Rome and the East
Empire asIuppiterOptimusMaximusHeliopolitanus.^69 Sometimes, though very
rarely indeed, the two other most characteristic deities of Romanised Heli-
opolis, Venus and Mercurius, were associated with him.^70 But far more often
he appears alone. That wider diffusion raises other questions which cannot
be discussed here. In this context it is sufficient to emphasise the establish-
ment in Berytus and its extensive territory of a Latin-speaking population
of Roman veterans, who worshipped Roman deities, even including a little-
known archaic goddess, Mater Matuta, under their Latin names. It was this
same context which enabled Valerius Probus to read in Berytus older Latin
works which had gone out of fashion in Rome (text to n. above), and
which was to give rise to a long-surviving Roman cultural framework, of
which the law schools of Berytus were to be an important aspect. It is essen-
tial to stress that all our evidence up to the fourth century does indeed present
the teaching and learning of Roman law as an aspect of the ‘‘rather more Ro-
man’’ city that Berytus was, and that we should speak of ‘‘law schools’’ rather
than of ‘‘the law school.’’ The second of these points is clearly and succinctly
expressed in theExpositio totius mundi et gentiumof the middle of the fourth
century:Berytus civitas valde deliciosa et auditoria legum habens, per quam omnia
iudicia Romanorum〈stare videntur〉.^71
In the light of this it must be all the more of a puzzle that the most fa-
mous of all Roman jurists, Ulpian, was to come not from Berytus but from
the Phoenician-Greek city of Tyre, which had become a nominalcoloniaonly
in his own life-time. It is time to turn to the latercoloniaeof the Roman Near
East, beginning with the distinctive group of three on the borders of, or at
the heart of, the Holy Land.
Ptolemais, Caesarea, Aelia Capitolina
These threecoloniae, recently discussed very well by Benjamin Isaac,^72 form a
clearly marked-out group, contrasting both with Berytus, on the one hand,
and with the much larger group of nominalcoloniaeof the Severan period,
and the following decades, on the other. It seems that all three foundations
. For the cult beyond its native areas, whose ramifications cannot be followed here,
see Hajjar (n. ), I, –, –.
. Hajjar (n. ), I, , no. (Athens); , no. (Zellhausen, Germania Superior),
a dedication by apraefectus cohortisfrom Berytus (the only examples).
.Expositio totius mundi et gentium (Sources Chrétiennes, ed. J. Rougé [], ).
. B. Isaac, ‘‘Roman Colonies in Judaea: The Foundation of Aelia Capitolina,’’Talanta
– (–): (reprinted with revisions in B. Isaac,The Near East under Roman Rule,
Selected Papers[]).