The explosion of public building in the cities of Asia Minor in the first and, above all, the second centuries ad is visible almost anywhere you look. The tourist industry of modern Turkey has reason to be grateful to the Romanized civic elites of the early and high empire, who spared no expense in the attempt to make their cities look and feel as Roman as possible. However, the dazzling urban facade of the cities ought to be understood as only one element in a wider pattern of elite self-representation. Along with flashy marble piles of sometimes questionable usefulness, the local equestrian and senatorial class were expected to fund the establishment of lavish festivals (Rogers 1991), the minting of civic bronze coinages (P. Weiss 2005), and straightforward handouts of grain or cash; in return, the cities voted them brash honorific statues (R. Smith 1998), often paid for by the benefactor himself. That these various items of elite expenditure were all regarded as parts of a single process is suggested by a famous inscription of the early second century bc, in which the great benefactor C. Julius Demosthenes of Oinoanda in northern Lykia describes his benefactions to the city as follows:
Since I have loved my dearest homeland since earliest youth, and have not only maintained but thoroughly surpassed the generosity of my ancestors towards it, in the annual subsidies which I made to ensure fair prices in the market and in providing a boundless supply of [. . .] to the magistrates, and since I have constructed a food market with three stoas facing it, two with one and one with two storeys, and have spent more than 15,000 denarii on this and the purchase of houses which were removed to make way for this building, and since I wish additionally to leave behind for my homeland, in like manner with these buildings, a permanent capital fund, I publicly promise the foundation of a theatrical festival to be called the Demostheneia, which will be celebrated after three-year intervals just as the other quadrennial festivals are celebrated. (Worrle 1988; Mitchell 1990, with English translation)
For Demosthenes, the construction of a market hall and stoas and the establishment of a capital fund to pay for a quadrennial festival evidently came to more or less the same thing: both were part of making one’s native “city” worthy of the name.
The growing pains of urbanization are well illustrated by the development of the city of Aizanoi in north-west Phrygia in the first two centuries ad (Rheidt 1999). Aizanoi lay on one of the major trade routes across western Anatolia, running northeast from Sardis towards Kotiaion and Dorylaion in northern Phrygia. It also boasted proximity to a major Phrygian cult center, the cave of Meter Steunenos, in a rocky outcrop some distance from the center of the pre-Roman settlement of Aizanoi. No pre-Roman monumental architecture is known, and Hellenistic Aizanoi seems to have been little more than a busy roadside village. Two stages of urbanization at Aizanoi can be discerned (fig. 21.2). The first century ad saw a feverish program of public building, beginning with a temple of Artemis and the emperors, probably constructed under Claudius, on the east bank of the Penkalas river, and culminating with the great temple of Zeus on the west bank (Fig 21.3), with a grid plan orientated around it. This period saw a violent break with Aizanoi’s Phrygian past; the town’s physical fabric was transformed beyond all recognition, and the civic space was articulated entirely around new, Roman (or at least heavily Romanized) cults.
In the latter half of the second century, however, things get more complicated. The central part of the city was laid out on a new grid-plan on a different axis,
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21.2 The urban center of Aizanoi and the modern village of Qavdarhisar. Note the two different axes around which the Roman city was laid out: that of the temple of Zeus (A) and the eastern bathhouse (F), and that of the colonnaded street (G) and the western bathhouse (C). Adapted from Rheidt 1997: 486. (By permission of K. Rheidt)
21.3 The temple of Zeus at Aizanoi. (Photo: author)
Orientated around a great processional way on the east bank of the Penkalas, pointing directly towards the cave of Meter Steunene, two and a half kilometers south-west of the city. This second phase of Aizanoi’s development under Roman rule seems to be driven by a desire to reintegrate the old indigenous cult of Meter Steunene into the religious identity and physical structure of the city. The tension between the two aspects of the cultural identity of Aizanoi, Phrygian, and Greco-Roman, was graphically represented on Aizanetic bronze coins of the late second century ad, depicting the birth of Zeus, the patron deity of Roman Aizanoi, to Rhea, identified with the Phrygian Meter Steunene (Robert 1987: 241-70).
This change in the cultural orientation of Aizanoi needs to be put in the context of a more general shift in the self-perception of the cities of Asia Minor in the second century ad. Roman policy towards the Greek cities of the Eastern empire might have been designed to exacerbate the inferiority complex of the modern cities of Asia Minor vis-a-vis their senior counterparts in mainland Greece. The doling out of favors and privileges to one city or another was all too often determined on the basis of antiquity (archaiotes) and sound - that is to say, Hellenic - ancestry (eugeneia) (Tac. Ann. 4.55). The establishment at Hadrianic Athens of a religious confederation of bona fide Greek cities, the Panhellenion, was the culmination of this process (C. Jones 1996; Spawforth 1999). Wealthy and ambitious Asiatic cities such as Aizanoi, all too obviously physical creations of the pax Romana, were at a serious disadvantage. In the intensively competitive civic culture which characterized the high Roman imperial period in Asia Minor (Robert 1977), convincing Hellenic origins were imperative to stand out from one’s neighbors; creative misinterpretation of local history and mythology was the best way forward (Strubbe 1984-86).
Eumeneia in southern Phrygia and Philadelpheia in south-eastern Lydia were Attalid royal foundations of the 160s bc, named after the brothers Eumenes II and Attalos II Philadelphos (“brother-lover”) respectively. A history dating back no further than the second century bc was a serious disadvantage - the city of Ptolemais-Barke in Libya had been disqualified from full membership of the Panhellenion precisely because of her Macedonian dynastic name - and both cities developed alternative foundation myths. According to Euripides, the wooden statue of the Tauric Artemis, stolen from the Taurians by Orestes and Iphigeneia, had been carried to Attica and dedicated at Halai, where it was still worshipped under the name Artemis Tauropolos. The Philadelphians knew better. The siblings had brought the statue to Lydia, not Athens, where it survived to be worshipped under the cult name of Artemis Anaitis, patron deity of the city of Philadelpheia. The city’s name was taken as confirmation of this: Philadelpheia was the “city of sibling love,” that is to say, the love between Orestes and his sister Iphigeneia. The city’s foundation was thereby backdated to the generation after the Trojan wars, making it one of the oldest cities in Asia (Burrell 2005; Nolle 2005b: 73-83). The Eumeneians, even more ambitiously, claimed to have been founded by Hyllos, son of the Argive Herakles, who was “happy to stay” (eu menein) at Eumeneia during the exile of the Herakleidai from the Peloponnese (P. Weiss 2000). These convoluted mythological origins can seem faintly risible. But the Roman authorities took them seriously enough, and practical benefits accrued. In the 120s ad, the Eumeneians’ Achaean ancestry was the foundation of a successful bid for membership of the Panhellenion; soon after, Philadelpheia gained the valuable status of an independent assize center, and was briefly made one of the peninsula’s metropoleis (mother cities) in the reign of Elagabalus. Quite apart from local prestige, these titles made a real difference to the city’s legal position and tax status (Dig. 27.6.2).
In the mid-third century, the bishop Pionios thunderously denounced the vanities of the citizens of Smyrna, who “plume themselves on the beauty of Smyrna,” and boast of being the native city of the poet Homer (Robert 1994: 1-9). The rise of the Church obviously required the cities to rethink their collective past. In the mid-320s AD, the town of Orkistos in Phrygia appealed to the emperor Constantine to be restored to the status of a city after a period of subordination to the neighboring city of Nakoleia. Antiquity and mythological origins seem simply not to have come into question; instead, city status was granted on the basis of the town’s favorable position, the size of its population, the existence of a curial class, and the fact that “as a kind of crown on all these things, the inhabitants are all said to be followers of the most sacred religion (i. e. Christianity)” (Chastagnol 1981). However, the transforming power of the Church ought not to be overstated. Christian Tarsos’s claims to fame in the late fifth century ad have a familiar ring to them: “a city priding itself on its beauty and size. . . and what is most important and glorious of all, the fact of being the native city of the most great and holy apostle Paul” (Miracles of St Thecla, Mir. 29). There is little here which would have shocked the pagans of third-century Smyrna.
Tarsos, of course, was fortunate in being able to make symbolic capital out of a direct connection with the Apostolic age. Others found the negotiation more difficult. In the late fifth century, the Isaurian imperial dynasty, natives of a notoriously barbarous part of Asia Minor, found it convenient to claim that the Isaurian race were the descendants of the prophet Esau (Photius, Bibl. 79); the citizens of Apameia Kibotos (the Chest) in Phrygia were reduced to claiming that the kibotos (also Ark) of Noah had come to rest on a nearby hill (Lightfoot 2008). At any rate, it is clear that the rise of the Church did little to dent the basic collective values of the Greco-Roman city in Asia Minor, even if it was now Esau rather than Rhea to whom they looked.
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