The Greek Freedom and Roman Hegemony: The Transaction of Roman rule in the Greek East (201 BCE - 14CE)

Abstract

<p>This study investigates the nature, operation and development of Roman rule in the Greek East during the second and first centuries BCE through the communications between states preserved in the epigraphic record. Using Roman senate decrees, letters of magistrates and laws, and Greek civic decrees, it addresses the questions of how the Romans and their Greek subjects mutually understood Roman rule and why the Greeks, whose political traditions valued autonomy, came to accept subordination into the Romans' imperial state. An investigation into the provincial system of the Roman empire - the institutional and administrative apparatus of the imperial state - reveals its limited arrangement and reliance to a great degree on local civic autonomy. In fact, the documents of state demonstrate the broader significance of freedom in Greco-Roman relations: more than simply propaganda or political sloganeering, it was a central political discourse whose normative values and rules circumscribed relations between Rome and the pole is of the East, complementing the limited structural arrangement of the empire itself, while also directing and constraining the actions of ruler and ruled. These actions are preserved in the state documents - actual artifacts of the transaction of empire - and reveal a dynamic, interactive empire. With reciprocity as the mode of interaction, this interactive empire operated through interstate benefactions, and social relationships like friendship and patronage that allowed Greek cities to negotiate their positions with Rome and de-problematize Roman authority as consistent with the traditional autonomy of the polis. Through these communications, the Romans and Greeks reached a consensus about the nature and operation of their relationship such that a Greek city-state in the first century could rationally declare war on behalf of both Roman hegemony and Greek freedom.</p>