VII. ROMAN ANATOLIA

The Hellenistic period drew to a close in the 1C BC with, as I have indicated, the steadily increasing dominance of the Romans in Anatolia. After Attalus Ill's bequest of Pergamum to them in 133 BC, Nicomedes of Bithynia bequeathed his own kingdom to Rome in 74 BC, and Pontus and Cappadocia were acquired by conquest. With Pompeius' (Pompey's) effective clearance of the corsairs from the Mediterranean trade routes in 67 BC. Cilicia too fell under Roman domination. In 64/63 BC came the reorganization of Roman administration in Anatolia and the incorporation of virtually the whole of Anatolia into the Roman imperial edifice. With this came Roman culture to Anatolia; yet it might be argued that Anatolia ‘hellenized’ Rome while Rome colonized her, for she possessed a well-developed and creative culture whose roots stretched back thousands of years. And with the advent of the Roman imperial period, from the assumption by Augustus of the Consulship, Anatolia became increasingly important to Rome. The obvious wealth of Roman Anatolia, so apparent in the extraordinary opulence of numerous cities with their luxurious buildings from the 1C BC to the end of the 2C AD, seems to have been founded upon the twin bases of craft and commerce. The old-established Anatolian manufactures revived in prosperity under the early Roman emperors, maintaining their hold on local markets and providing some of the major centers of transit trade in the Empire, notably at Ephesus and Antioch. Anatolian wool was exported in the form of varieties of textiles, ivory and precious metals—particularly bronze—as finely worked artifacts. But it was the rich marble deposits of the Anatolian quarries that were most eagerly sought by the Romans and assured Anatolia of a prominent role in the marble trade. Along with exports of marble in block form and in semi-finished 'quarry' state went numerous skilled Anatolian craftsmen to work it in ateliers and trade centers all over the Empire.

Anatolia's flourishing economy meant that during this period many of the existing municipal mints remained active and silver coins such as the cistophori issued by Pergamum and Ephesus continued to exist alongside Roman coinage as a general provincial currency—the Romans making no serious attempt to impose a uniform weight on them. Successive Roman emperors visited Anatolian cities, par ticularly to open campaigns in the east; and their visits prompted the issuing of new coins, and the setting up of new buildings and shrines, which were usually dedicated to the Emperor in question.

The monumental architecture of the major Hellenistic cities was modified by the Romans through the introduction of the colonnaded street, crossed by colonnaded side streets and doubled or even trebled by parallel streets. This, combined with the increased construction of lavish public works, gave the urban centers a new luxurious character and revealed a new taste for ostentation. At Ephesus, provision was even made for street lighting at night. The regular urban street plan, considered monotonous, went out of fashion, and the agora took on the form of a court enclosed by four porticoes, often constructed in connected series, as at Aphrodisias. Temple architec ture remained, with certain innovations and adaptations, firmly within the Hellenistic tradition, but the triumphal arch, so typical of the Roman Empire, appeared on a number of Anatolian sites, such as Ephesus, Nicaea and Diocaesarea. The theaters of Priene, Miletus, Pergamum, Aphrodisias and Ephesus, among others, were adapted according to contemporary taste, and new theatres constructed in the Roman style, for example in Aspendus (Belkiz), Hierapolis (Pamukkale) and Side (Selimiye). Architectural innovations, such as the thermae (combined bath and gymnasium) in Ephesus, Miletus and elsewhere, and the Roman basilicas in Smyrna and Aspendus, made their appearance. Other, quite new skills were adopted in their entirety from their Italian source—roads and bridges, aqueducts, cisterns and other hydraulic works.

An interesting feature of architectural technique in Roman Anat olia was the type of building material used. In addition to the traditional dressed stone of Anatolian monumental architecture, the Roman period introduced the extensive use of kiln-fired brick— clearly evident in a number of buildings, notably at Ephesus and Pergamum—or even bands of brickwork alternating with wider bands of mortared rubble—as in the city walls of Nicaea—instead of the usual Roman concrete of mortared rubble faced with brick.

Sculpture, especially in marble, continued to thrive as a medium of artistic expression, tending to derive inspiration from the traditional Hellenistic schools of, chiefly, Pergamum and Rhodes. Workshops in centers such as Ephesus and Aphrodisias flourished as marble votive stelae and funerary reliefs and sarcophagi were in almost as much demand as the prized sculptures and friezes that went to adorn the temples and other public buildings of the Empire as well as the homes and gardens of wealthy private citizens. Paintings, frescoes and mosaic-work continued to develop to meet a growing market, and were exported to Rome and other imperial cities where they were often copied; relatively few original examples have survived in their own settings.

The Roman Empire went through a period of crisis in the 3C, a crisis from which the western part of the Empire was to suffer disastrously. Yet the eastern part, centering on Anatolia, while experi encing severe political upheavals and economic collapse did not suffer as massive and irreversible a decline in population or decay of city life and economy as the western, despite the drying-up of funds for lavish public works and the imposition of increasingly heavy taxes and military duties on a large proportion of the population.

Unlike the western part, the eastern Roman Empire was able to revive, indeed continued to exist for centuries to come. The cumula tive effect of the old Hellenistic civilization as it spread outward from its epicenter in the Aegean basin was not merely spatial but tem poral. The cultural continuum of the Hellenistic world was to exert an undeniable influence on those who held the reins of power in Anatolia long after the fall of Rome. For it was the integration of Hellenistic culture and the new Christian religion within the Roman imperial framework that gave rise to that historical phenomenon which we know as the Byzantine Empire.