5
Proconsular Administration in the East, 148-89
Thanks to Cicero's long pamphlet on the excesses of C. Verres in Sicily in 73-71 and his own copious letters from Cilicia during his own service as provincial governor (51-50) we are apt to think that we have a fairly good idea of what Roman provincial administration was like in the late Republic. The governor was a king in his province, Roman citizen and provincial alike cowered before his crowded tribunals, and even when peace reigned his time was fully occupied with long judicial tours of the major centers of his province to transact the endless business that came before his court. This is fairly intrusive administration, and here, certainly, we are entitled to speak of Roman "rule." Unfortunately, there has long been the tendency to assume that this is the way it had always been, virtually from the moment an area was first assigned as a provincia ; for example, reconstructions of the administration of Asia from the beginning of the Roman presence in the 120s are typically built upon Ciceronian evidence of roughly half a century later, and little if any attempt is made to give due account to development over time. Yet the Ciceronian evidence all derives from the period after the catastrophic First Mithridatic War, which had an effect upon the Roman presence in Asia that would be hard to overestimate. Furthermore, both Cilicia and Sicily had special characteristics that it would be unwise to extrapolate to Greece, Macedonia, and western Asia Minor: Cilicia, outside the Aegean heartland of Hellenistic civilization, had none of the traditional ties of friendship and alliance with Rome of which many of the great poleis of Greece and Ionia could boast; and although Rome gained a foothold here before the First Mithridatic War, for the most part Cilicia was a recent acquisition, won during the burst of eastern imperial expansion in the 70s and 60s. The structures of provincial administration in Cilicia are the product of this phase and cannot be
supposed to have been characteristic of the Roman presence in Asia Minor in the second century or early first. Sicily, on the other hand, had been Roman for dose on two centuries by the time its treatment by Verres was attacked by Cicero. Not only had most of the island been under Roman domination for over a century and a half before the publication of the Verrines , but it was acquired under circumstances very different from those of Macedonia or Asia Minor. Again we must beware of the tendency to transfer Verres' Sicily to Metellus's Macedonia or Aquillius's Asia; equally, we should be open to the likelihood that the methods and activities of Rome's earlier proconsuls[1] in the East bore more resemblances to those of its commanders in the field during the wars of the first half of the second century than to those of Verres or Cicero in the middle of the first century.
My purpose in this chapter is not to attempt a survey of provincial administration before the First Mithridatic War: quite simply, the evidence is insufficient for that before the age of Cicero. Rather, my purpose is to ascertain just how far the evidence allows us to say that Rome administered the areas assigned to its magistrates as provinciae . How intrusive and systematic was Roman "rule" in the East before the dash with Mithridates? Indeed, to what extent did Rome "rule" at all?
Judicial Intervention
Aside from the praetor's military duties in a provincia , which officially consisted not only in pursuing the interests of the Republic but also in maintaining the territorial integrity and security of the friends and allies of the Roman people,[2] provincial "administration" consisted above all in jurisdiction. In Asia in the 50s, for example, the absence of any military component of the job meant that the praetor's chief administrative task was jurisdiction.[3] Jurisdiction, therefore, will be the chief object of our attention in this chapter, by reason of both its prominence among a proconsul's duties and, to be sure, its relative prominence in our scattered evidence.
A Roman commander had comprehensive judicial powers that flowed out of his imperium: imperium gave coercitio , that is, the power to initiate and execute judicial proceedings of both a criminal and a civil nature.[4] A passage from the Greek copy of a Roman law recently discovered at Cnidos both confirms this doctrine and, for the first time in our evidence, specifies these powers: a commander who has resigned or been relieved of his duty has the power to initiate judicial proceedings of all types; to judge, give sentence, and punish; to refer the case to external judges, including foreigners; to authorize the seizure of property for compensation (apparently); and to manumit slaves, just as he had while holding his magistracy, until he reaches the city of Rome.[5] Arrival at the city of Rome terminates these powers precisely because only there does the commander lose his imperium . It is obvious, then, but must nevertheless be stressed, that a praetor's judicial powers, inasmuch as they were founded on his imperium , did not depend on positive legal acts, such as the leges provinciae , that are regularly postulated. Put simply, no formal rules were required to establish a provincial commander's judicial authority in his provincia .
Whether a provincial commander enjoyed full criminal jurisdiction over Roman citizens is a controversial matter, but the balance of evidence seems to indicate that he did, although he was in practice limited here by customary respect for the person of Roman citizens and the pressures of expediency.[6] The provincial commander had equally sweeping powers, as imperator , over foreign peoples, although here he had to take into account
any privileges or guarantees recognized by the Roman Senate and People.[7] Thus, as we have seen, when Q. Fabius Maximus Servilianus put to death two men he had found guilty of firing the archives of the city of Dyme in Achaea in 144, this in no way suggests that this part of the Peloponnese had been reduced to the status of a "province," or that the proconsuls of Macedonia exercised some formal Spruchrecht over it, any more than do the executions ordered by L. Aemilius Paulus after the war with Perseus in 167 or M. Fulvius Nobilior's hunt for the murderers of some Delphian ambassadors in 189/188.[8]
On the other hand, an illuminating example of how vigorously a "free" city might defend its judicial autonomy has now come to light in the recently published inscriptions from Claros in honor of Polemaeus and Menippus of Colophon, dating not much after 120. Menippus especially had exerted himself on behalf of his city's judicial autonomy: when the proconsuls of Asia had begun to usurp judicial authority over citizens of Colophon and in particular forced a Colophonian accused before them to give bail to them, Menippus had undertaken an embassy to Rome (his fourth) and obtained from the Senate a decree that freed the inhabitants of the city from the requirement to give bail to the proconsuls, indeed exempting them from their power altogether, inasmuch as the provincia was now distinguished from the autonomous area.[9] Later a Colophonian was accused of murdering a Roman and summoned by order of the consuls to a trial in Rome; Menippus took a fifth trip to Rome and secured the quashing of the prospective trial on the grounds that the Senate had decreed that Colophonian plaintiffs and defendants were entitled to a trial at home even in cases involving Romans.[10] The decree honoring Menippus
celebrates this success as an act by which he "maintained the force of the laws regarding every kind of charge even in cases involving the Romans themselves";[11] that is, Menippus did not even allow a charge of murdering a Roman—very likely in Colophonian territory itself, for the city itself was under suspicion, as the text tells us[12] —to lead to the diminution of Colophon's judicial autonomy. Another great man of the city, Polemaeus, was able to prevail upon a proconsul to set aside his conviction of a Colophonian on an unknown charge before his own tribunal in contravention of the rule that Colophonians be tried in their own city; Polemaeus, like Menippus, is said thus to have "preserved the integrity of the laws."[13] On another, rather obscure occasion Menippus managed to obtain from the Senate an explicit statement that the proconsul had no fights, judicial or otherwise, outside the province (i.e., in Colophon)—"a fine response most befitting the democracy."[14]
This precious evidence conveys very dearly the ideological framework of the struggle now to be carried on by "free" poleis for the integrity of their laws against proconsular intervention and meddling. But the very recurrence of such instances shows that this objective required constant vigilance and repeated efforts. The judicial autonomy of a "free" city was not something simply granted but continually won and rewon; the actual fights of a city would be defined by its success in this struggle. We can justifiably assume that not all "free" cities enjoyed the success of Colophon.[15] Much depended on the availability, wealth, and rhetorical capacity of local great men like Menippus and Polemaeus, who were able to prove themselves worthy of the friendship of Roman senators and, by establishing relations of patronage between leading Romans and their city, trans-
ferred to their fellow citizens the profit derived from this friendship.[16] Cicero happens to mention in the context of Verres' alleged depredations in Asia Minor an incident that took place at Ephesus, a "free" city before the Mithridatic wars, probably in the 90s, which provides a contrary example of a less successful outcome. A Roman quaestor, M. Aurelius Scaurus, was forcibly barred from entering the shrine of Artemis to recover a slave who had sought sanctuary there; a leading citizen of Ephesus, one Pericles, was regarded as responsible for this insulting treatment and summoned to Rome, apparently by means of a letter from the consuls.[17] We do not hear of a Menippus coming to Pericles' rescue in this case, and it would have been embarrassing for Cicero, here concerned to contrast Verres' actions with the appropriate procedure that he should have followed, to bring up a case that gave no satisfaction to the accuser. On the other hand, to judge from the evidence of the Claros inscriptions the Roman Senate tended to be rather an ally than an adversary in this struggle (as also in the friction with the publicani , to be considered later): the corporate body, far removed from the province itself, was not so subject to the pressures or temptations offered by friends and other interested parties as was the lonely proconsul on the spot.
A praetor faced no such limits on his powers when dealing with unprivileged communities, civitates stipendiariae . But we must not deduce the constant or pervasive use of a wide-ranging legal power from its mere existence, any more than the social historian assumes that the notorious patria potestas implies that Roman fathers regularly put their children
to death. In actual practice, then, to what extent were the judicial powers of Roman commanders actually exercised over provincials and local authorities?
It has long been recognized that under normal circumstances local judiciaries maintained their autonomy; even had he wished to, the proconsul, before whom personally judicial business came as a rule, simply had a limited capacity to meddle, and for the most part he had neither the time nor the inclination to usurp functions of local government that were performed quite satisfactorily by the cities themselves.[18] This is, admittedly, an a priori argument, although a strong one, and it has been held that it is contradicted by one important piece of evidence that dates to Cicero's proconsulship in Cilicia but may have relevance to Roman Asia Minor before the Mithridatic wars. Cicero writes to Atticus from Cilicia that he has taken over and included in his provincial edict a provision of the edict of Q. Mucius Scaevola Pontifex, commander in Asia ca. 98-97, that suits between Greeks should be held according to their own laws, that is, without reference to the proconsular tribunal.[19] If this was an innovation in practice by Scaevola rather than simply in the provincial edict of Asia, the implication would seem to be that before Scaevola the proconsuls in Asia Minor had actually usurped all functions of jurisdiction in their provinces except those of the "free cities," or, alternatively, that all local jurisdiction was "precarious," wholly dependent on its protection in the governor's edict.[20] In Cilicia in 51-50 the ruling was regarded by the delighted dries as tantamount to autonomy;[21] how far this was true for Scaevola's Asia is unclear. But, rather than leaping to the conclusion that before Scaevola pro-
consuls of Asia had been buried under all the judicial business of their province—and that it was now swept away with a mere stroke of the pen—we should regard this clause of Scaevola's edict as a guarantee only: namely, that the praetor would not intervene in cases that did not involve Romans. This hypothesis brings with it the inference that former commanders had indeed been known to do just this on occasion at least. If so, it would not be difficult to excogitate likely scenarios that would lead to this result. Bribery or friendship might induce a praetor to offer his own court as a refuge for those who doubted the outcome of a local trial or indeed despaired of the endemic delays. Evidence from the period of the Mithridatic wars (78) shows that noncitizen friends of Rome might well find it in their interest to resort to the praetor's court;[22] there is no reason to suppose that this possibility had never been raised or exploited before. Certainly the eagerness of those Greeks who could boast of long friendship with Rome to seek advantage by taking their disputes before Roman authorities for mediation or arbitration was not a recent phenomenon.[23] A proconsul might feel particularly well justified in considering such a case when the plaintiff and defendant were from different cities, which, in the absence of a federal league or a judicial compact between the cities concerned, might have no other fixed framework for resolution: the lex Rupilia in Sicily gave the praetor the power to appoint judges for such cases, while if both parties belonged to one city, jurisdiction remained local (Cic. Verr . 2.2.32).
In this context we might speculate for a moment, although it may be of only marginal relevance for our period, upon the puzzling question of what Cicero's use of this clause had to do with the use of "foreign judges" (peregrini iudices ), which he presents as the result greeted most enthusiastically by the Greeks in his province.[24] Whether these "foreign judges" are judges summoned from abroad to settle local suits (
, an important Hellenistic institution), local judges for suits between citizens and foreigners (as was the praetor peregrinus in Rome), or some other as yet unexplored alternative is controversial.[25] The lex Cnidia ,
published in 1974, may offer a third possibility, for it refers explicitly to a praetor's right to institute
, a word that ought to reflect peregrinos iudices in the Latin original.[26]Peregrini iudices may then be a Roman technical term; and if we interpret Cicero in light of the epigraphic passage, we may suppose that peregrini iudices were non-Roman judges assigned by the proconsul in cases that came before him that did not involve Romans, a procedure that can be paralleled by that laid down by Augustus for Cyrene in the Fourth Edict of 7/6 B.C.[27] Being judged according to local law (suis legibus ) by a jury of fellow Greeks, rather than foreigners, will have seemed, at least by the time of Cicero, virtually tantamount to autonomy. We do indeed possess some evidence from our period that such a procedure might be followed by the Asian proconsul. In an inscription of the late second or early first century we hear that a panel of visiting judges (, "foreign judges" in the usual Hellenistic sense) at Adramyttium had successfully judged not only the cases that emerged from local jurisdiction but also "the cases referred [to Adramyttium?] by the propraetor Gnaeus Aufidius, son of Gnaeus."[28] Whether Aufidius took "advantage of the presence of a competent commission in Adramyttium to send down a batch of cases more suited to their arbitral treatment,"[29] or Adramyttium itself took advantage of the presence of "foreign judges" to clear up cases remanded to them by Aufidius, this is an example of the judgment by locally constituted juries of a case that had first come before a Roman authority but presumably did not involve Romans. An inscription from Priene reveals that one of its citizens was sent to one C. Egnatius, presumably a proconsul, as "judge."[30] If the
suggestion offered above is on the right track, this Prienean may have been a "foreign judge" (peregrinus iudex ) nominated by the proconsul to hear a case involving non-Romans.
The role of proconsuls as arbitrators or mediators of international disputes between Greek communities or societies will be considered below. To anticipate somewhat we may simply note at this point that the arbitral role of proconsuls was minor in comparison with that of the Senate.[31]
So far we have considered mainly the limitations, either formal or practical, upon a proconsul's degree of judicial intervention in the affairs of the local communities. To gain a proper perspective on his judicial activity, and to understand why such limitations were allowed or even welcomed, we need to invert the question: that is, why should a proconsul have intervened at all in local jurisdiction? We have already given a hint in this direction by mentioning the likelihood that some provincials will have had something to gain by applying to the praetor's court rather than to their local judiciaries. Far more so will this incentive have worked to attract to the praetor's court Roman citizens resident or conducting business in the provinces.
In Cicero's time, certainly, a basic judicial duty of a provincial commander was to provide a court of justice for Romans in the provinces (Cic. Att . 5.21.6; cf. QFr . 1.1.20). Indeed, a glance at Cicero's letters from Cilicia, supplemented by his speech for Murena and other letters to provincial commanders urging them to bring their influence to bear in behalf of friends doing business in their province, gives the clear impression that this was indeed a proconsul's primary judicial responsibility.[32] A significant example is provided by Cicero's reference in a letter to Atticus to his sending of a member of his staff to conduct jurisdiction in his place in Cyprus, a part of his provincia : had he altogether neglected Cyprus "the few Roman citizens who do business there" might have claimed that they were denied justice (Att . 5.21.6).[33] Cicero could hardly have written these words if he had had judicial responsibilities in Cyprus beyond the provision of justice for Roman citizens alone. There is reason to believe that this had always been the case: as a rule, from which Fabius Maximus's trial of three Dymaeans (Sherk 43) in exceptional circumstances is the sole apparent
deviation, known examples of Roman judicial intervention in Eastern communities involve Roman citizens.[34] Even matters well within the competency of the local courts, if they concerned Romans, will have occasionally been brought by an interested party before the proconsul. Romans were expected to obey the local laws,[35] but they naturally might seek to override them by an appeal to a friendly proconsul when difficulties arose; and the proconsul's readiness to intervene depended more on his personal inclinations than on any set procedure.[36] Badian has aptly commented:
It is dear that even the most elementary principles of protection and justice for the provincial depended on the whim (and probity) of the governor. . . . It is not often recognized how unsystematic and how dependent on the character and purposes of the individual the whole of provincial administration under the Republic really was.[37]
It is not necessary to surmise that locals were barred from bringing disputes with others before the proconsul's court (some such activity is surely implied by the clause of Scaevola's edict examined above) to accept as a sound hypothesis that, as for Cicero later, the proconsul's central judicial duty was to provide justice for Roman citizens in the provinces whether among themselves or against provincials. The proconsul was, indeed, a combination of praetor urbanus and peregrinus in Rome itself—from which officials his edict was largely derived.
The provision of justice for Roman citizens will have required some structure as their numbers in the provinces increased, for as Cicero's reference to jurisdiction in Cyprus shows, the proconsul had to make himself broadly available lest there be complaints at Rome of his neglect of judicial duties. This is surely the origin of the assize system (best attested in Asia
Minor): the division of a province into districts called conventus , the center of each of which the proconsul would visit in succession to conduct local jurisdiction in the course of a judicial tour.[38] Its creation or development into a form like that in which we finally encounter it is variously dated. It certainly existed in a developed form by the time of Cicero, but we have no evidence for how much earlier its origin may be. Although some scholars have attempted on weak grounds to place its genesis quite early, even as early as Aquillius, and to attribute its institution to individuals, it is surely best to assume a process of evolution more or less in step with the increase in the number of Romans in Asia Minor that made such judicial tours necessary.[39] There were many thousands of Roman citizens in Asia Minor by the end of the 90s, who will have provided the proconsul with plenty of judicial business at his assizes.[40] But the extraordinary expansion of Roman revenues from Asia Minor after the First Mithridatic War and the debt crisis that accompanied it must have caused a quantum leap in the number of Romans resident or doing business there and in the amount of judicial work they generated.[41] The maturation, if not the genesis, of the system of assizes in Asia Minor should probably be placed after 84. Very likely the practice of judicial "tours" was also followed in Macedonia during the winters between the campaigning seasons, although we should imagine far fewer Roman residents or businessmen there than in Asia Minor, inasmuch as publicani apparently did not collect the Macedonian fixed tribute (stipendium ), in contrast to the arrangement in Asia. If so, however, it is evident that the proconsul did not normally travel into Greece for this purpose even shortly after the First Mithridatic War.[42]
Taken as a whole, then, our evidence strongly implies that proconsular jurisdiction was largely a matter of providing a court of justice for Roman citizens: this much was required of the proconsul, but he hardly had time for much else besides, and he was unable to exert dose supervision over details where he was not present. It is a reasonable and economic hypothesis that where a proconsul is seen to have intervened in local jurisdiction it was for the most part in response either to appeals from interested parties (mostly Romans, sometimes Greeks) who saw some advantage in applying to his court. Much, however, ultimately depended on the proconsul's whim, and the arbitrary exertion of power, whether or not for the sake of personal gain, will probably not have been too unusual under such circumstances. The proconsul's judicial authority, which was based above all on his coercive power, had no explicit limitations except those he chose to adhere to in his edict when he chose to exercise it in communities that did not possess special privileges or guarantees from the Roman Senate and People. On the other hand, infringing upon the judicial sovereignty of "free" cities might lead to some embarrassment if a local citizen of the means and authority of Menippus of Colophon was at hand to bring the matter to the attention of the Senate, which for its part appears to have been a consistent defender of the rights of the "free" cities.
It is important to keep in mind that most of the Greek cities of western Asia Minor, as well as those of mainland Greece, appear at this rime to have been "free" (see chap. 4). Before the First Mithridatic War, too, the presence of Roman residents and traders, who provided the chief incentives and opportunities for proconsular intervention in local judiciaries, was on a far smaller scale than after. Our evidence, even if it were more copious, is not of the type to allow us to gauge the degree of Roman intrusion into local judicial structures, but the hypothesis toward which it points is that outside of coastal Macedonia and the interior core of the old Attalid kingdom (i.e., Mysia and Lydia) proconsular intervention can have been only sporadic at this time and of limited lasting effect. The "free" cities of western Asia Minor were in an anomalous position, for the proconsuls of Asia clearly spent much time in their midst (especially in Pergamum and Ephesus), and this must have exposed them, as we have seen in the case of Colophon, to repeated, though not necessarily systematic or extensive, infringements of their judicial autonomy. Yet once again Colophon's fight for its judicial sovereignty, and epigraphic evidence of the continuation of international diplomatic exchanges,[43] show that the Greek poleis did not
simply yield themselves to the imperium Romanum upon the establishment of a permanent Roman presence in Asia Minor.
Proconsuls and Publicani
Perhaps the most delicate administrative duty performed by the praetors of Asia, and one that at times must have absorbed much of their attention in lieu of military campaigning, was that of restraining the publicani in the interests of the allies, and hence of the state.
C. Gracchus's two tribunates were ultimately of profound significance for the Roman presence in Asia Minor. His law providing for the sale of contracts for collection of the Asian revenues before the censors in Rome, although probably intended to limit proconsuls' opportunities for peculation and bribery, opened up a brilliant opportunity to Roman tax companies. This alone need not have had a pernicious effect had not, at the same time, the court for cases of extortion in the provinces (quaestio rerum repetundarum ) been transferred to equestrian rather than senatorial jurors. The intention, again, was probably to introduce stricter supervision of the financial administration of provincial governors,[44] but the possibility existed of collusion between equestrian jurors and the publicani of the same order because of their personal links and perhaps common sympathies. If so, the system established by C. Gracchus might merely supervise proconsuls in the interest of the tax contractors themselves or, more realistically, encourage collaboration between the two parties, for the possibility existed that a proconsul would pay for any transgressions in his province against the business activities of the publicani in the extortion court upon his return.
It is important, however, not to exaggerate this factor and to impute to C. Gracchus motives that were probably foreign to him. Although it is always possible that the survival of privileged or random pieces of evidence has distorted the picture, what we have clearly suggests that it was only around the turn of the second century that the tension between the search for increased profits on the part of the publicani and the interests of Senate
and proconsul alike to maintain good relations with the "friends and allies of the Roman People" reached a crisis point. It is possible that our view of provincial government has been distorted by taking as the norm the clash between the publicani and Q. Mucius Scaevola's legate P. Rutilius Rufus, who was ultimately convicted by the extortion court after his return from Asia, rather than as evidence for new stresses upon the imperium .
Although Q. Mucius Scaevola Augur (cos. 117) was prosecuted for extortion probably in 119, we have no evidence that his brush with the repetundae court was due to difficulties encountered with the publicani , and the equestrian jurors acquitted him despite ostensibly damning evidence.[45] However, in 104, when Marius requested troops from Nicomedes III of Bithynia in accordance with a senatorial decree calling for military assistance from abroad, the king excused himself on the grounds that "most of the Bithynians had been seized by the publicani and were enslaved in the provinces."[46] The Senate responded with a decree that provided that no allied free man was to be a slave in a province,[47] and that the governors should see to their manumission. It is an attractive conjecture that the 800 Bithynians, Thessalians, and Acarnanians who later turn up among the forces of Nerva's successor in Sicily are the 800 slaves whom Nerva freed before calling a halt to the process (Diod. 36.3.2, 8.1), since it strains the imagination that there had been time to summon troops from those nations, and it would explain the anomaly otherwise of employing Bithynian, Thessalian, and Acarnanian assistance in a slave war. Before we consider the basis of Nicomedes' charge we must take note of just how extraordinary it was for the Roman government to call upon its Eastern allies for military assistance in the West.[48] In Rome's darkest hour since the Second Punic War the Senate hoped it could count on the goodwill of its Eastern allies—and in the case of Bithynia at least it was disappointed. Not only that, but the Senate's attempt to rectify the situation by forbid-
ding the enslavement of allies and calling for the manumission of those already enslaved led to a new slave war in Sicily that took four years to put down. The appeal to Nicomedes and its troubling results will have made clear that Rome's hold on the East, resting as it did not on direct coercion but on resignation to Rome's supremacy, was tenuous enough as it was, and that perceived injustices, in particular ill-treatment by the tax contractors, might shake it to its roots. Senators with forethought will have noted that there was a direct link between restraint of the publicani and the security of the imperium in the East.
What exactly the publicani had been up to in Bithynia is not easy to divine. Suggestions of scholars that they were engaged in a Bithynian slave trade "of demographically significant size" or that the Bithynians had come to be seized because Nicomedes had defaulted on a loan borrowed from Romans on security of his subjects' persons are unconvincing.[49] Ultimately, of course, the Bithynians must have been traded as slaves in order to arrive in Sicily, but the question is how and indeed whether—for the claim may not be true—the publicani seized them in the first place. Both Nicomedes' complaint and the Senate's reaction are hard to reconcile with the view that this was no more than the legitimate consequence of default on loans. Indeed, nothing is said at all of loans (the experience of Nicomedes' son a decade later, under much straitened circumstances, is of dubious relevance),[50] and were they at issue we should expect rather a ban on lending money on the security of the person of free allies. We do know, however, that at least later publicani had the nasty habit of seizing the person of those who could not pay taxes allegedly owed,[51] although in such cases they were legally entitled only to the seizure of some property to initiate an action.[52] We also know that they were known to encroach upon
territory in which they did not have an indisputable legal right to collect taxes, such as that of the "free cities" or sacred lands, concerning which indeed a number of cases just around this time are known. It is most likely that the Bithynians had been seized by publicani in just such disputed territory along the edges of Nicomedes' kingdom. But we must be wary of gauging the extent of this activity from Nicomedes' patently self-interested exaggeration of the number of its victims.
Around the turn of the second century the publicani had laid claim to the revenues of two lakes south of Ephesus that produced large revenues (from fish?)[53] for the patron goddess Artemis; "the kings" (presumably the Attalids, at least) had taken over these revenues, but the Romans themselves had restored them to Artemis, probably as part of the settlement of the war with Aristonicus.[54] The native geographer Artemidorus led an embassy to Rome which was successful in urging the restoration of the revenues to Artemis. And in another case involving an important "free city" of Asia Minor before 101,[55] the publicani had encroached upon Pergamene land (and probably that of its sanctuaries) to such an extent that an embassy was sent to Rome, and the urban praetor headed an inquiry into the boundaries of Pergamene territory with an unusually large consilium .[56] Although the case concerned Pergamene land alone, it would seem, epigraphic copies of the senatorial decree have been found at Adramyttium, Smyrna, and Ephesus; this has led one scholar to propose that in 101 the urban praetor was to undertake the gargantuan job of defining the borders of all the tax-exempt states of Asia.[57] That is unwarranted: the embassy that prompted the investigation is from Pergamum alone (line 7), and it is perfectly plausible to suppose that the derision was now or
later published in the major cities of western Asia Minor for maximum visibility.[58] We do not strictly know whether the praetor's decision amounted to a victory for Pergamum.[59] But the affair is further evidence of encroachment by the tax gatherers on disputable lands around the turn of the century and of the Senate's readiness to hear the complaints of its "free" ally, Pergamum, against them.
A provision of the approximately contemporary lex de Cilicia Macedoniaque provinciis , which expressed, as we shall see further below (chap. 9), a positive image of Rome's solicitude for the communities under its imperium , should perhaps be considered in this context. Among a series of regulations concerning the settlement of the Caenic Chersonese, recently conquered by T. Didius, we read that the proconsul is to "do as seems best to him to ensure that the public revenues in that land are collected in accordance with the law by those who are entitled to collect them."[60] The two points of emphasis in this injunction are that only those who are authorized are to collect revenues, and they are to do so according to law. The point is surely to emphasize the proconsuls' role as supervisors of the collection of revenues, in particular to block illegal exactions such as those of which Pergamum, Ephesus, and doubtless others had so recently complained.[61] This is not, then, a command "to organize the taxation of the new territory, an interesting indication . . . of Roman priorities,"[62] but a pledge, quite in keeping with other evidence we have
surveyed from this period, to enforce the legitimate collection of tribute. In a similar vein, the very next clause orders the Macedonian proconsul to remain in the Caenic Chersonese for at least two months each year before he is succeeded, and "to ensure, as far he is able, that the friends and allies of the Roman People are not thrust from their borders, that no one hinders, or nothing unjust befalls them."[63] The proposer of this law was quite in accord with the efforts of the Senate which we have just examined in attempting to counteract the "justified hatred of their hegemony" that Diodorus (34/35.25), probably quoting Posidonius, claimed had been unleashed by C. Gracchus but was only now, in the aftermath of the Bithynian debacle and the crisis of the Teutonic and Cimbric invasions, making an impact.[64]
Only three to four years after the decision on the Pergamene land, either during his praetorship in 98 or immediately ex praetura in 97,[65] Q. Mucius Scaevola Pontifex arrived to take up command of Asia provincia and to set in motion a chain of events that was dearly epochal in the history of Rome's presence in the region. Although our evidence is as usual very fragmentary, consisting above all in some extracts from Diodorus in the Constantinian Excerpts (37.5-6), it will repay our closer investigation.
Diodorus, who is here almost certainly following Posidonius, a contemporary and native of Asia Minor, describes the situation before Scaevola's arrival in dark terms: the publicani had filled the province with their crimes, for they had as allies those in Rome who staffed the standing public courts (i.e., in particular, the extortion court which every returning proconsul might face).[66] The lawlessness of the tax contractors, abetted by their manipulation of judicial process, had caused widespread misery and
engendered hatred for Rome's supremacy.[67] Above all, according to Diodorus, by meting out strict justice to the publicani and not forcing the provincials to pay his expenses and those of his staff, Scaevola managed to relieve the suffering province, assuage hostility, and, indeed, recapture the goodwill of the allies toward Rome.[68] For his behavior, Diodorus notes, he was honored like a god by those he had benefited, and received many rewards for his achievement from his fellow citizens (37.6). Diodorus is here corroborated by other testimony: the cities of Asia instituted a festival in his honor called the Mucieia and—clearly aiming for maximum publicity—erected a statue of Scaevola at the greatest Panhellenic center, Olympia, which bore an inscription attesting to his lofty character, his justice and probity, and awarding him the title, redolent with Hellenistic tradition, of "savior and benefactor."[69] The Roman Senate for its part formally commended him on his administration, and Scaevola won an abiding reputation for iustitia, abstinentia , and innocentia that conferred no small authority upon him in his consulship of 95.[70]
Some details Diodorus provides about Scaevola's behavior in the province deserve special attention. That he brought with him as legatus not a young man on the make but "the finest of his friends," the senior consular and legal expert P. Rutilius Rufus (cos. 105), to act as his special adviser is specially noted as a laudable and wise action.[71] Scaevola's reliance on his own funds rather than being a parasite upon the provincial communities
is noted as an exception from the practice of earlier proconsuls. A striking illustration of this is provided now by the Claros inscriptions, which stress the public service of both Polemaeus and Menippus in paying for the entertainment of Roman authorities, thereby saving Colophon a considerable expense. By an amusing coincidence, Scaevola's own homonymous cousin, Q. Scaevola Augur, and his staff are specifically mentioned—with some impatience—as having arrived in the city "more than once."[72] On the other hand, a warning against presenting Scaevola Pontifex in simplistic, encomiastic terms is provided by Cicero's admission that Scaevola too had requisitioned grain for the maintenance of his troops, a practice often mentioned as a major burden upon provincial communities.[73]
But Diodorus gives most attention to Scaevola's strict and incorruptible administration of justice against the tax contractors (37.5.2-4). This passage gives a clear sense of the attention the proconsul of Asia had to devote to jurisdiction involving the publicani .[74] Not only did he spare provincials from unjust charges by the publicani ; he even checked their offenses by offering a fair hearing for complaints against them and forcing them to pay financial damages and even to submit to capital punishment. In one famous instance Scaevola crucified a slave who was a leading agent of the publicani and had already arranged with his owners to escape extreme punishment through manumission. With this treatment he "put the publicani into the hands of their victims"—a magnificent reversal.[75] This phrase may be only metaphorical. However, in view of the tax contractors' habit of seizing the persons of alleged defaulters, we are entitled to wonder whether this phrase and that which immediately follows suggest that Scaevola handed over the condemned to the provincials for punishment.[76] This
was an extraordinary way of treating Romans and their agents in their own imperium: as Diodorus implies, it was one thing to discourage unjust suits from the publicani against alleged defaulters, quite another to exact penalties from Roman purses and persons on behalf of provincial communities. Executions, particularly if performed upon citizens as well as the slave singled out for mention because of the extreme form his punishment took, will have been particularly unpopular in Rome not only, we may suppose, among the tax gatherers. All those with business interests in the provinces—not only equestrian negotiatores but also senators—will have been displeased at the prospect that the opportunities for personal gain that the imperium provided the ruling people, Romans and Italians, might be sacrificed by self-righteous magistrates in favor of the provincials' interest.[77] If Scaevola executed citizens as well as slaves, this violation of custom, though not of law, will have exacerbated odium against him.[78] The anger of the equestrian order against Scaevola and his legate Rutilius, therefore, is fully explicable in this instance without accepting Diodorus's or Posidonius's notion of a dose alliance between publicani and equestrian judges.[79] Scaevola himself was too powerful a target; but the message was gotten across sufficiently by the condemnation of Rutilius, whose stunning isolation at his trial bespeaks the absence of strong senatorial support not only for himself but for the line he and his commander had taken in Asia Minor.[80] Rutilius's conviction for extortion, of course, had a special piquancy, inasmuch as it was a standing accusation of hypocrisy.
If my reading of the evidence we have reviewed thus far is broadly correct, it emerges that around the turn of the second century, and most probably as a direct result of the crisis of the Teutonic and Cimbric invasions, influential members of the Senate became alert to the fact that the imperium in the East was dangerously unstable above all because of the aggressive behavior of the tax contractors. Scattered literary and epigraphic evidence shows that the Senate now gave a favorable ear to the complaints of the communities of Asia Minor against the publicani , and finally we
see that Scaevola applied new principles of benevolent administration quite forcefully during his tenure of Asia provincia . But such conscientious governance was not uncontroversial in Rome and Italy, from which vantage point it will have seemed to many an odd perversion of the privileges of empire; and certainly Scaevola's harsh retribution upon the wretched tax contractors will have made further enemies. Rutilius's conviction served notice that he and his commander had gone too far, but we should not conclude that the publicani were once again given an entirely free rein.
Inscriptions from Priene suggest instead that the lesson Asian praetors learned from the hostility that greeted Scaevola and Rutilius was to evade responsibility and pass complaints on to the Senate with relief. During the tenure of Asia by C. Iulius Caesar toward the end of the 90s the publicani attempted to lay claim to the revenues of the saltworks at Priene, which belonged to Athena Polias.[81] An embassy was sent to Rome to complain to the Senate, but in the meantime the publicani insisted that they should be allowed to continue to collect the revenues therefrom until the Senate's decision was known. An ambassador of Priene named Crates managed to persuade Caesar to restrain the publicani until the Senate's decision was known; the publicani asserted their claims again;[82] Crates undertook another embassy to Caesar, probably with the same result. The dispute continued upon the arrival at Ephesus of the next praetor, one Lucius Lucilius, son of Lucius, whom the publicani again tried to influence; but Crates again persuaded the Roman commander to leave the revenues to Priene until the Senate should decide about them.[83] We must suppose that Priene had to wait a considerable length of time for the Senate to rule on its case: when we last hear of the case under Lucilius, the Senate's decision is still not known. A parallel example is instructive: not much less than a year must have passed between the senatus consultum of 74, requesting a con-
sular decision on the revenues of Oropus, and the decision itself on 14 October 73—and to this must be added travel time and doubtless lengthy preliminaries in Rome to the senatorial audience itself.[84] But Crates' tireless exertions on his city's behalf seem to have been no less successful than those of Menippus of Colophon which we have reviewed above, for this honorific inscription's stress upon them should bespeak success. It is therefore most probable that Priene was able to stall the tax contractors until a favorable decision was handed down by the Senate.
Rutilius's condemnation, then, had not transformed the Asian praetors into mere allies and agents of the publicani , and the Senate remained ready to support the rights of the Greek communities against encroachment. The Greek cities, too, remained vigilant; one Prienean active around the turn of the century is honored for having served on embassies to no less than three probably consecutive praetors, as well as a quaestor—and King Seleucus VI.[85] Probably, as in the other Prienean honorary inscriptions, the embassies to Roman officials chiefly involved disputes with the publicani —the main source of friction for the Greek cities around the turn of the century, in contrast (so it would appear from the Claros inscriptions) to the early days of the province.
Proconsular Supervision of Local Affairs
A kind of "police function" exercised by Roman proconsuls in the East is easy to presume, but here too some caution against sweeping conclusions is necessary. As we have just seen, at least ca. 100 the proconsul of Macedonia held an explicit brief to defend the rights and boundaries of Rome's "friends and allies" of the newly conquered region of the Caenic Chersonese, and perhaps this can be extended over the entire area of his assignment or provincia . But this must have applied above all to Macedonia itself, and as we saw (chaps. 1-3), we should not suppose that he performed such a function in Greece itself, occupied as he was with the defense of the Balkan frontier. The only evidence for the exercise of such a function by the proconsul of Macedonia—the intervention of Q. Fabius Maximus at Dyme—involves an outbreak of stasis during the settlement immediately after the Achaean War and cannot be considered to be representative of a norm; on the other hand, the Attic slave wars, one of them quite severe,
were contained (so it appears from our evidence) without Roman intervention. A proconsul's involvement in such matters was perhaps dependent above all upon his proximity: thus, in the Dyme incident, the councillors led by Cyllanius readily appealed to Fabius because he happened to be nearby at Patrae;[86] similarly, presumably, the regular presence of the proconsul of Asia in the Greek cities of the Aegean coast led the Senate, upon appeal from Colophon, to give him and his successors the responsibility of suppressing armed raids upon part of that city's agricultural land.[87] Despite the presence of a Roman magistrate in Asia Minor, open friction between or within the "free" cities was then evidently not entirely at an end, as a few other such instances also show, in particular a conflict, seemingly violent, between Sardis and Ephesus mediated by a Roman proconsul not far from the turn of the century.[88]
This case is an important example of an attempt at mediation by a Roman proconsul, and the diplomatic forms he employs are particularly worthy of note. Had he intervened too forcefully he might have received a rebuke from the Senate, as appears to have happened to the proconsul who meddled in the quarrel between Colophon and Metropolis somewhat earlier.[89] Instead, expressing his concern over the animosity between the two cities, he sent a Greek—indeed, an Athenian—to invite each side to accept the proconsul's offer to help bring about a settlement.[90] Both cities
accepted the initiative and sent ambassadors to negotiate; from that point on, however, the proconsul fades into the background, because it appears to have been not he but Pergamum, a third city of appropriate status for such an honor, that actually mediated the treaty.[91] It would seem that the proconsul referred the matter to Pergamum and confined himself to informing the Sardians and Ephesians by letter of the eventual results.[92] The provisions laid down in the treaty for arbitration of future alleged breaches leave no place for either the Senate or Rome's proconsul: rather, within thirty days of any complaint both cities are to send envoys to Pergamum; within five more days Pergamum would conduct a lottery to determine the actual arbitrating city, from among those agreed upon by both parties; and within sixty further days both cities would send representatives to the arbitrating city, which would judge them.[93] The compact is entirely Hellenic in character and bears no mark of any basic alteration in political structures since the coming of the Romans; the delicacy with which the proconsul dealt with the Sardian-Ephesian conflict, and his apparent respect for the forms of international diplomacy among autonomous states, are striking.[94]
Another example of mediation, this time from Macedonia and Greece, illustrates further the limits of proconsular involvement in international disputes. In 118 the Athenian "guild" of Dionysian artists went to Macedonia to complain to the proconsul Cn. Cornelius Sisenna of their treatment at the hands of their Isthmian-Nemean colleagues.[95] Representatives
of the Isthmian-Nemeans were not present, so Sisenna wrote to the Isthmian-Nemean
requesting that they send envoys to him at Pella within a stated period of days to defend their group against the Athenian charges. These envoys accepted a settlement late in 118 with the Athenians which called for the Isthmian-Nemeans to pay a fine of ten talents.[96] It is important to note that the pact is referred to as an "agreement" () rather than as a "decision" or "ruling" () laid down by binding arbitration;[97] Sisenna appears to have mediated rather than imposed the settlement, which included a "fine" of ten talents (perhaps compensation for damages).[98] The subsequent history of the affair deserves attention: the Isthmian-Nemean "guild," outraged at the concessions made by their representatives, condemned them at a meeting at Thebes for exceeding their instructions; the rebuked envoys then led a secession movement to Sicyon, taking with them not only some of the artists of Thebes and Boeotia but also some of the common funds, votives, sacred crowns, and records of the "guild," and proceeded to make
much trouble for the Isthmian-Nemeans.[99] In short, the agreement mediated by Sisenna was immediately repudiated by the Isthmian-Nemean "guild" and subsequently ignored for nearly six years, until the Athenian state became involved and took up the matter with the Senate. Far from illustrating the "subject status" of certain Greeks,[100] this affair dearly illustrates the minimal interest the proconsul of Macedonia took in "ruling" Greeks: Sisenna accepted the Attic group's request to mediate, but neither he nor his successors cared to play the role of enforcer not only of an agreement over which he presided but even of senatorial decisions. As we shall see in the next chapter, the forms of international diplomacy continued to be maintained by the practice of reserving disputes between communities for the Senate's attention.
Proconsular Grants of Privileges
Before concluding this survey, we should take some notice of the grants by Roman magistrates in the East of privileges, particularly those of the "guilds" of the artists of Dionysus. What is said here can be only tentative, for the imminent publication of an epigraphic dossier from Argos on the privileges of the Isthmian-Nemean "guild" will multiply our information for this practice, regarding which we have, thus far, only two short texts.[101] We can, therefore, be brief.
It is dear that by granting privileges such as (typically) immunity from taxation (
) and from mandatory contributions () to the Dionysian artists, a Roman magistrate infringed to some extent the sovereignty of a community.[102] On the other hand, in doing so he was merely assuming a traditional Hellenistic function previously performed by the kings and the Amphictyonic Council, and one necessary for the continued celebration of the musical and dramatic contests that were so central to Hellenic culture. The Amphictyonic Council, it should be noted, continued to be a guarantor of the privileges of the Athenian guild of artists along with the Romans well after the establishment of a permanent Roman presence in Macedonia; still, for all the Amphictyony's prestige, Rome's power gave its Senate's and magistrates' decisions primacy and
attracted disputants to its tribunal.[103] In this case, certainly, traditional Hellenic legal structures were not overturned but rather persisted with a new orientation toward the new locus of power and authority.
The first known example of a Roman grant of tax-exempt status not to Dionysiac artists but to Greeks who had performed particular service to Rome belongs immediately after the First Mithridatic War.[104] The origins of this practice belong to that era, when loyalty to Rome's hegemony had first become an issue of grave importance.[105]
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.
