The Greek City in the Roman Period the western Mediterranean and the Adriatic thus inevitably remain outside
his brief. So, more regrettably, do those of the Bosporan kingdom, which
have produced a substantial crop of inscriptions;^46 those of Cyrene, whose
inscriptions have yet to be collected in a corpus, but which include impor-
tant items, for instance of course the five ‘‘Cyrene edicts’’ of Augustus; and
letters of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius on membership of the Panhellenion,
and on the question of where jurisdiction should be given by the proconsul
of the geographically divided province of Crete and Cyrene.^47
For obvious reasons the Greek cities of the Parthian Empire also lay out-
side the scope of Maurice Sartre’s work. The available evidence on Seleucia
on the Eulaeus (Susa), Spasinou Charax (Mesene), or the cities of Babylonia,
notably Seleucia on the Tigris, as they were in the first three centuries..,
has not increased greatly in recent years.^48 Nor has much greater attention
been paid to those places which in the second and third centuries were incor-
porated in the Roman Empire. The most notable is of course Dura-Europos,
the study of which, as it was both in the Parthian and the Roman periods, has
been gravely hampered by the failure to produce a corpus of its inscriptions,
in an unprecedented range of different languages.^49
Somewhat more progress has been made with the Greek cities produced
by Hellenistic colonisation in northern Mesopotamia. Long part of the Par-
thian Empire, they came under Roman rule with the conquests of Septi-
mius Severus in the s, and many then underwent a rapid transformation
into Roman colonies, producing documents in an inextricable mélange of
Greek, Syriac, and Latin.^50 Like the ‘‘Greek cities’’ of other regions, they
were carefully treated in A. H. M. Jones’ great survey; but both their charac-
ter as self-governing ‘‘Greek’’ cities and their bilingual Syriac/Greek culture
. V. V. Struve,Corpus Inscriptionum Regni Bosporani (CIRB)(); see V. F. Gajdukevi,
Des bosporanische Reich().
. For the five Cyrene Edicts, see still the discussion by F. de Visscher,Leséditsd’Auguste
découvertsàCyrène(). For the letters of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, see J. M. Reynolds,
‘‘Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and the Cyrenaican Cities,’’JRS (): . The Jewish in-
scriptions are collected by G. Lüderitz,Corpus jüdischer Zeugnisse aus der Cyrenaika(). A
corpus of the inscriptions of Cyrenaica is being prepared by J. M. Reynolds.
. See still, for some of them, N. Pigulevskaya,Lesvillesdel’étatiranienauxépoquesparthe
et sassanide(). See also S. A. Nodelman, ‘‘A Preliminary History of Characene,’’Berytus
(): .
. See F. Millar, ‘‘Dura-Europos under Parthian Rule,’’ in J. Wiesehöfer, ed.,DasParther-
reich und seine Zeugnisse(Historia-Einzelschrift , ), – ( chapter of the pres-
ent volume).
. For these places ascoloniae, see F. Millar (n. ).