Political Authority and Local Agency: Cilicia Pedias and Syria between the Seleucid Empire and the Roman Republic

Bradley Jordan

doi:10.1163/1568525x-bja10064

Abstract

Abstract This paper aims to show how local civic communities, nominally subject to the Seleucid dynasts, integrated Roman magistrates into an existing framework of authority during the late second and early first centuries BCE. I argue that as Roman magistrates played an increasingly significant role in the region, cities initially framed them in quasi-regal terms, which their interlocutors consciously accepted. Through a close reading of two Roman letters to the Cilician city of Mopsuestia, dated to 87 BCE (SEG 44.1227), and analysis of literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence for the final collapse of Seleucid authority in the early 60s BCE, I reveal that this was a locally driven process. Consequently, local agents played a critical role in both legitimising Roman hegemony in local contexts and encouraging Roman intervention within the region.

Highlights

At the death of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 164 BCE, Seleucid hegemony over Cilicia and Syria was undisputed; less than a century later, after defeating Tigranes of Armenia, Cn
This paper aims to show how local civic communities, nominally subject to the Seleucid dynasts, integrated Roman magistrates into an existing framework of authority during the late second and early first centuries BCE
Local agents played a critical role in both legitimising Roman hegemony in local contexts and encouraging Roman intervention within the region

Summary

Introduction

At the death of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 164 BCE, Seleucid hegemony over Cilicia and Syria was undisputed; less than a century later, after defeating Tigranes of Armenia, Cn. Both titles came to be applied to Hellenistic rulers in an honorific capacity.[79] Accepting Plutarch’s claim, the Cilician communities chose to honour Lucullus in ways traditionally appropriate for their Seleucid monarchs In this case, given Lucullus’ distance from the communities in question—the narrative sources imply he did not personally visit Syria or Cilicia—and his attempts to reconstitute the communities affected by Tigranes’ actions made the analogy more potent. This inscription seems to integrate a Roman commander into a localised, if flexible, honorific framework, assimilating him to previously royal values, in an attempt to authorise and legitimise his actions

Conclusions

92 Mytilene

95 On the embeddedness of social and political frameworks