The Settlement of the War With Aristonicus
Aristonicus proved a tougher nut to crack than expected. P. Licinius Crassus Mucianus, the consul of 131, actually fell in battle against the Pergamene pretender, while his successor, M. Perperna, died of illness at the moment of victory after capturing Aristonicus. A third consul, M'. Aquillius, had to complete operations with a campaign against holdouts in the interior after his arrival in 129.[51] If Strabo is to be taken strictly at his word (14.1.38, C646), it appears a commission of ten senators to arrange the settlement accompanied Aquillius to the provincia already in 129. Aquillius probably did not leave Asia Minor until early in 126, for he triumphed on 11 November of that year (Fasti triumph . an. DCXXVII).
Unfortunately, one of the most obscure and controversial features of the settlement over which Aquillius presided is the extent of the former Attalid realm and its revenues now claimed by Rome. Given the state of our evidence, no reconstruction can be decisive; but we can attempt to reach the conclusion that is most consistent with the evidence.
It is dear from our evidence for Aquillius's territorial arrangements after the war that he gave away a good portion of the prizes of victory to Rome's royal allies, who had provided generous assistance.[52] The sons of Ariarathes of Cappadocia, who had fallen in the war, were given Lycaonia and probably the Attalid holdings in Pamphylia and Pisidia as well.[53] Besides the Cappadocian kings, Mithridates V of Pontus was the greatest beneficiary of the settlement, receiving as his reward Greater Phrygia.[54] Although we hear nothing of rewards for Nicomedes of Bithynia and Pylaemenes of Paphlagonia, both of whom had certainly joined the alliance against Aristonicus, this may mean only that their gains were less spec-
tacular.[55] Aquillius's generosity immediately got him into trouble in Rome. A passage in Appian indicates that the Senate actually rejected his acta on the grounds that he had been bribed; specifically, he was alleged to have been bribed by Mithridates for Phrygia, but other, similar charges are suggested in our evidence.[56] Subsequently, a rogatio Aufeia of perhaps 124 would apparently have assigned some territory to Mithridates that was also claimed by Nicomedes.[57] Embassies from both kings arrived in Rome to strive for and against it. Gaius Gracchus spoke against the proposal, alleging that both kings were freely dispensing bribes; a preserved fragment of his speech suggests that a possible outcome of rejection of the proposal was the assertion of a Roman claim over the territory and its revenues.[58] Picking up on his elder brother's attempt to use the Asian revenues to support his project of land distribution, Gracchus stressed that they were a crucial resource both for government and for maintaining the "benefits" (commoda ) of the Roman people.[59] Among the commoda alluded to was surely above all the land distribution program itself, which
was stalled by the early 120s.[60] Aquillius's diminution of the people's inheritance thus could be represented as a part of a conspiracy to cheat the plebs of its due.
It is hardly likely, in view of Aquillius's evident readiness to distribute portions of the winnings to those who had assisted Rome, that the Greek cities that formerly belonged to the Attalid kingdom but had resisted Aristonicus, and indeed had managed to turn him back before Roman help was sent, were now rewarded for their help by being forced to pay tribute to Rome. That would have been a perverse reversal of normal Roman practice, employed, for example, in Asia Minor in 188, which was to free of tributary obligations those communities that demonstrated their commitment to the Roman side while the issue was still in doubt—-certainly not to punish them. In the cases of Pergamum, Ephesus, and Colophon, we have direct evidence that their "freedom" was recognized.[61] Elaea received a treaty of alliance with Rome after the war, an honor hardly consistent with being reduced to tributary status; Tralles as well an Attalid possession since 188, seems to have been "free" in 98, a status that should go back to the conclusion of the war with Aristonicus.[62] These, as we saw above, were not the only cities to offer noteworthy resistance to Aristonicus,[63] and we must surely conclude that the number of cities "freed," or whose freedom was now confirmed, by Rome was rather larger than the number for which evidence happens to have survived. Perhaps, indeed, most of the Greek cities of the coast belonged to this category.[64]
As it happens, one text, a speech attributed by Appian to M. Antony in Ephesus in 42/41, explicitly says that originally the Romans had remitted the tribute formerly exacted by Attalus "until the emergence of demagogues among us [sc. Romans] made tribute necessary."[65] The passage is not without problems; in particular, what it implies about the origin of tribute from the Greek cities is difficult to understand. Gruen suggests that C. Gracchus, who certainly might be called a demagogue, not only instituted the sale of the Asian tax contracts by the censors in Rome, as is attested in other evidence, but also first imposed Roman tribute in Asia.[66] However, it would then be surprising that an innovation of such sweeping significance receives so little attention in our sources for C. Gracchus's tribunate.[67] Instead of rejecting the entire passage as a fabrication by Antony or an ill-informed guess by Appian, we might associate it with the evidence already examined for controversy over and revision of Aquillius's settlement. It may be that Aquillius had granted a blanket exemption from tribute to all the former cities of the Attalid kingdom, adhering, it seems likely, to the letter of the will, but that subsequently, in Rome, popular politicians associated with the Gracchan land reform had exploited resentment of such squandering of the populus's possessions and whittled these exemptions down to cover only those cities that had earned their freedom by their conspicuous assistance in the war.[68] But even this last category cannot have been small as we have seen, inasmuch as the Greek cities of the coast had offered Aristonicus resistance from the first, and only Phocaea and Leucae (by Smyrna) are known to have yielded to him without
a struggle.[69] In any case, of course, Antony/Appian's statement applies only to the Greek cities. Those areas that came into Rome's possession and were not exempted or given away to the allied kings are likely to have been made subject to Roman tribute already at the conclusion of the war. Hence Velleius's flat statement in his survey of Rome's conquests that "M. Perperna made Asia tributary after the capture of Aristonicus" is not entirely mistaken, although he is thinking in very rough categories here ("Asia") and throughout the passage, as here, he sloppily conflates military victory with the imposition of tribute and the establishment of provinces in a way that shows how little this writer of the early Principate understood Roman techniques of domination in the East in the second century.[70]
Large portions of the former Attalid kingdom, therefore, had been parceled out to allied kings (Phrygia, Lycaonia, probably Pamphylia and Pisidia), and many of the Greek cities will have received their "freedom" and exemption from a tributary obligation. It is important to recognize the limits of Roman control in other directions as well. Toward the south neither Lycia nor Caria had been part of the Attalid kingdom, nor is there any evidence that they came under Roman control in the war; there matters will have continued as before.[71] A second-century alliance between Plarasa/Aphrodisias, Cibyra, and Tabae explicitly guarded against actions hostile to Rome as well as to themselves; this is simply another example to be added to others of a "saving clause," useful in a time of predominant Roman might in the Greek world, which would allow an escape from treaty obligations if one's ally had serious trouble with Rome. It certainly does not imply any sort of formal "clientship" or Roman sponsorship of the alliance.[72] Cibyra, which enjoyed a treaty of alliance with Rome, remained
under its own tyrants until captured by L. Murena in 83; nor is there good reason to think that Laodicea on the Lycus, not an Attalid possession or a theater of fighting, came under Roman control in the war with Aristonicus.[73] Aquillius oversaw the improvement of the major routes of communication both along the coast and inland, one up the Hermus into Lydia, an Attalid domain which must now have come under Roman control and the other up the Maeander to or toward Apamea.[74] It has been supposed that this road up the Maeander leading toward the major city of southern Phrygia clashes with our sources' statement that Phrygia Maior was given to Mithridates,[75] but that may be drawing lines too sharply. The difficulty of exerting control from the coast over the rough Anatolian inland, where on the upper Caicus Aristonicus had had his stronghold, had played an important role in the war just concluded. The significance of this problem seems not to have been lost on Aquillius, who had followed up Perperna's victory over Aristonicus himself at Stratonicea on the upper Caicus with an arduous campaign in the mountains and forests of Mysia Abbaitis.[76] If the roads up the Hermus and Maeander imply that Aquillius wanted to guard against a repeat of Aristonicus's performance based in central Lydia, eastern Caria, or southern Phrygia, this need not imply the assertion of a formal Roman claim equally to all those areas. The road to Apamea in any case may well have been built before Mithridates took occupation of Phrygia.
It appears, then, that the area of Asia Minor subject to Roman tribute was rather a patchwork of communities and regions concentrated chiefly in Mysia and Lydia, with some outposts on the Aegean, such as Phocaea and Leucae, interspersed with the autonomous Greek cities of the coast. Indeed, the two cities in which Roman commanders henceforth spent most of their time in peace—Ephesus and Pergamum—were both autonomous,
and surely now, as well as later, major centers for his judicial activities.[77] The seemingly irresistible temptation to presuppose that a contiguous area was marked out with formal boundaries seems in this case particularly inappropriate, for if they meant anything—that is, if they defined a commander's imperium —they would only have gotten in the way of his executing his responsibilities in the region.[78]
A salutary sign of how the complexities of such a situation had to be worked out and defined by experience is now given by a newly published inscription from Claros. In it we hear that Roman officials had usurped some of Colophon's local jurisdiction, demanding bail from accused citizens for appearance before their court; Menippus of Colophon had gone on an embassy to the Senate at a date probably not far from 120 and succeeded in inducing it to draw an explicit distinction for the purpose of jurisdiction between the provincia and autonomous regions, to pronounce that a proconsul was not to judge or meddle at all outside the provincia , and to guarantee that all trials in which Colophonians were plaintiffs or defendants should be judged in Colophon.[79] All this would hardly have been necessary if a relatively recent lex provinciae had given a comprehensive structure to Roman administration in Asia Minor; certainly it is impossible to believe that Roman commanders had been explicitly forbidden to intervene outside the area directly subject to their control. More likely, Colophon had simply obtained recognition of its continued "freedom" at the close of the war with Aristonicus,[80] and the details of what precisely this meant beyond nonpayment of tribute were left for time to sort out. In view of this evidence it is surely difficult to suppose that Aquillius and the ten commissioners gave western Asia Minor a new ju-
dicial structure. Certainly the impression one gains from the senatus consultum Popillianum , which enjoins successive praetors to honor all regulations, grants, exemptions, or penalties laid down, given, or imposed by the Attalids, is that as much as possible of previous structures was left in place.[81] Much recent work has gone into the early history of the system of judicial assizes, held annually in the praetor's tour of the centers of districts called conventus or
. It would be rash to take this judicial structure back to Aquillius; far more likely is its gradual and natural development as the extent of proconsular jurisdiction expanded through the late second and early first centuries.[82]
Still, Aquillius and the ten commissioners will have had much to attend to within the area over which Rome now assumed control: a multitude of details had to be taken care of, such as the transformation of royal lands into Roman ager publicus ,[83] and arrangements for the collection of revenues from the old Attalid domains, including the inland peoples (
, especially Mysians and Lydians), the "crown land" (), and those cities, such as Stratonicea on the Caicus, that had supported Aristonicus. In view of the senatorial decision to uphold the arrangements of the Attalids and the Roman tendency to adopt viable local financial structures, it would be surprising if the Pergamene financial structures were not simply taken over. The newly published copy of the imperial lex portorii Asiae from Ephesus at least proves that the publicani took over At-talus's customs stations, and we can probably presume that most of the toll structure was taken over as well.[84]
So much seems traceable of the arrangements of Aquillius and the ten legates sent to assist him in the settlement of the Asian war. While Strabo, in a brief survey of Rome's entry into Asia Minor occasioned by his narrative's arrival at Leucae, makes Aquillius the author of the structure of Asia provincia as Strabo found it in his own day,[85] it would be unwise to extract from this cursory comment a more elaborate and sweeping settlement than our more detailed evidence suggests. The assertion, certainly, is not strictly accurate. As we have seen, some at least of Aquillius's arrangements seem to have been rejected by the Senate, and major features of the Asian settlement continued to be the subject of proposals and legislation such as the obscure rogatio Aufeia and the crucial lex Sempronia , which introduced censorial sale of the contracts for Asian revenues. Strabo is not only unaware of or unconcerned with these modifications and changes, but also ignores (to restrict ourselves to larger matters about which we happen to know) the major alteration of the tax-farming system by Caesar in 48 and the reduction of many cities to tributary status and more direct proconsular supervision under the Sullan settlement.[86] Still, in the broad terms that Strabo is here employing, the statement is doubtless generally correct, inasmuch as it was Aquillius and the ten legates who laid down the basis for Rome's future possession of what was left of the former Attalid kingdom after the grants to the kings and cities.
An important question must now be asked. Since so much of the former Attalid kingdom was not taken over by Rome for reasons of policy—Rome's traditional stance of patronage toward the Greek cities, and the imperative to reward allies in a crisis—how rich were Roman revenues from Asia after Aquillius, and before the catastrophe of the First Mithridatic War and the Sullan settlement? The evidence, derived above all from Cicero, for a staggering annual income from Asia has little relevance for
the period before the catastrophe of the First Mithridatic War and the Sullan settlement, which reduced the number of "free" Greek cities to a handful and brought considerably more territory under Roman control.[87] Historians of Roman politics have usually not been sensitive to the possible extent of change over the six or so decades before the evidence of Cicero appears, and have continually presented Asia as an immediate bonanza.[88] But on closer analysis was it so?
The question is of course easier to ask than to answer. Ti. Gracchus, as we have seen, was eager to take over Attalus's riches and exploit them for the sake of his program of land redistribution; it seems likely, indeed, that popular expectations of a windfall played a role in the assignment of the war against Aristonicus to P. Licinius Crassus Mucianus in 131. That around this time the possibility of winning wealth in Asia as a publicanus was a subject of conversation in Rome is dearly implied by a fragment of the satirist Lucilius.[89] Around 124 C. Gracchus dearly articulates such hopes in his speech against the Aufeian law: revenues ought to be increased in order not only to finance government but to pay for the Roman people's privileges.[90] Aquillius, who had solid reasons of foreign policy for sacrificing so much, was nevertheless, and perhaps with some justice, suspected of having lined his pockets with bribes while giving away the people's property. Evidently, then, the Gracchani argued strongly for maximizing revenues and counterattacked sharply. Although Aquillius was acquitted
of the extortion charge laid against him on his return before a jury of his peers—a blow that led directly to C. Gracchus's introduction of equestrian juries—the Senate did not accept Aquillius's settlement without modifications. Some tributary exemptions were very likely removed, among other things, as we have seen. But even so there is at least one indication that the usual view that the sums coming in from Asia Minor were nothing less than staggering is exaggerated. Neither of our main sources for the tribunates of C. Gracchus in 123-122, Appian and Plutarch, so much as mentions the lex Sempronia de censoria locatione , and yet it is accorded considerable weight in modern interpretations.[91] When Diodorus claims that Gaius "offered up the provinces [sic ] to the brazen greed of the publicani , thereby drawing forth from its subjects a just hatred of Roman domination,"[92] he must be thinking primarily of the introduction of equestrian juries, which he has just mentioned. Diodorus is notoriously hostile to C. Gracchus, and his source, Posidonius of Apamea, was particularly interested in the moral aspect of Rome's financial exploitation of its subjects, which was so rampant in his homeland in his own time;[93] it is by no means improbable that Posidonius or Diodorus has illegitimately traced back to its origin the excesses that would ultimately ensue from Gaius's legislation. It is in fact not until around 100—and then quite suddenly—that we hear of specific cases of overreaching by the publicani .[94] While the clustering of evidence at that time is surely at least partly due to a new alertness on the part of the Senate to the dangers of allowing the tax
gatherers too much free rein, the complete absence of complaints about the publicani before then is noteworthy. While our evidence is quite sparse in general for relations between the Greek cities and Roman authorities in the generation after Aquillius, the new decrees from Claros now cast some light on this period: they provide a perhaps surprising picture of smooth and cordial relations ca. 120 between Colophon and a solicitous Senate that is ever ready to check the excesses of its officials in the province.[95] And it should be noted that the most significant point of conflict with Roman authorities is jurisdictional; none of the many embassies to Roman commanders and the Senate that Polemaeus and Menippus undertook on their city's behalf concerned encroachments of the publicani .
The Claros decrees therefore help to moderate our imaginative reconstruction of an army of Roman tax gatherers straining at the reins of senatorial government and finally unleashed by C. Gracchus. The transferral of the arrangements for tax contracts in Asia from the provincial commander's supervision to that of the censors in Rome was, to be sure, a boon to Roman financiers, but it is very hard to accept the view that it was above all a tactical ploy to win the support of the equestrian order. Not only would it be hard to explain Appian's and Plutarch's silence about such an important development in the Gracchan crisis, but one comes up against the hard fact that the equestrian order was not conspicuously supportive of Gaius and indeed eventually became hostile.[96] These reflections give further support to the far more attractive view that Gaius's main object in moving the farming of the tax contracts to Rome was to remove the new revenues from the hands of the proconsuls, who, whether because of corruption or for reasons of policy, might not extract the full sum to which the populus Romanus deemed itself entitled.[97]
One further point deserves attention. The military contingent regularly supplied to successive praetors of Asia Minor has been estimated at no
more than a legion with its complement of Italian troops, if that much.[98] This will not have sufficed to do more than provide praetors with an appropriate escort and a policing capability. Asia provincia was not to be a theater for triumph hunting or for the flexing of military muscle. It offered no real possibilities for military gloria until the conflict with Mithridates,[99] and thus it was hardly an easy stepping-stone into the consulate: of the whole period after the departure of Aquillius in 126 until the war with Mithridates, we know of only four proconsuls of Asia who went on to the consulship.[100] (Admittedly we are not well informed on Asian proconsuls of the period; but C. Labeo, L. Piso, M. Hypsaeus, C. Egnatius, Cn. Aufidius, C. Billienus, L. Lucilius, and C. Cluvius made no mark in the rest of the evidence we have for Roman politics in this period,[101] and C. Caesar's chief distinction was, it seems, to have been the dictator's father.) The occupation of the core of the old Attalid kingdom therefore was not motivated by an atavistic militaristic impulse toward ever-greater control and conquest, nor even were Roman forces sufficient to suppress internal revolt
or fend off external invasion. The farthest outpost of Rome's eastern imperium was also among its weakest.
As in the events of 148-146 in Macedonia and Greece, Rome's response to the crisis of the Attalid kingdom and its result—an abiding Roman presence in Asia Minor—appear at first glance to manifest a new expansionism and a novel policy of exploiting the imperium to the fullest. Yet closer scrutiny demonstrates the superficiality of such a view. The Romans did not seek intervention in Asia Minor in 133 but found their leisurely deliberations overtaken by events; at last, in 132, not to intervene would have thrown the imperium itself into question. Having accepted the Attalid legacy, the Romans did not retire from Asia Minor, perhaps mindful of the likely consequences in a land replete with ambitious dynasts. But the forces they maintained in Asia provincia were obviously insufficient to fend off external invasion or even to suppress internal revolt. That Rome's farthest outpost was so weakly defended bespeaks indeed a remarkable confidence in the imperium . Just as in the southern Balkans, the imperium populi Romani was founded not on military occupation or legal structures but on an image of invincibility and the absence—for the time being—of rivals. Nor does the nature of Aquillius's arrangements in Asia, so far as they are known, suggest that Rome had given up its long tradition of hegemonial imperialism for a new policy of exploitation associated with the Gracchi and their followers. Aquillius relinquished to allied kings and the Greek cities much formerly Attalid territory and revenue, so much indeed that his settlement appears to have excited some opposition in the Senate as well as among the Gracchani. And yet, as Strabo says, his settlement remained largely intact. It is true that from 133 popular politicians began to assert the right of the Roman people to exploit imperial revenues to maintain its commoda . And yet such claims had little concrete effect on the broad outlines of the settlement of Asia provincia in the 120s, and even the innovation of C. Gracchus that was eventually to attract so much attention—the sale in Rome of the contracts for Asian revenue—took nearly a generation for its consequences to be acutely felt. The attitudes that underlay the origin of Asia provincia were rooted in the past, just as new forces were emerging whose impact lay in the future.