The Hellenistic World and Rome
firstly, that in all cities the ruling circle of office-holders and members of the
council showed a steadily increasing proportion of Latin names, normally in
the standard triple Roman form ofpraenomen,nomen,andcognomen(the latter
very frequently still a Greek name); and with that, in principle at least, the
application to their family structures and property relations of Roman pri-
vate law (for instance, the father’s legal authority over his extended family
known as thepatria potestas). But neither the rules of the pre-existing pri-
vate law of the Greek cities nor the real extent of the currency of Roman
private law can be easily understood.^71 The spread of the Roman citizenship
to individuals, and hence families, culminating in theConstitutio Antoniniana
(the universal grant of citizenship made by Caracalla in ), was however
yet another respect in which the ‘‘Greek’’ city of the imperial period was
in reality ‘‘Graeco-Roman.’’ A secondary effect was that those persons who
served as equestrians or senators ‘‘belonged’’ not only to their native cities,
but also to a much wider world, whose varied regions might be represented
before their fellow citizens in the record of the places where they had served,
incorporated in inscriptions put up in their honour.
The processes touched on above might have led to a wholesale loss, or
even suppression, of the historical identities of Greek cities, and their ab-
sorption into an undifferentiated Graeco-Roman culture and outlook; or on
the contrary, to a clear ideological ‘‘resistance,’’ and to a reassertion of historic
identity; to actual armed resistance on the part of cities or regions; or, per-
haps, to a claim to Greek dominance within that Graeco-Roman world on
which the Empire had imposed so high a degree of unity. As regards the last
possibility, we have seen above that it was indeed the case that Greek cities
enjoyed privileges, like coinage, or the fact that emperors and governors paid
them the compliment of addressing them systematically in Greek, which did
indeed mark them out from the urban communities of the West. But their
status was thereby explicitly recognised, and no Greek cities, or groups of
cities, offered any parallel to the major Jewish revolts of..– and –
. It was however not merely a strategic shift towards the eastern frontier
which meant that Constantine’s new capital would be situated in the Greek
world, on the route between the Danube and Euphrates, and would have a
ciera, ed.,Epigrafia e ordine senatorioII (), –. See above all, however, for the local
activity of senators, W. Eck, ‘‘Die Präsenz senatorischer Familien in der Städten des Im-
perium Romanum bis zum späten . Jahrhundert,’’ in W. Eck, H. Galsterer, and H. Wolff,
eds.,Studien zur antiken Sozialgeschichte: Festschrift F.Vittinghoff(), .
. For a sketch of the problem, see H. Galsterer, ‘‘Roman Law in the Provinces: Some
Problems of Transmission,’’ in M. Crawford, ed.,L’impero romano e le strutture economiche e
sociali delle province(), .