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History

In the late Hellenistic age, corresponding to the last century of the Roman republic, Asia Minor was visible to the Roman eye mainly as a trouble spot, and that is how we encounter it in the narrative history of Appian (The Mithridatic Wars) and in Plutarch’s biographies of Roman commanders and their adversaries. The early Empire, on the other hand, was a period of comparative tranquility in western Asia Minor, which makes only intermittent appearances in the works of Roman historians.

Tacitus or Suetonius tend to focus on events taking place in Italy itself or at the borders of the empire; more detail is sometimes provided by the third-century historian Dion Cassius, who was of Nikaian descent. For the early third century, he is supplemented by Herodian and the notoriously unreliable Historia Augusta. Still, given the emperors-and-battles approach that characterizes most Roman historians, it is not much that we learn about everyday life in distant provinces. It is only with the establishment of a permanent imperial residence at Nikomedia and the transfer of the capital from Rome to Constantinople that Bithynia finds itself within the range of imperial historians such as Lactantius and Ammianus Marcellinus.

Letters

For more mundane details, we must turn from the sphere of formal historiography to the slightly less formal sphere of letter-writing. In the Roman world, this was a literary genre in its own right. We possess the collected letters of numerous persons with a direct interest in Asia Minor: M. Tullius Cicero, who served as governor of Cilicia and whose brother, Q. Cicero, was governor of Asia; M. Iunius Brutus, who likewise served as governor of Cilicia;⁴ and of course the younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia et Pontus. From the fourth century, we have the letters of Basil the Great, bishop of Kaisareia, and his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa; Gregory of Nazianzos; the pagan sophist Libanios;⁵ the emperor Julian, and others. Imperial rescripts (see below under Legal texts) form a special subcategory that includes some of Trajan’s letters to Pliny.

It is worth keeping in mind, however, that ancient letters are, for better or for worse, works of literature and that unlike modern private correspondence, they were composed for a wider audience. It was not uncommon for the recipient of a letter to read it aloud or circulate it among his acquaintances, who might even make copies or excerpts for their own use. For instance, Gregory of Nyssa relates how he has received a letter from Libanios:

as I was going to the metropolis of the Cappadocians [Kaisareia], I met an acquaintance, who handed me this present, your letter, as a New Year’s gift. And I, overjoyed at the occurrence, threw open my treasure to all who were present; and all shared in it, each getting the whole of it, without any rivalry, and I was none the worse off. For the letter by passing through the hands of all, like a ticket for a feast, is the private wealth of each, some by steady continuous reading engraving the words upon their memory, and others taking a copy of them upon tablets.⁶

Realizing that his letter would come under the close scrutiny of many eyes and ears, the sender would take pains over its composition and perhaps emulate other letter-writers that were considered stylistic models. If he retained duplicates of his correspondence, the writer could later publish the letters, giving himself a second chance to go over their style and content, perhaps even adapting them to changed political circumstances. On the other hand, the awareness that his original letter might have been copied and retained by unknown third parties presumably set a limit on the scope for later revision. If the content of the original letter was politically controversial or cast an unfavourable light on the past activities of its writer, it would be easier and safer to omit it altogether.

In short, when writing a letter, the author is projecting a certain image of himself to the recipient and to the recipient’s circle of friends and clients; when editing a collection of his letters for publication, the writer is drawing a selfportrait for posterity. From time to time, the modern reader catches revealing glimpses of the writer’s personality – Pliny’s indecision, the brash arrogance of Basil, Libanios’ hypochondriac worries – but it is naïve to assume that the edited correspondence lays bare the entire character of its author.

From a Bithynian viewpoint, the most important of the letter collections at our disposal is the tenth book of Pliny’s Letters. The majority of these were composed in Bithynia et Pontus and deal with provincial concerns; they are complemented by the emperor’s replies to Pliny’s missives. For a detailed discussion of the Letters the reader is referred to the monumental commentary of Sherwin-White (1966) and the recent précis of the main problems by Woolf (2006), but it will be useful to summarize some key questions. The date at which the letters were collected for publication is nowhere indicated, but if the first nine books were collected and edited by Pliny himself, and if he died in office in Bithynia, as is often assumed, then the tenth book must have been published posthumously by another. This would explain why book ten differs from the other nine in several significant respects. The first nine books contain letters from Pliny but not those he received. In the published collection, many of Pliny’s outgoing letters open with a short summary of the incoming letter to which he is replying. This is a conventional way of opening a letter also found in other writers⁷ but Pliny uses it often – 30 % of the letters in the first nine books are prefaced in with a summary of the correspondent’s previous message.⁸ This obviously makes it easier for Pliny’s reader to follow the discussion between Pliny and his correspondents. The correspondents themselves would rarely need such prompting, which is sometimes taken to extremes. For instance, in Ep. 4.10, Pliny not only summarizes the missive he has received from Statius Sabinus but even quotes a phrase from Sabinus’ letter which Sabinus, in his turn, had quoted from a legal document.⁹

One possible explanation is that, intending to publish his correspondence at some future date, Pliny had collected the incoming letters of his friends and copies of his own outgoing letters. He only intended to include the latter in his publication, but if the reader were to appreciate their content, some clues to their context were needed. While reworking a letter for the public, then, Pliny sometimes inserted a summary of the incoming letters, to provide the reader with the minimum of background information required to understand Pliny’s replies. In the first half of the collection this is done only sparingly, but in books six, seven and nine, nearly half the letters are provided with such opening summaries, and the trend carries on into the first fifteen letters of book ten.

The composition of book ten differs from the other books not only in including letters to Pliny but also in omitting letters from Pliny to family and friends; all letters in the tenth book are directed to, or received from, the emperor Trajan. The first fifteen letters (1-14) form a separate group antedating the appointment of Pliny to Bithynia, some by as much as ten years; some even antedate the early volumes of private letters.¹⁰ This small group includes three letters from Trajan to Pliny (10.3b; 10.7; 10.9) and three letters by Pliny opening with a summary of three other letters (not included in the published collection) received from Trajan.

The remainder of book ten has an altogether different character. First, the ingoing and outgoing letters are more evenly balanced (though Pliny’s letters still outnumber those of Trajan by two to one). Secondly, Pliny’s letters are much shorter than in the preceding part of the collection, less “literary” in character and – except for one¹¹ – without the opening formula summarizing the content of the incoming letter.

Clearly, from the outset of his publication project, Pliny intended to reserve his correspondence with Trajan for a separate volume, which would in some cases include the emperor’s reply, while in others the main outlines of the imperial letter would be incorporated into the edited version of Pliny’s reply. The scanty material that he collected during the first decade of Trajan’s reign was edited for publication, but the much larger volume of imperial correspondence accumulated during Pliny’s term as governor of Bithynia et Pontus was never dealt with in the same manner. Presumably he fell ill and died while still in office, and one of his friends or collaborators combined the provincial correspondence with the edited imperial letters to form a separate volume, a sequel to the nine that had already been published. On this assumption, the letters from 10.15 onwards have come down to us more or less as their copies were found at the time of Pliny’s death.

Central to any interpretation of Pliny’s letters as historical sources is the nature of the relationship between the emperor and his legate. A first reading generates an impression of familiarity between the two correspondents, perhaps even a personal interest in Pliny on the emperor’s part. But these are precisely the images that the respective letter-writers wished to project: the governor as an intimate of the monarch, the emperor as a ruler concerned for the welfare of his subjects and subordinates. That these roles conform to modern positive archetypes render them all the more convincing to our eyes. A closer reading of the individual letters and a comparison with the other nine books of Pliny, and with other ancient letter collections (the letters of Cicero, which served later writers as a model, and Fronto’s letters to the Antonine emperors) reveals a rather more asymmetrical relation between the correspondents.

First, it is noteworthy that in the entire collection of Pliny’s letters, we find no letters to Trajan that antedate the latter’s accession as emperor. Since his personal relationship with Trajan is at the centre of Pliny’s tenth book, we may take it that if any epistolary evidence of a personal contact prior to Trajan’s elevation existed, it would have been included or at least referred to in the published collection.¹² It is not; thus the conclusion imposes itself that Pliny had no prior personal relationship with the emperor. From start to finish, their relation was one of subject and ruler, reflected in Pliny’s consistent use of domine, “lord”, when addressing Trajan. Domine is the form used by a social inferior when addressing his superior, or of a junior addressing a senior.¹³ When referring to Trajan in the third person (in letters to his other correspondents) Pliny likewise uses formal expressions like princeps, Caesar or imperator noster.¹⁴

Writing to Trajan, Pliny takes care to present his ideas as petitions, proposals, suggestions, or queries. This feature and the near absence of personal content is in striking contrast to the style of the letters in books one to nine, where a personal touch is often present. Equally instructive is a comparison with the letters of Fronto: clearly, Fronto enjoyed a closer, less formal relationship with the ruling dynasty than Pliny ever did.¹⁵

Speeches

Our richest source for the political life of the Bithynian cities is the collection of Orations preserved under the name of Dion Chrysostomos. Dion, a scholar, sophist and philosopher, returned to his native Prusa after an abortive career in Rome and years of exile. He immersed himself in municipal politics and travelled widely across Bithynia and Asia Minor. Dion’s contemporaries valued his rhetorical style highly, and many of his speeches were preserved for posterity by his admirers. They did not, however, succeed in preserving the entire oeuvre of their master. The biography of Dion by Synesios and the tenth-century Suda list works by Dion that were lost at an early stage, since they do not appear in the Bibliothêke of Photios.¹⁶ Some of the lost pieces may have been philosophical exercises of a frivolous or sophistic character (e.g., “Encomium of a parrot”) but Dion also wrote a larger work, Getika, presumably based on his own travels and observations among the Getae on the northwestern Black Sea coast.

The Dionian corpus that has been handed down to us comprises eighty pieces, in form and style ranging from set speeches to dialogue, myth, and novel, but conventionally all known as “orations”. Their order is not chronological, but loosely thematical: the collection opens with the four so-called “kingship speeches” to the emperor Trajan, and the “municipal” orations are grouped between Or. 38 and Or. 51.¹⁷ The corpus includes two speeches (37 and 64) that are not by Dion himself, possibly by his pupil Favorinus.

One would obviously like to know how the speeches came to be preserved. Were Dion’s municipal orations extempore performances taken down in shorthand by city clerks, or noted down by his admiring pupils sitting among the audience? Though a number of commentators, most recently Cécile Bost-Pouderon (2006), assume that Dion’s orations were taken down in shorthand, the theory is not supported by the evidence of the texts themselves, where we find no traces of different “hands” or misheard phrases that might point to a shorthand original, nor of interruptions by the audience.¹⁸ Even a skilled shorthand clerk would have found it difficult to render Dion’s Atticisms and quotations from the classics correctly. A second problem is the assumption that a shorthand writer would always be available. While shorthand may have been used for the senatorial Acta at an early date, there is no good evidence for shorthand records of municipal council proceeedings in the late early or early second century AD¹⁹ and we have no reason to believe that small-town council secretaries such as T. Flavius Silôn, grammateus of Prusa in Dion’s time,²⁰ had a team of trained tachygraphers at his disposal.

It appears more likely that the texts as they appear in the corpus are based on Dion’s speaking notes. This would explain why some “orations” are mere fragments or introductions to longer speeches, the remainder of which has not been preserved. In these cases, Dion apparently did not require a full manuscript for his speech. He could write out the opening paragraphs and rely on his sophistic training and rhetorical experience to improvise the remainder of the oration and a conclusion tailored to the reactions of his audience. Sometimes, sections of previous orations would be recycled for new occasions, the result being word-for-word correspondence between different speeches;²¹ if the speeches had been held extempore or from memory, we would expect some devations in their wording.

In the corpus, each text has a short descriptive rubric, usually indicating either the subject or the audience of the speech in question (e.g., Or. 4: Peri basileias; Or. 35: en Kelainais tês Phrygias), or both (Or. 36: Borysthenitikos … en tê patridi). Again, we would like to know when the rubrics were inserted and by whom.²² Arnim pointed out that the rubrics of some Bithynian speeches “den thatsächlichen Inhalte der Stücke nicht entsprechen” suggesting that they are the work of a not very efficient “Sammler und Ordner”.²³ This argument, however, cuts both ways: even a moderately competent editor could have extrapolated the information required for a short rubric from the content of the oration itself, or replaced a misleading rubric with a better one. Since the imperfect rubrics were retained, they presumably possessed an authority equal to that of the text itself, perhaps being derived from marginal notes by Dion himself or added by a source considered to be reliable, such as Favorinus. Especially important for our purposes are the statements that some Prusan orations were held en ekklêsia or en boulê (e.g., Or. 48; 49). Since this information could not be extracted from the text itself, we must assume that it came from a note in the actual manuscript or from a source close to the author.

A possible reconstruction of Dion’s modus operandi and the preservation of his municipal speeches is that for most occasions, Dion did not write his speech beforehand. In the council, deliberations had the nature of a discussion with fairly brief interventions by each councillor. As Dion was unable to foresee which course the day’s discussion would take,²⁴ it would be difficult to prepare a text in advance; instead, he would extemporize, perhaps supplementing with scraps of previous orations where appropriate. Taking the evidence of the rubrics at face value, only two of the preserved orations were held en boulê, and one of these consists almost entirely of generalities that have clearly been recycled from an earlier speech by way of an introduction to the point at issue.²⁵

For the longer speeches in the Prusan ekklêsia and in other Bithynian cities, Dion apparently sometimes wrote up his speech beforehand – not necessarily from scratch, but incorporating material from previous occasions; and not necessarily the whole speech, but sometimes only the opening, leaving the rest to be improvised on location or read from another document, such as the letter from the emperor attached to Or. 44 (but now lost).

For the modern reader, Dion’s municipal speeches provide a fascinating insight into small-town conflicts, ambitions and trivialities. It needs to be borne in mind, however, that despite their “documentary” appearance, the orations of Dion are literary works, composed or re-composed with a specific public in mind and intended to convey a very specific image of their author.

Legal texts

When Bithynia was incorporated as a province in the late Republican period, Roman provincial administration was still based on the personal authority of proconsular or propraetorian governors, tempered by the lex Calpurnia of the mid-second century BC which had given provincials the right to file a suit de repetundis at the end of a governor’s term of office.

The sphere of action of the governor was further limited by a provincial code – in the case of Bithynia et Pontus, the lex Pompeia – by rules of procedure, by custom and local law and by the governor’s edict (below, p. 63-64), creating a complex of legal sources that varied from province to province.

It is useful to distinguish between three main categories of texts that complement the laws themselves: edicts, which are issued on the initiative of the emperor or a magistrate; sententiae or opinions, i.e. jurists’ exposition of existing law; and rescripts, which are the emperor’s response to a specific case or problem which is laid before him.

In the imperial period, a gradual process of legal harmonization and standardisation across the Empire can be observed. Important mileposts are the Constitutio Antoniniana extending Roman citizenship to all free provincials and Diokletian’s administrative reorganization in the late third century. One aspect of this process is a proliferation of imperial rulings that apply across the empire, creating a common and (at least in theory) consistent legal basis for its administration. These rulings and other sources of law were collected in the Corpus Juris Civilis, which gives us a detailed picture of late Roman law; it also preserves important relics of older law codes and commentaries on non-Roman law, including the peregrine law of Bithynia.

Being normative texts, statutes, edicts and rescripts need to be handled with some care when used as historical sources. They do not describe the world as it was, but at best, as the emperor intended it to be. Furthermore, like a letter-writer, the legislator was making a statement that would be read and repeated many times, and like a letter-writer, he was concerned to convey a desirable impression of himself (or of the emperor, if he were a jurist in the imperial chancery). In some cases, the primary motive behind a piece of legislation may have been to project a positive image of the ruling power.