Rome, the Greek World, and the East

Volume 3: The Greek World, the Jews, and the East

Fergus Millar

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807876657
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This volume completes the three-volume collection of Fergus Millar's essays, which, together with his books, transformed the study of the Roman Empire by shifting the focus of inquiry onto the broader Mediterranean world and beyond. The eighteen essays presented here include Millar's classic contributions to our understanding of the impact of Rome on the peoples, cultures, and religions of the eastern Mediterranean, and the extent to which Graeco-Roman culture acted as a vehicle for the self-expression of the indigenous cultures. In an epilogue written to conclude the collection, Millar argues for rethinking the focus of "ancient history" itself and for considering the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean from the first millennium B.C. to the Islamic conquests a valid scholarly framework and an appropriate educational syllabus for the study of antiquity. English translations of extended ancient passages in Greek, Latin, and Semitic languages in all the essays make Millar's most important articles accessible for the first time to specialists and nonspecialists alike.

PART I
The Hellenistic World and Rome

CHAPTER ONE
The Problem of Hellenistic Syria^*

And it came to pass after the victory of Alexander the son of Philip, the Macedonian, who came out from the land of Kittim and smote Darius, king of the Persians and Medes . . . and started many wars and conquered many fortified places and slew the kings of the earth. . . . And his sons ruled, each in his own place, and after his death they all assumed diadems, and his sons (ruled) after him for many years and multiplied evils in the land.

—1 Maccabees 1.1–9

The first book of Maccabees in its opening paragraph reflects an important aspect of the impact of Hellenistic rule in Syria, the prevalence of conflict, war, and instability. It does also, however, illustrate something quite different, the possibility of a communal historical consciousness and a national culture which might provide a framework within which a community in the Syrian region could have absorbed and reacted to the fact of Greek conquest. That this was true of the Jewish community of Jerusalem is beyond all question.¹ 1 Maccabees, written originally in Hebrew, directly continues the tradition of Old Testament historiography. It has indeed also been argued that Chronicles and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah were also written in the Hellenistic period.² If that is dubious, the book of Ecclesiasticus (Ben Sira) was certainly written around 200 B.C. or soon after, and Daniel, in its final form, in the 160s.³

The culture of Judaea and Jerusalem thus exhibits both a profound continuity with the pre-Greek past and an equally undeniable absorption of Greek elements.⁴ As is well known, the first attested use of the word hellenismos comes in 2 Maccabees (4.13) and refers to the enrolment of the Jerusalemites as “Antiochians,” the setting up of a gymnasium, and the wearing of Greek clothes.

We can therefore use Maccabees to pose at least one of the many questions which can in principle be asked about Hellenistic Syria. By “Hellenistic” in this sense I mean simply the period from Alexander to the mid-first century B.C. By “Syria” I mean anywhere west of the Euphrates and south of the Amanus Mountains—essentially therefore the area west of the Euphrates where Semitic languages were used: Aramaic in its various dialects, Phoenician, Hebrew, and earlier forms of Arabic. This begs a question about Asia Minor (and especially Cilicia), from which Aramaic documents are known, and a far more important one about northern Mesopotamia and about Babylonia. Should we not, that is, see the various Aramaic-speaking areas of the Fertile Crescent as representing a single culture, or at any rate closely connected cultures, and therefore not attempt to study the one area without the others?

The first question is one of cultural identity. Can we observe elsewhere in Syria, that is, outside Judaea, either the continued survival of a non-Greek culture or the fusion (Verschmelzung) in Droysen’s sense of Greek and non-Greek cultures? As I have argued elsewhere, there is perhaps just enough evidence to show that this was the case in the Phoenician cities of the coast.⁵ But elsewhere, with the exception of Judaea, we meet a problem which haunts one and all of the questions we would like to ask. If we are going to ask about the nature or limits of Hellenisation, there is a prior question: the Hellenisation of what? Whether we think of northern Syria, the Orontes valley, or Damascus, or present-day Jordan, we find that almost nothing is known, from either literary or documentary or archaeological evidence, about what these places were like in the Achaemenid period.⁶ Our best evidence for the personal life, nomenclature, and religious observances of non-Jewish Aramaic speakers in the Achaemenid period comes in fact from the private letters in Aramaic from Egypt.⁷ The not very numerous monumental inscriptions in Aramaic from Syria are no later than the seventh century B.C.⁸ The only known cuneiform archive from Syria, found near Aleppo and dating to the Neo-Babylonian and early Achaemenid periods,⁹ will serve to remind us of how much we do not know. The only cuneiform tablet of the Achaemenid period so far discovered in Jordan is, however, more revealing.¹⁰ Written in Harran in the first year of a king named Darius, it records a sale by two people with Aramaic names to a person whose father has the Edomite/Idumaean name of Qusu-yada’. It was found at Tell Tawilan near Petra and thus clearly reflects the type of movement and interchange round the Fertile Crescent hinted at above. It is also significant that the same Idumaean name reappears on an Aramaic-Greek bilingual ostrakon of the third century B.C. (text to n. 49 below). By contrast, formal inscriptions in Aramaic are rare.¹¹ Otherwise, it is only in Teima in north-west Arabia, on the southern borders of what would later be the Nabataean kingdom, that we can find Aramaic inscriptions, west of the Euphrates and south of the Amanus, in the Achaemenid period itself.¹² Aramaic ostraca of the Persian period are, however, known from a number of sites in Israel, for example, Beer-Sheva and Arad.¹³ It can reasonably be expected that archaeological investigation in areas outside present-day Israel would produce more; and Aramaic material of the Persian period has, for instance, been discovered at Tell el Mazar in Jordan.¹⁴

For the moment our evidence on Achaemenid Syria is very limited,¹⁵ and what we know of its social and economic history is still largely dependent on passing allusions in classical sources, for instance, Xenophon’s account of his march across northern Syria from Myriandrus, a Phoenician trading post, through an area of villages, and one satrapal palace and associated paradeisos, to the city of Thapsacus on the Euphrates (Anab. 1.4.6–11). There were apparently no cities on the route which they took between the coast and the Euphrates at that moment. Did they deliberately avoid Aleppo, or had it declined as a city? Of the inland cities of the Syrian region which may still have been inhabited in the Persian period, only Damascus is really certain. It was there that Parmenio captured the treasures of Darius (Curt. 3.12.27; Arrian Anab. 2.11.9–10); and Strabo 16.2.20 (756) says that it was the chief city of Syria in the Persian period. Berossus also reports (FGrHist. 680 F 11) that Artaxerxes II (405/404–359/358 B.C.) set up images of Artemis Anaitis in various places, including Ecbatana, Babylon, Susa, Sardis, and Damascus.

Our ignorance of Achaemenid Syria is a major problem also for any assessment of the economic consequences of the Macedonian conquest. From a “Marxist” standpoint, for instance, the late Heinz Kreissig argued that the Seleucid empire continued to be based on the “Asiatic mode of production,”¹⁶meaning the labour of peasants who were not slaves and owned their own means of production but were dependent on those to whom they paid their surplus. Pierre Briant, from a similar standpoint, once equated the “Asiatic mode of production” with the “royal economy” briefly sketched in the Aristotelian Oeconomica 2.¹⁷ But if we look for specific and provable instances of dependent villages in Syria in the Achaemenid period, we will find precisely, and only, those in northern Syria which Xenophon states had been granted to Parysatis (Anab. 1.4.9). We need not dispute Briant’s generalisation that the village was a predominant social formation throughout the Near and Middle East through both the Achaemenid and the Hellenistic periods. But we do not know what was the typical set of existing economic relationships into which the Macedonian conquest obtruded.

The fact of military conquest is indeed about all that is clear from the early Hellenistic period. Beyond that we would want to ask, for instance, some of the following questions: (1) What new Greek cities were founded, when, and where? (2) Were they accompanied by Greek or Macedonian settlement in the surrounding territories? (3) What substantial changes, if any, accompanied the acquisition of Greek names by existing cities? (4) Was there significant immigration and settlement by Greek speakers outside the context of city foundations? (5) Are we to think of a degree of social and cultural fusion between Greek settlers and the existing population, or rather, as Briant has argued,¹⁸ of the Greeks forming separate enclaves? (6) Did the period see the introduction into Syria of what “Marxists” define as the “ancient mode of production,” that is, one based on a monetary economy, private property, and the exploitation of slave labour? Any temptation to make sweeping generalisations in this topic should be tempered by the important evidence of the papyri from the Wadi Dâliyeh, north of Jericho.¹⁹ They date to the third quarter of the fourth century, and may well have been deposited in the cave where they were found in the aftermath of the Samaritan rising of circa 332 B.C. One document of 335 B.C. records the sale of a slave for thirty-five pieces of silver. There were also a number of coins, imported and local (especially Tyrian), as well as seal impressions.

These documents are also potentially relevant to a final question: (7) What changes were brought about, outside the area of Greek settlement, in the culture of the inhabitants, for example, in literacy? What combination of literacy was there in Semitic languages (Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic, Phoenician, and later Nabataean Aramaic), in Greek, in both, or in neither?

The only substantial area where it is beyond question that new city foundations transformed the map of the region is northern Syria, with Seleucus I’s foundation of Antioch, Apamea, Seleucia, and Laodicea, a process brilliantly described by Seyrig.²⁰ Near Antioch there was said to have been briefly a city “Antigoneia,” founded by Antigonus Monophthalmus and settled by Athenians (so Malalas, apparently following a chronographer named Pausanias, FGrHist. 854 F 10). At Laodicea there was similarly said to have been a village called “Mazabda,” and at Apamea one called “Pharnace” (FGrHist. F 10, 9–10).

Excavations on this site have revealed one object from the Persian period, a fragment of an Attic pyxis.²¹ What is significant is that it is only, so far as I have discovered to date, in the area of these cities that we find smaller settlements with Greek or Macedonian names. For instance, Diodotus Tryphon, who seized the Seleucid throne in the 140s, came from a phrourion (fortified settlement) called “Cassiana,” which, like others with the names “Larissa,” “Megara,” “Apollonia,” and so forth, belonged to Apamea, where Tryphon was educated (Strabo 16.2.10 [752]). Even so, there were also villages in the territory of Apamea with non-Greek names, like the k

m

Kaprozabadai

n (the village of th...