Rome and the East
threeprōteuontes; if this is not a simple error, it could mean the twoduumviri
(?) and theecdicus,ordefensor.
Neither Jerome nor Mark the Deacon explicitly refers to the city as a
colonia; if their evidence suggests that the city still had a colonial constitu-
tion, it is only implicitly. So far as is known, the city had never minted any
colonial coins; and if anycoloniaewere still benefitting from remission of di-
rect taxation, Mark’s narrative categorically implies () that Gaza was not
among them.^216
Conclusion
It is not entirely unsuitable that this survey of thecoloniaeof the Roman Near
East should end on so uncertain a note. From one point of view the dis-
cussion might serve to emphasise how fragile, limited, and disparate is the
evidence for the physical nature, social composition, self-government, and
collective images of cities in this region under Roman rule. From another,
however, it might serve to suggest how considerable the changes brought
about by Roman rule were. Even if we ignore fundamental issues of so-
cial history such as the extension of cultivation, the growth of substantial
villages in many regions, and the efflorescence of places calling themselves
towns, Roman rule profoundly affected the personal and collective identities
by which people lived. Quite outside the list of places which becamecoloniae,
Latin place-names, from ‘‘Julias,’’ ‘‘Livias,’’ and ‘‘Tiberias’’ onwards, were scat-
tered liberally across the map of the Near East, while Latin personal names,
andthentheRomantria nomina, found their way into common use, not only
in Greek but in Semitic languages.
From the strictly linguistic point of view it is also revealing that the
Near East was a zone in which Latin, Greek, and Semitic languages oper-
ated in a complex set of interrelationships. Socoloniaandcolonuscould be-
comeκολωνία,orκολωνεία,andκόλων, and these in their turn QLNY’, or
QLWNY’, and QWLWN. In the form of a loan-wordcoloniaand its cog-
nates found their way into several different Semitic languages: Hebrew, Jew-
ish Aramaic, Palmyrene, and Syriac. Since Nabatean remained in use until
the fourth century, it is not impossible that the word might one day turn up
here too.
The main wave of grants of colonial status, beginning under Septimius
Severus, immediately preceded, or accompanied, Caracalla’s grant of Roman
. The historical status of the entire narrative is, however, a matter of controversy,
not least in this section. See also Glucker (n. ), , n. .