The Greek City in the Roman Period
*This paper will concentrate on the imperial period, the first three cen-
turies.., when ‘‘the Greek city’’ is more visible to us than at any other time.
For it is from this period that the vast majority of the surviving remains of
Greek cities date; it was in these centuries, except for the last few decades,
that the largest number of Greek cities struck coins; and, above all, it was in
this period that the Greek cities provided the fullest expression of their own
communal identity, through the medium of inscriptions. Although there
are cities, such as Athens, Ephesus, Miletus, and others in Caria and Lycia,
which provide substantial numbers of Hellenistic inscriptions, in almost all
cases there is a sharp decrease in the extremely troubled period of the first
century.., the time of the Mithridatic wars and the Roman civil wars,
largely fought on Greek soil. The victory of ‘‘Imperator Caesar Divi filius’’
(that is, ‘‘Imperator Caesar son of the deified [ Julius]’’), soon to add the name
‘‘Augustus,’’ both allowed and stimulated the production of public inscrip-
tions on an unprecedented scale. In this sense the Augustan regime marks
an epoch in the history of Greek inscriptions which is almost comparable to
that which it certainly signals, as Géza Alföldy has shown, in the history of
Latin epigraphy.^1 In the inscriptions, as in the coins and in the physical and
monumental structure of the Greek cities, the person, that is, the name and
the image of the emperor, was to play an essential role.^2 How Greek cities ex-
*First published in M. H. Hansen, ed.,The Ancient Greek City-State(Copenhagen, ),
–. This paper owes a great deal to the comments of the participants in the colloquium,
above all those of Ph. Gautier.
. G. Alföldy, ‘‘Augustus und die Inschriften: Tradition und Innovation,’’Gymnasium
(): .
. For a brief sketch of some aspects of this transformation, see F. Millar, ‘‘State and