INTRODUCTION

This book analyzes the nature and development of Roman hegemonial power in the Hellenistic Aegean world, broadly defined—the southern Balkan peninsula and Asia Minor—from the suppression of Andriscus, pretender to the Macedonian throne, in 148, through Pompey's return in 62, following the long struggle with Mithridates VI of Pontus. The central conviction that has informed the project is that the establishment of Roman rule must be traced as a historical process, as something that developed and evolved, rather than something suddenly created whole out of nothing in each region with the successive "creation" of "provinces." I wish to depart from the old tradition which focuses narrowly on the legal structures assumed (often without good evidence) to have been erected by Roman conquerors after the various Eastern wars, and to turn attention rather toward the evolution of imperial structures both as an ongoing process of mutual adaptation on both the Greek and Roman sides and as a reaction to specific historical events. Evidence of the concrete actions of the successive Roman commanders on the spot and the rulings of the Roman Senate that affected Hellas will be the main focus of attention, rather than the legalistic schemata that have so long sufficed as description of "provincialization." Throughout, special attention will be devoted to the following questions. To what extent did Rome's advent and presence alter preexisting political and legal structures and traditional patterns of behavior? To what extent did the new Roman authorities on the spot, or the Roman Senate from afar, administer, govern, or rule? Was Rome's practical domination given formal expression or recognition? Did a conception of mutual responsibilities and obligations between Roman and

Greek emerge? Above all, how did such manifestations of the Roman imperium change over time?

The "epigraphic habit" among the Greek-speakers of the lands encircling the Aegean will allow us to follow the process of the establishment of Roman rule in general more closely here than elsewhere. The result should be a clearer picture of the evolution of a Roman empire in the East—one that gives due emphasis to the inevitably somewhat obscure, but dearly crucial, age of adaptation and creation that followed the great wars of the first half of the second century B.C .

Surprisingly, these questions have not been asked before in a systematic way. The bulk of scholarly inquiry into Rome's conquest of the Greek world halts in 146 (with the Achaean War), or perhaps leaps thence to 129 (the victory over Aristonicus in Asia Minor) before the curtain is finally drawn. E. Badian speaks for many:

The year 146 brings to their inevitable conclusion the developments begun . . . even before the victory over Perseus: it sees the end of proper international relations and proper international law over the Roman world.^[1]

It is not hard to perceive the reasons for this tendency to conclude the story of Roman intervention in the East around the middle of the second century. The great wars of the second century and the diplomatic arrangements that preceded and followed them are rather more dramatic—and more susceptible to traditional narration—than the scattered proconsular judgments, arbitral proceedings, treaties with insignificant states and the like that make up so much of the story we are about to tell. In 146 we lose the intelligent, contemporary account of Polybius, and further investigation must proceed on the basis of scattered, short references in later authors and the painstaking scrutiny of elliptical and often fragmentary inscriptions. But not least, as the quotation above illustrates, the conviction that Hellas had finally and irrevocably lost all vestiges of independence by 146 has discouraged investigation of the succeeding period. If the important part of the story is over, why persist?

The central buttress for the view that the mid-second century is an apt conclusion for the history of the establishment of Roman rule in the East is the prevailing conception, inherited from the great systematizers of the nineteenth century, that provinces were created as distinct and formally recognized legal entities that served to integrate and to annex territory

into an empire. If so, the implication would be that developments thereafter are merely a matter of adaptation to fundamentally changed circumstances, not a formative process in its own right. The effect is to focus interest almost exclusively on the supposedly decisive, constitutive act of "annexation"—thus the debate over Rome's supposed hesitation to "annex" territory, a central controversy in Roman history which has continued uninterrupted since the time of T. Mommsen.^[2] The most influential proponents of opposing positions on this question are Badian, who in his Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic argued that the Senate, given the choice, avoided annexation well into the first century B.C ., and W. V. Harris, who devoted a chapter to an attack on this thesis in his War and Imperialism in Republican Rome , adopting the view that the employment of alternatives (such as "indirect," "hegemonial" control) by no means establishes that the Senate was hesitant to annex territory.^[3] Roman historians have tended to go along with the traditional definition of empires "as the formal annexations of conquered territory, marked on maps in red, blue, and yellow."^[4] But students of modern imperialism have long learned that such a narrow definition excludes too much of the phenomena of imperial control; informal means of controlling the effective sovereignty of other communities require no less attention.^[5] This not only diminishes the overwhelming traditional emphasis upon annexation but also reduces or eliminates the apparent discontinuity between periods of nonannexation and annexation, as J. Gallagher and J. Robinson showed in 1953 in their seminal article on nineteenth-century British expansion, which first properly stressed the concept of informal empire.^[6] Formal annexation, in the

second-century Mediterranean world as well as nineteenth-century Africa, is no simple gauge of empire and imperialism.

Indeed, the very concept of annexation as it applies to the Roman Republic receives insufficient examination and definition. Harris devotes a mere paragraph to the matter, Badian less.^[7] Not even W. Dahlheim's 1977 study Gewalt und Herrschaft , subtitled Das provinziale Herrschaftsystem der römischen Republik , a survey of the entire history of Republican "provincialization," comes fully to grips with the question of what precisely was involved in creating a province.^[8] That, evidently, has been thought to be well understood. But as we shall see in chapter 1, traditional views on the nature of the province are gradually coming under fire, and recent work has shown that the historical situation has been obscured by legalistic abstraction. Dahlheim, in the book just mentioned, showed in particular through his examination of Sicily and Spain that Roman rule in the provinces was something that underwent a historical development, and that the overseas provinciae had begun as military rather than administrative districts. J. S. Richardson has recently produced an exemplary book-length study of the early evolution of the Spanish provinciae which explicitly challenges the old view of annexation,^[9] and salutary criticism has appeared of the traditional idea that Romans typically reorganized territory fundamentally upon conquest through so-called leges provinciae (see chap. 1). Scholars had long recognized that the word provincia underwent an important evolution, but the synchronic methods of the juristic scholarship of the nineteenth century have tended to prevent due recognition of a similar and related development of imperial structures.

That the integration of the Hellenistic world into a Roman imperial system was a complex and fluid process, and by no means a steady linear development in the direction of closer Roman control is becoming increasingly dear. Two recent books in particular have stressed the continuity of Hellenistic traditions in the shadow of Rome. In 1984 Erich S. Gruen's The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome challenged hasty generalizations about the destruction of Greek independence and stressed the persistence of Hellenic diplomatic and political structures up to and even beyond the "arrival" of Rome. A year later R. Bernhardt in his Polis und römische Herrschaft showed that reports of the death of the polis had been

greatly exaggerated, and presented a strong case for its continued survival as the focus of Greek loyalties and the framework of Greek political consciousness down at least to the age of Augustus. Such studies show that it is insufficient to focus on Rome's emergence as the dominant force in the Greek world as the sole fact of importance. As Polybius himself saw (3.4.1-12), it is not enough simply to note that Rome's power was so great from 168/167 that Roman orders could no longer reasonably be resisted. Even the power to compel submission does not necessarily imply its constant use.

Legalistic schemata, which too often obscure rather than illustrate historical development, will not avail us. Dahlheim in Gewalt und Herrschaft , though rightly stressing the original, strictly military element of Roman provinciae , works at too lofty a level of abstraction to discern the mundane realities of governance in the provinciae . Badian aptly comments that Dahlheim "tends to convert the general theory of Rome's relations with other states into a weird ballet of legal terms, all equally beyond the mental and conceptual horizon of the participants."^[10] On the other hand, A. M. Eckstein now rightly stresses (Senate and General [1987]) the importance of the activities and decisions of individual Roman commanders in the field over the dubious notion of senatorial "policy." All of this reminds us of the prevalence of ad hoc decision making in Roman governance from beginning to end: even under the Empire, Rome was essentially a reactive and passive ruler.^[11] Without coming to grips with the individual actions of Romans and Greeks in their specific historical context, abstract ruminations remain devoid of content.^[12]

A few words may be allowed to distinguish my subject and approach from some other work, much of it recent. I have already signaled my chief

difference with the approach of Dahlheim. Gruen's magnum opus, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome , concludes with the settlements of Macedonia, Greece, and Asia, with which I begin. A. N. Sherwin-White's Roman Foreign Policy in the East (1984) concentrates excessively, for my purposes, on Roman policy in the great military crises. Behavior in crisis is often telling, and the evidence of our literary sources is almost wholly restricted to the great wars; but "foreign policy," such as it was in Rome, can be only a fairly narrow part of the larger questions that we are addressing here about the character of Roman rule. R. K. Bulin's "Untersuchungen zur Politik und Kriegführung Roms im Osten" (1983) is a collection of special studies of restricted scope. Bernhardt's admirable Polis und römische Herrschaft , though often germane to my investigation, is primarily concerned with a different subject, the persistence of the Greek polis under Roman domination, as is also J.-L. Ferrary's Philhellénisme et impérialisme (1988), whose subject is the ideological context of Rome's intervention in the East.

Among older studies that substantially overlap with this project, S. Accame's Il dominio romano in Grecia (1946) and D. Magie's magisterial Roman Rule in Asia Minor (1950) are particularly worthy of honorable mention. Both works are monuments of erudition and will remain for the foreseeable future the standard reference works on Roman administration in Greece and Asia Minor. But even if their advancing age alone did not demand some revision, neither pays sufficient attention, for our purposes, to the historical development of Roman rule in the provinces or to its actual mechanics. Magie's sketch of Roman administration of Asia between Aristonicus and Mithridates, for example, is essentially derived from the evidence of Cicero two generations later, with no clear attempt to discern any kind of evolution. Accame abjures a chronological approach altogether and analyzes the structure of Roman rule in Greece largely in terms of legal concepts.

The source material for this investigation is scattered, disconnected, and sometimes intractable. The attention of the literary sources that survive is monopolized by great wars and crises—a part, but not even the greater part, of my project. Even when the literary material is relatively copious, as for the First Mithridatic War (for which we have Appian's Mithridatica and Civil Wars , Plutarch's lives of Sulla and Lucullus, and the beginning of contemporary Ciceronian references), it has very little to say directly about the relations of proconsul and city in peacetime, or mutual duties and responsibilities of ruler and ruled. Many of the most important passages in the literary sources are mere scraps of a sentence or so. Epigraphic

evidence must often bear the weight of the discussion. There is indeed a wealth of relevant inscriptions, often difficult to interpret but sprinkled with highly significant information. Though most of them have received careful scrutiny by epigraphists of the stature of M. Holleaux, A. Wilhelm, and L. Robert (not to mention first-rate scholars at work today), not uncommonly the progress made in readings and interpretation goes unnoticed by the Roman historian, while, on the other hand, the questions I am pursuing have usually not been among the main concerns of the Greek epigraphist. Furthermore, new documents pertaining to this study are emerging continually. The point may be sufficiently illustrated by noting only a few of the most striking epigraphic discoveries: the publication in 1974 of substantial new fragments of a Roman law found at Cnidus; of the honorific inscriptions from Claros for Polemaeus and Menippus, two leading citizens of Colophon, in 1989; and of the Monumentum Ephesianum in 1990—not to mention important inscriptions well known in epigraphic circles but not yet published. With a certain sense of excitement over the constant accretion of knowledge, however, comes humility as well; for anyone who attempts a synthesis such as this must do so in full recognition that the emergence of inconvenient texts in the future can refute with devastating suddenness as well as confirm. Our understanding of the establishment of the Roman Empire is very much in flux, and in many areas this can be only a preliminary report.

It is a central argument of the present study that it was not one of the various "annexations" of territory after 148 but the long, intermittent dash with Mithridates of Pontus that was the decisive event for the consolidation of a concrete and intrusive Roman empire in the Hellenistic East—hence the terminus of the investigation at Pompey's return from his extensive campaigns in the East in 62. Obviously, the story of the development of Roman rule in the East does not end there; but the author's energy and the reader's patience, both limited, do not allow the continuation of the story to Augustus—or to Hadrian and the Antonines. Given the temporal definition of the scope of the work, it is justifiable as well to exclude Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Syro-Palestinian coast from close consideration, for Rome established a permanent presence in these areas only at the very end of this period or well afterwards, and to concentrate our attention on the Hellenistic heartland on the Greek mainland, in Macedonia and in Asia Minor.

The structure of the study combines thematic and chronological presentation. Part 1 comprises four chapters on the origins of the permanent Roman presence in the East: the settlement of the war with Andriscus

and the beginnings and early history of Macedonia provincia ; the status of Greece after the Achaean War of 146; a comprehensive analysis of L. Mummius's settlement of that war; the crossing to Asia Minor in the war with Aristonicus. There follow in part 2 four chapters of a thematic nature covering the entire period down to the beginning of the Mithridatic wars, in which are treated the activities of the proconsuls of Macedonia and Asia (chapter 5), senatorial arbitration (chapter 6), Roman treaties of alliance with Eastern states (chapter 7), and the background to the conflict with Athens precipitated by the Mithridatic War (chapter 8), a rare occasion when the source material allows Rome's relationship with an individual city to be traced over a significant period of time. With part 3 we resume the history of events: first, the measures taken against the pirates and the diplomatic skirmishing with the kingdoms of Pontus and Bithynia down to the outbreak of the Mithridatic War (chapter 9); then there follow two chapters on the period of the Mithridatic wars, the first (chapter 10) attempting to delineate the impact of Sulla on the Eastern imperium , the second (chapter 11) following the subsequent burst of Roman military activity in the 70s and 60s through Pompey's arrangements and return in 62.