that Rome made part of Greece a province, and that this part, though distinct from the province of Macedonia in a sense, was appended to it and placed under the imperium of the proconsul of Macedonia.[5] We have already had reason to doubt such a formal conception of provincia ; but what is derisive is that these weighty conclusions were based not on anything that exists on the stone, but on what was conjectured to have stood in parts now broken off; and these restorations can now be shown to have been not only wholly hypothetical but extremely improbable in themselves.[6] It is not even clear that the " of the Romans" in these lines refers to a provincia at all,[7] whereas we simply cannot say who was the subject of the verb . Further, the guarantee by a Roman


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magistrate of certain traditional privileges of the Dionysiac artists no more implies the assertion of a kind of Roman sovereignty over Thebes, where the inscription was found, or elsewhere in Greece than previous grants by Hellenistic kings or other political authorities of the same or similar privileges.[8] The inscription is dearly too fragmentary to be of any independent value in determining the status of Greece from 146.[9]

Of considerably more weight is a passage from Cicero's Verrine Orations (2.1.55) that refers briefly to Mummius's victory in Greece in terms that suggested to Accame the creation of a province (or provincial appendage) in Greece. But in his eagerness to seize upon nuggets of evidence Accame has ignored the context, which is crucial. The entire passage must be quoted.

You villain, what sort of knavery and madness is this? You entered those friendly and allied cities with the powers and rank of an envoy, but even had you forcibly invaded them as a general at the head of an army, even so, any statuary or works of art that you might take away from them you were surely bound to transport, not to your own town house or the suburban estates of your friends, but to a public place in Romel Need I quote the example of Marcus Marcellus, who captured Syracuse, that treasury of art? Of Lucius Scipio, who conducted the war in Asia and overthrew that mighty monarch Antiochus? Of Flamininus, who conquered King Philip and Macedonia? Of Lucius Paulus, whose energy and bravery overcame King Perseus? Of Lucius Mummius, who destroyed the rich and beautiful city of Corinth, full of art treasures of every kind, and brought so many dries of Achaea and Boeotia under the sway of the Roman People? The houses of these men overflowed with public esteem and moral excellence while they were empty of statues and paintings; and indeed we still see the whole city, and the temples of the gods, and every part of Italy adorned with the dedications and memorials they brought us.[10]


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It is immediately manifest that Cicero's point is to emphasize the dastardly Verres' audacity, not merely in (allegedly) robbing art treasures from the coast of Asia Minor but especially in keeping them for his private delectation rather than setting them up in public. It was, by contrast, the practice of the great conquerors of the past, Cicero tells us, to donate to the enjoyment of the Roman people, the gods, even all Italy, the booty they had won legitimately in warfare. (A marvelous sleight of hand: the invidious comparison of Verres with conquerors not only characterizes his acquisitions as plunder but allows Cicero to blame him for not setting them up in public!) Cicero recalls a series of great and very rich victories: Marcellus's capture of Syracuse, urbs ornatissima ; Scipio's victory over that rex potissimus , Antiochus; Flamininus's "conquest" of King Philip and Macedonia; Paulus's victory over Perseus. So too, when he comes to Mummius, Cicero lays great stress on the wealth of Corinth, urbem pulcherrimam atque ornatissimam . . . plenissimam rerum omnium . He is not, obviously, speaking of the extension, much less the organization of the Roman Empire; his subject is military conquest and the consequent capture of booty.

This should immediately warn us against assuming that urbisque Achaiae Boeotiaeque multas sub imperium populi Romani dicionemque subiunxit refers to a legal act such as the "creation" of a province—a notion that we have already seen ought not to be applied to the second century—rather than the mere fact of conquest and the cities' subjection thereby to Roman power Oust as Polybius wrote of the defeat of Perseus as the act that made the

subject to the Romans). We have already noted that being subject to the imperium of the Roman people by no means implies the formal organization of a province, and that imperium ought not to be defined in a narrow, legalistic manner; and in fact neither Ciceronian parallels nor other correlates of the common phrase sub imperium or dicionem (alicuius) venire/redigere/recipere/subicere/accipere refer necessarily to legal enactments or a change of status.[11] Cicero's phrase


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no more implies the imposition of some formal structure of subjection than his claim two sentences previously that Flamininus Macedoniam subegit . Rather, the point of the phrase is the factual subjection of one party to the other, not necessarily absolute or formally defined, typically following upon defeat, conquest, or surrender.

It is therefore illegitimate to import the notion of the conversion of "many cities of Achaea and Boeotia" into a part of a "province." Had Cicero meant in provinciam redegit he could have used the phrase, which was current at least from his time.[12] It is conquest that is relevant to the general theme of winning rich booty through victory, not some putative creation of a province. His choice of phrase is apt for his purposes, since he both stresses thereby the power of discretion (imperium ) over the possessions of the cities and reminds the audience that this power was, after all that of the Roman people, whom Mummius indeed honored with his many public dedications.[13] The passage from Cicero's Verrines provides no more support for Accame's view on the formal status of Greece than the Theban inscription. Nor does, incidentally, Polybius's statement (38.3.11) that the Greeks, by foolishly precipitating the Achaean War, received the fasces into their cities. This on the face of it should refer to their surrender to Metellus, Mummius, and Roman arms rather than to reduction to a putative "provincial status."[14]

The occasional intervention of the Roman commander in Macedonia in Greek affairs after 146 has generally been thought a strong argument that part of Greece at least was a province.[15] But that hypothesis is an unnecessary step. We shall shortly consider a few of the more striking examples of the proconsular role in Greek affairs, but for now it suffices to note that appeals to the imperator in Macedonia for arbitration or mediation in disputes such as that between the Isthmian-Nemean and the Athenian guilds of Dionysiac artists in the 110s no more prove that either party was formally subject to Roman jurisdiction than does any of the innumerable appeals of this sort before 146.[16] Earlier Roman commanders in Greece had


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not shied away from such activity. That earlier proconsul assigned Macedonia, T. Quinctius Flamininus, spent the winter of 195-194 in Elatea, Phocis, engaged in jurisdiction. In 191 the consul M'. Acilius Glabrio granted an appeal from the Achaeans to allow the resettlement of Elatea, while in 189-188 the Senate delegated the consul M. Fulvius Nobilior, then on Cephallenia, to seek out and punish the murderers of some Delphian envoys.[17] This last case also shows that a commander with imperium had no need of some underlying legal structure of a province to take drastic punitive action. In 167 L. Aemilius Paulus held a judicial investigation into an Aetolian massacre, and shortly thereafter, conducting further hearings, he executed two Greek political leaders, but no provincial status formally authorized him to do so.[18] He and Fulvius were acting by virtue of their imperium , and it mattered not at all that Paulus's provincia was Macedonia, not Greece. If such cases before 146 do not imply the formal underpinning of "provincialization," later ones—induding Q. Fabius Maximus's judicial intervention in the affairs of Dyme ca. 144, in which he sentenced two men to death—should not either.[19]

We do not need to perform legalistic gymnastics, postulating the formal attachment of Greece to the province of Macedonia, to explain the facts known to us. The apparent contradiction between the influence of Roman commanders in Greek affairs and the absence of a formal structure for it is one created solely by an overly rigid idea of provincia and dissolves upon closer analysis. Previous proconsuls assigned Macedonia provincia —from Sulpicius Galba in 211 through Flamininus and the successive commanders in the war with Perseus—had operated in Greece without affecting the legal status of Greek cities;[20] this practice will not have changed in 146.

The last of what passes for positive evidence of Greece's "provincial status" is the so-called Achaean Era used by some former member states


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of the Achaean League, of which the year 1 was 145/144.[21] Although our evidence never explicitly reveals the significance of the terminus, such eras have often been assumed to commemorate provincial annexations. We have already seen how dubious the notion of "annexation" is in middle Republican Rome, but the most damaging point is that the termini of eras can be shown on other occasions to be associated with some great event in a city's life: what was once regarded as an "Asian era," for example—restricted oddly to Ephesus—has now been persuasively connected not with the establishment of a province in Asia but with the end of the Attalid monarchy and the recovery of "freedom" in Ephesus.[22] The "Achaean Era" thus has no certain connection with annexation and may simply have recalled the "freedom" granted by the Romans in the Mummian settlement.[23] Obviously, too little is known about this era for it to be used as historical evidence in itself.

Accame's main arguments are thus exhausted. Additional points made recently by his defenders need not detain us long. The notion that a provincial "status" in Greece can be deduced in syllogistic fashion simply from the tide civitas libera apparently held by Sicyon in 60 B.C. (Cic. Att . 1.19.9) can be dismissed.[24] No evidence suggests that such "freedom" implied the existence of a bordering province; insofar as it implied a guarantee of non-interference from Roman authorities—not always rigorously observed in practice, and probably not made an explicit feature of the guarantee until the late Republic[25] —it was not an empty title anywhere within a Roman


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magistrate's potential reach. One might compare the senatus consultum of 169 that specifically instructed Greek communities not to respond to the demands of Roman magistrates unless specially authorized by a decree of the Senate (Polyb. 28.16.2; Livy 43.17.2); this hardly implies that previously they had been formally obliged to do so. But there is no need to pursue this line of argument farther into the controversial question of the nature of the populus liber and its probable evolution, for in any case there is no evidence that Sicyon received this title in 146-145. Nor is one tempted to put any weight on Tacitus's ablative absolute possessa Achaia Asiaque in one sentence, unencumbered by details, of a sweeping survey of the theatrical arts in Rome from the Etruscans to A.D. 60.[26] As we have already seen in Cicero, Mummius was of course often thought of later as the conqueror of Greece (cf. Verg. Aen . 6.836-37), and it is no surprise that Tacitus, from a distance of two and a half centuries, thinks of Greece as possessa henceforth; but we shall not try to extract formal structures from such a broad conception.[27]

Finally, whether any part of Greece was assessed tribute in 146-145, as Pausanias thinks (7.16.9), is a controversial and vexed question, full discussion of which must be left for the next chapter. In my view it is highly improbable. But, in any case, the levying of tribute is not a sufficient condition of "provincialization," as Macedonia between 167 and 148 and, much later, Judaea show.[28]

Greece and the Proconsul in Macedonia

The traditional view of the status of Greece after 146 therefore has no great claim to our credence. Old notions of "provincialization" and talk of


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"annexation" have obscured rather than illuminated historical realities. The apparent contradiction between official freedom and Roman intervention derives simply from the clumsy tools of analysis we have been taught to wield. A new view that assumes less a priori and ventures less widely beyond the limits of our evidence may be considered. We have already had reason to doubt that the presence of a Roman commander in his provincia was typically founded upon a new legal structure, imposed at a specific time of "annexation," and I hope to have shown that there is no good reason to believe that Macedonia provincia was legally defined as a formal entity in the 140s. That conclusion opens up a new approach to the question of the "status" of Greece. The signs of the "conversion" of part of Greece into a "province" have been lacking for the same reason that they have been absent in so many other areas to which Rome's power spread. The question of the "status" of Greece is a nonquestion. Romans of the second century did not think in those terms. As we have already seen, Rome's supremacy was much less clearly defined than has been thought; the reality of the situation was, as usual, complex, and perhaps not always consistent or perfectly clear.

To start with a certainty, it is clear that Graecia or Achaia was not assigned regularly as a provincia until 27 B.C. (with the exception of a brief period ca. 81, and another possible exception in 46-44). Therefore, as has long been known, Pausanias's and Strabo's belief that governors were henceforth sent out to Greece is a gross anachronism.[29] Officially Greece was again "freed" in 146 as it had been in 196.[30] The debate over what precisely the nature of this "freedom" was seems tiresome and fruitless:[31] it was a useful slogan precisely because of its flexibility. It is clear that the Roman commander in Macedonia was the most convenient representative for Greeks to approach when Rome's intervention in some Greek affair was desired;[32] likewise, he was the Senate's administrative deputy, carrying


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out its instructions in matters involving mainland Greeks, and settling the minor aspects of matters whose crucial issues were resolved in the Senate.[33] Finally, the commander in Macedonia might be expected to face any serious threat to Roman interests that appeared in Greece itself, as did Metellus at the outbreak of the Achaean War and C. Sentius at the time of Mithridates' invasion of Greece,[34] and it is dear that Romans assigned Macedonia provincia were in no way legally excluded from operating in Greece.[35] As before, Greeks could be formally free, and at the same time sporadically appeal and defer to the authority of the Roman commanders who happened to be near. The greater frequency of Roman magisterial intervention in Greece after 148 is due to the simple fact that whereas previously Roman commanders had been present for relatively short periods of time during the prosecution of the various wars, now one was continuously no farther away than Macedonia. Rome's sheer power made its representative and agent, the proconsul of Macedonia, the most authoritative and powerful figure in the vicinity, to whom difficult disputes would naturally be referred. It is not formal structures that account for this but pragmatic calculations of interest. So, about 135, when the city of Cyzicus in northwest Asia Minor wanted Roman help against some enemy, presumably Thracians, it turned to the proconsul of Macedonia (IGRR IV. 134). But no one has yet argued that northwest Asia Minor was actually part of the province of Macedonia; rather, M. Cosconius was dearly the man to see about this problem because he might be able to help.

It is normally supposed that, whatever the formal structures or lack of them, successive Roman commanders assigned Macedonia provincia "oversaw" Greece in addition to their duties in Macedonia itself. But did Greeks in fact conduct their affairs "under the watchful eye of the proconsul of Macedonia"?[36]


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We ought first to note how little evidence we have for even the presence of the proconsul of Macedonia in Greece during the period under our purview. We cannot presume that the presence of Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus in the Peloponnese, overseeing the Mummian settlement ca. 144,[37] was anything but extraordinary, as was the situation. He is, however, the last Roman magistrate (other than those passing to and from Asia Minor) whose presence in Greece is explicitly documented before the Mithridatic War, nearly six decades later. Other evidence that might be adduced for the presence of the proconsul of Macedonia is negligible. An inscription from Messenia that reveals a Roman praetor (?

) levying in person a special monetary exaction has recently been shown not to date, as was previously thought, toward the end of the second century, but certainly much later, surely indeed well after the Mithridatic wars.[38] In Athens, a statue of Sex. Pompeius was at some time erected on the Acropolis. While it has been assumed that the statue belongs to the time of his tenure of Macedonia (which ended with his death in battle in 119), it is no less possible that it was set up, as presumably was that of his son Cn. Pompeius Strabo (who is not known ever to have been near Athens—or Macedonia), during the ascendancy of their grandson and son respectively, Pompey the Great, perhaps for one of his two visits to Athens in 67 and 62.[39] M. Minucius Rufus may well have visited Delphi, presumably, in view of his victories over the Scordisci and stabilization of the northern frontier, on a sight-seeing and thanksgiving tour, like that enjoyed by Aemilius Paulus in 168, before returning home ca. 107.[40] Like


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Paulus's visit to the south, however, Minucius's putative tour would have had an exceptional symbolic and propagandistic purpose and should not be taken to illustrate the norm for proconsuls in Macedonia. And that is all.

Two known cases corroborate the argument from silence. In 118, the complaint of the Athenian guild of Dionysiac artists about their brethren of the Isthmian-Nemean group had to be presented to the proconsul Cn. Cornelius Sisenna at Pella in Macedonia, and there too the parties were subsequently summoned for his mediation. The agreement reached there quickly fell apart upon the return to Greece of the representatives of the two parties, but the commanders in Macedonia played no further role until the matter was finally brought before the Senate in 112. The Scordiscan wars, which began in earnest in 114, make such neglect easily understandable from that point, but the previous history of the case strongly implies that the Roman imperator was not expected to stir from Macedonia for assizes. By contrast, in the law on the praetorian provinces of ca. 100, future proconsuls are ordered to spend no less than sixty days a year in the part of Thrace recently conquered and now made one of their responsibilities.[41] The implication of Plutarch's reference to a hearing before the proconsul of Macedonia concerning a charge against his home city of Chaeronea, probably in the 70s, is the same: "The trial was held before the commander of Macedonia; for the Romans did not yet send out commanders to Greece."[42] Plutarch surely is not making a rather trivial point about the titulature of the Roman official; the contemporary reader, at a time when the proconsuls of Macedonia certainly did not have jurisdiction in Greece, by then another province altogether, will have understood him to mean that the hearing was in Macedonia itself. Since Plutarch is dearly being careful about details here and is uniquely well informed, as the story is about his home polis, we can exclude the possibility that he is fuddled or unintentionally ambiguous, and draw the obvious conclusion, which accords with all our other evidence, that the Roman commander in Macedonia stayed there as a rule.

It is possible, to be sure, to intervene at a distance. But the evidence we have of his involvement in Greek matters does not imply that the procon-


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sul kept a very dose watch over Greece—that is, after the departure of Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus, whose presence ca. 144 is explained (as noted above) by the extraordinary situation. In numerous cases, some of which have already been mentioned, proconsular arbitration or mediation was requested by one of the parties in a dispute between Greeks, but we cannot suppose that these cases were normally of any great interest in themselves to Rome. The proconsul Sisenna, and after him the Senate itself, need not have been particularly eager to hear the tedious and convoluted story of the squabble between the Athenian and the Isthmian-Nemean guilds of Dionysiac artists—unless for comic relief. The dispute lasted years, and we have no guarantee that the senatorial decree of 112 B.C. preserved for us even brought the sorry affair to its conclusion. Even when (in the other case referred to above) Chaeronea was accused before the proconsul of Macedonia of conniving at the murder of a Roman officer, it was only because Chaeronea's neighbor Orchomenus had hired a Roman lawyer to reopen the case that L. Lucullus, while passing through, had previously satisfied himself was dosed.[43] It appears that the proconsul of Macedonia acted as something of a magnet for Greeks who sought to outmaneuver their opponents by enlisting the prestige and power of Rome on their side. Not that he played the game as vigorously as was hoped: Sisenna allowed the settlement he had negotiated of the artists' dispute to be flouted, and the proconsul before whom Chaeronea was denounced dismissed the case brought by Orchomenus's hired patronus after corresponding directly with Lucullus.

We do well also to note occasions when the failure of the commander in Macedonia to play a role in Greek affairs is conspicuous. When Q. Caecilius Metellus, aedile designate, traveled to Thessaly probably around 130 to arrange for a large shipment of grain to Rome, it was a personal matter—a reward for the beneficia conferred by his family—in which the Roman proconsul of Macedonia is not even mentioned.[44] That the Roman


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commander in Macedonia filled no police function in Greece is shown by the Attic slave revolts ca. 130 and ca. 100 (if indeed there were two).[45] The "first" was put down by local Athenian forces (Oros. 5.9.5). In Posidonius's account of the "second" revolt, we are told that many thousands of slaves (

) from the mines seized the acropolis at Sounion and for a long time () plundered Attica.[46] But despite the severity of the crisis—apparently the greatest outbreak of violence in Greece itself between the Achaean and Mithridatic wars—Rome did not intervene.[47] Indeed, when, in the early stage of the First Mithridatic War, Athenion and his followers seized control of Athens, began to tyrannize the citizens, and gave no reassuring signals of loyalty to Rome in the contest already raging in Asia,[48] the commander in Macedonia did nothing. Not until well after Aristion brought Athens over to the Mithridatic camp, Archelaus had established a Pontic beachhead at Athens, and they were together soliciting allies in Greece was the legate Braetius Sura sent with a small force against them.[49] There is no indication that the Athenians' decisions were much influenced by the presence of Roman troops in Macedonia. The Roman proconsul in Macedonia hardly policed Greece.


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Finally, it is noteworthy that we hear of no charge of extortion brought by mainland Greeks until immediately after the First Mithridatic War.[50] It is hardly likely that it took seventy years of magisterial intrusion in their affairs for Greeks to make use of this tool. The absence of Greek extortion charges is a further sign to be set beside others that the proconsul in Macedonia did not make a habit of meddling in Greece.

It is, therefore, improbable that the proconsul in Macedonia kept a close eye on Greece. He was a far-off and unfamiliar figure for the inhabitants of the Greek mainland—at least for those who did not have anything to gain by traveling to Macedonia in order to call his attention to some flagrant injustice being perpetrated by their fellow Greeks. His job was to see to the defense of Macedonia, and to judge from our evidence—in which heavy Roman defeats appear nearly as often as victories[51] —this task will have kept him and his legion more than busy enough without having to keep Greece under heel as well. Indeed, as Braetius Sura's late arrival with inadequate forces in 87 shows, if Greeks decided to cause trouble for Rome, there was little the commander in Macedonia, with the Balkan tribes on his flank and back, could do. The Roman commander in Macedonia did not enforce quietude in Greece but presumed it.

The solution presented here to the old puzzle of the status of Greece is quite simple. There was no change of formal status. Traditionally Roman commanders assigned Macedonia provincia had been free to take action in or affecting Illyria and Greece; this was no different after 148, or 146. This freedom had not involved, nor did it now involve, the official subordination of any Greek community to the Macedonian proconsul's imperium ; the idea of "provincialization" or "annexation" of Greece is even less apt than it is for Macedonia. The Roman commander in Macedonia, preoccupied with protecting the northern frontier of his provincia , did not control police, or supervise Greece; his occasional involvement in Hellenic affairs, as a rule without stirring from Macedonia and in response to Greek appeals, is simply a development of a phenomenon well established before 146.


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