Placing Power: Greek Cities and Roman Governors in Western Asia Minor, 69-235 CE.

Abstract

My dissertation situates public space at the heart of a Greek city’s efforts to negotiate its position in the networks of power that comprised the Roman Empire. It focuses on the annual assize tours Roman governors conducted through the provinces of Asia and Lycia-Pamphylia, and, drawing on a wide range of literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence, shows how, in the cities that hosted them, these tours provided local elites with opportunity to use the spaces in which a governor was welcomed and performed his duties as a means of both modeling his conduct and appropriating his prestige. The exposition is divided into five parts. The first part reviews the imperial policies that environed the dialogue between governor and city, and illustrates how Roman power both shaped and was shaped by the provincial spaces in which it was exercised. The second part explores how mid-imperial Roman governors were conditioned to regard Greek cities as settings in which their authority had special conditions and implications. The third part examines in detail the ideal of the stable, orderly, and cultivated polis that imperial Greek notables sought to convey to important visitors. The fourth part considers how a Greek city could, through the ceremonies surrounding a governor’s arrival, present its built environment as both an index of its status and a template for the legitimate exercise of Roman authority. The fifth and final part investigates the extent to which local elites influenced a visiting governor’s engagement with the sites in which he performed his duties. This research significantly nuances our understanding of how Roman power worked in the provinces. Most immediately, it allows greater appreciation of the leverage civic elites possessed in their dealings with imperial representatives. More generally, by illustrating the extent to which local notables cooperated in both the creation and the presentation of their cities, it outlines a way of understanding the formal public spaces of the imperial period as constructs and instruments of elite political goals. Most broadly, it reveals the intimacy of the connections between imperial policy, the ambitions of local notables, and the appearance of provincial cities.