Money and proto-national identities in the Greco-Roman cities of the first and second centuries AD

Abstract

In this article, the author avoids assessing the levels of ‘Greekness’ or ‘Romanness’ of the eastern Roman provinces; instead, she tries to evaluate the impact of the imperial and civic ideology on the formation of two distinct and, yet, inter-related political identities. The civic and State identities are made clear through the prism of modern theories of nationalism. The manifestation of familiar national characteristics such as patriotism, pride in one's fatherland, the construction of an invented tradition and the issue of both civic and ‘official’ coinages indicate the existence of two distinct proto-national identities in the Roman Empire.