106 CHAPTER THREEgovernors and their staff) who ruled by complicated, largely ad hoc mixtures
of Roman, Greco-oriental, and local law.^3
Most of the little principalities the Romans annexed had no special ethnic
self-consciousness that we are aware of, and their former rulers had usually
come from elsewhere. No one apparently had ever identified himself as a
“Chalcidian” or an “Agrippan” or a “Minor Armenian.”^4 These principalities
are probably best compared to the grand estates of early modern Ukraine or
Ireland, before the rise of nationalism, ruled by foreign (Polish or English)
lords. The lords simultaneously protected and exploited the peasants, with the
help of intermediation by their relatives, wealthy natives, and outside adminis-
trators. Some autonomy may have been sometimes granted to such local insti-
tutions as churches, but pressure on them and their priests was constant and
relations often tense or worse.
When the Romans annexed the ancient counterparts of such places, little
in them, one might have thought, initially changed: the former rulers, Judaeo-
Idumaean descendants of Herod, and various Ituraean, Nabataean, and sub-
Seleucid grandees, disappeared or were absorbed into the Roman senatorial
aristocracy, and the mediating class was altered by the introduction of Roman
officials. But rich natives retained their importance, and the cities in these
areas, as well as the temples and their priests, continued to enjoy a nervous
and limited freedom (surely much more than the Catholic churches of Ire-
land and the Orthodox ones of the Ukraine).^5 Only rarely can we trace the
cultural effects of direct Roman rule, in part for lack of evidence and in part
because they were usually subtle, mostly by-products of the more immediate
administrative, social, and economic changes. The local rulers had in any
case been mediators of Hellenistic culture and had administered and judged
in accordance wit hstandard types of Greco-Oriental convention and law in-
herited from their Seleucid predecessors. In these respects, the Romans
scarcely differed.
(^3) For a recent discussion, see H. Galsterer, “Roman Law in the Provinces: Some Problems in
Transmission,” in M. Crawford, ed.,L’Impero romano e le strutture economiche e sociali delle
province(Como: New Press 1986), pp. 13–27. Galsterer offers a plausible compromise between
those who suppose that Roman annexation involved a thorough going change in legal behavior
(e.g., H. J. Wolff, “Ro ̈misches Provinzialrecht in der Provinz Arabia,” inANRWII.13 (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 1978), pp. 788–804; and “Le droit provincial dans la province romaine d’Arabie,”RIDA
23 (1976): 271–90), and the pure laissez-faireists, such as Millar.
(^4) See, e.g., the discussion of Emesa in F. Millar,The Roman Near East(Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993), pp. 300–309. The distinction between the Jews (and perhaps the Phoeni-
cians) and other inhabitants of the Roman Near East in this respect is implicit throughout Millar’s
book, and though he probably overstated his case, there seems to me to be a hard core of truth
to it.
(^5) See R. Gordon, “Religion in the Roman Empire: The Civic Compromise and its Limits,”
inPagan Priests: Religion and Power in the Ancient WorldM. Beard and J. North, eds. (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 240–41.