Preamble: Being Roman and Being Greek

Romans, broadly speaking, thought that being Roman was a matter of both mores and material culture (Woolf 1994). They saw ‘‘Romans’’ sharing, not a kinship group, but a value-system, one that was conservative, respectful of social hierarchy, and scrupulous in the observation of religious taboos. ‘‘Romans’’ were people whose own self-discipline, combined with their power to mobilize the labor of others, imposed a rational order over much of the known world. This rationalization of space involved a network of centuriated farmland, roads, and aqueducts whose critical nodes were cities, each of which replicated, on a grand or humble scale, the basic infrastructure of the capital city itself: fora, temples, porticos, and baths.

Greeks saw their world differently. They imagined themselves more as a kinship group, speaking a common language, descended from common ancestors (both historical and mythological), and worshipping a common pantheon, whose Olympian universality was balanced by deliberately distinctive forms of local cult. A Greek’s first loyalty was always to his city, but the Greeks’ prickly civic particularism was to some extent balanced by a tradition of joint activities in leagues.

To a Roman eye, the Greeks were poised somewhere between civilization and decadence, their intellectual and artistic achievements not matched by military might or sobriety of morals. But Greeks did live in cities, and so as long as they paid their taxes, let the better sort of people run local politics, and expressed appropriate respect for the emperor and his deputies, they were Romanized enough.

Did Greeks consider themselves Romanized? Many aristocrats had Roman citizenship and used the family name of the Roman emperor or general who had first granted citizenship to their family. After the emperor Aurelius Caracalla extended Roman citizenship in 212 ce, any free person could style himself ‘‘Aurelius,’’ and many did. Yet Greeks with Roman names did not stop considering themselves Greek. And since material culture was not a determining component of Greek identity,

Greeks felt no less Greek when they adorned their cities with Roman amenities and integrated the emperor’s effigy into the ceremonies of their civic life. Scholars still debate the extent to which the intellectual productions of Greek aristocrats show signs of resentment, assimilation, or regret (Bowie 1970; Swain 1996), but the public face of city life combined cultural loyalty to the idea of being Greek with highly demonstrative loyalty to the hegemony of Rome (Smith, this volume).

In some ways Roman hegemony actually fostered their subjects’ self-identification as Greeks. In Egypt, and elsewhere in the east, Roman rule involved a partnership with the local aristocracy, usually a hereditary caste of land-owning families. When Cicero wrote to his brother about ‘‘the Greeks of Asia’’ he meant the propertied and educated elite of the province that his brother was governing at the time (Q. fr. 1. 1). Previously, such persons might have identified themselves more parochially as Lydians or Mysians (Mitchell 2000:124), but they were quick to present themselves as ‘‘Greeks’’ to Romans who guaranteed their position of local privilege in exchange for their loyalty to Rome.