The RomanColoniaeof the Near East was honoured with acoronaby thedecuriones, apparently at the moment of
the centenary of the foundation of thecolonia—saeculo c(ondita) c(olonia)—so
(see above) in the s..(AE, ). If that is so, it had been not long
before that, in the reign of Vespasian, that someone, perhaps the Emperor
himself, had erected or restoredtabernae, perhaps fronting the forum, and
had put up a statue of Liber Pater,[s]ignum Liberi Patris.^33 Given the associa-
tion, or confusion, of the two, it may well be that this statue is the same as
that of Liber Pater’s servant Marsyas, which coins of Berytus from the reign
of Elagabal represent as standing in front of an arched entrance which may
be an entrance of the forum. If so, and of course that remains a speculation,
it might have been a deliberate reminiscence of the statue of Marsyas which
stood on the edge of thecomitiumin Rome.^34 Marsyas also appears on some
of the earlier coins of thecolonia. Here as elsewhere, however, the question
of what exactly that signified remains open to debate. There is no concrete
evidence whatsoever for the common notion that Marsyas specifically de-
noted the possession ofius ltalicum. Servius (ad Aen. , ; cf. , ) believed
rather that a statue of Marsyas placed in the forum of a city had indicated
that it enjoyedlibertas. Veyne argued that Marsyas on city coinages showed
no more than a claim to association with Rome; but a clear correlation with
colonial status is indeed evident. Beyond that, nothing is certain.^35
Given the relatively restricted corpus of inscriptions from Berytus, never
collected and hardly likely to be in the foreseeable future, the attestation
there of the cults of Roman deities in private dedications (though not on the
city coins) is extraordinarily full: Venus Domina and Mercurius Dominus;^36
Venus, Mercurius, Apollo, Diana, Mars, Ceres(?), Proserpina in a single dedi-
cation, along with the Fortuna of the Colonia and the Fata;^37 and above all
the ancient and little-known deity, Mater Matuta, whose temple stood on
.CILIV , subsequently re-published; see R. Mouterde, ‘‘Monuments et inscrip-
tions de Syrie et du Liban . L’emplacement du Forum de Béryte,’’MUSJ (–): ,
whence the following identifications are derived.
. See M. Torelli,TypologyandStructureof RomanHistoricalReliefs(), ; F. Coarelli,
Il Foro romanoII:Periodo repubblicano e augusteo(), –.
. For Marsyas on coins of Berytus, seeBMC Phoenicia, –. See P. Veyne, ‘‘Le Mar-
syas ‘colonial’ et l’indépendence des cités,’’Rev. Phil. (): . Cf. F. W. Klimowsky,
‘‘The Origin and Meaning of Marsyas in the Greek Imperial Coinage,’’Isr. Num. Journ.–
(–): ; and for a reassertion of an original connection with colonial foundations,
Torelli (n. ), –. ForiusItalicum, note also M. Malavolta s.v. inDiz.Epig. IV, fasc. –
(), –.
.Syria (): , nos. – AE, –.
.Syria (): AE, .