The Greek City in the Roman Period The second feature which is (almost) all-pervasive is the name and image
of the reigning emperor. Except where local eras were used, it is of course
precisely the presence of this name and image which allows us to arrange
the coins of any one community in a temporal sequence. The naming and
portrayal of the emperor is not universal: there is a large category of city
coins from all areas of the Greek East in which other images (most often
of gods) and legends are substituted for the portrait and name of the em-
peror. Such coins are conventionally labelled ‘‘pseudo-autonomous,’’ on the
presupposition that they embody some special privilege, or special degree of
freedom from Roman control: but none such can in fact be identified. None
the less, it is surely significant that Tyre is both the only ‘‘Greek city’’ in the
Empire which continued to use some non-Greek (Phoenician) letters on its
coins right up to the moment of its transformation in the s into a Roman
colony; and that it was one of only three cities (the others being Chios and
Athens) which never (up to the same point) named or portrayed the reigning
emperor on its coins.^60
The presence of the name and the image of the emperor has to be taken as
one of the dominating features of the collective life of the Greek city in the
imperial period. This applies, as noted above, very widely to the names of
the cities themselves, and not merely to those transformed into Roman colo-
nies; to the personal names of individual citizens, in which the family names
(nomina) of successive ruling houses—‘‘Iulius,’’ ‘‘Claudius,’’ ‘‘Flavius,’’ ‘‘Ulpius,’’
‘‘Aelius,’’ ‘‘Aurelius,’’ ‘‘Septimius’’—were ever more prominent, transliterated
into their Greek forms; to the cults and temples of the emperors, reigning
or deceased, and individual or collective (‘‘theSebastoi’’); to the identities of
public buildings, like the ‘‘Hadrianic Baths’’ revealed at Antioch in Syria by
a new document of..;^61 to the names of months in city calendars; to
the names of tribes or other sub-units of the communities; to the names of
festivals; to the actual clothing ofagōnothētai(president of games) orarchiereis
(high priests; see below); to the presence of honorific statues of emperors
and members of their families; and to the prominence of inscribed letters
from emperors, written in Greek, and of other inscriptions recording privi-
leges granted to individuals by emperors. It is not too much to say that the
public self-expression of the ‘‘Greek city’’ in the Empire embodied at every
level an explicit recognition of the distant presence of the emperor. When
. See A. Johnston, ‘‘The So-Called ‘Pseudo-Autonomous’ Greek Imperials,’’Am.Num.
Soc., Mus. Notes (): . There is no complete study of the coinage of Tyre; for the
essentials, seeBMC Phoeniciacxxiii–cxxiv, and –; for these three cases, seeRPCI, .
. See Feissel and Gascou (n. ) I (), no. .