The Hellenistic World and Rome
emphasise its vast progressive diffusion since then, with the effect that the
Greek-speaking city now provided the primary form of identity for perhaps
million people; the growth in size, architectural adornment, and urban
facilities, such as aqueducts, characteristic of very many of them; the wider
unity symbolised by the cycle of athletic and ‘‘musical’’ festivals; and their
involvement, in many different ways, practical and symbolic, in the Roman
Empire. It is no accident that the ‘‘Greek city’’ whose ruins we can still see
was the ‘‘Graeco-Roman city’’ of the imperial period. But Christianity was
to triumph all the same.
The preaching of Christianity was not of course the only crisis which
steadily transformed the Greek city in the later imperial period. Invasions
touched much of the Balkans, Macedonia, Greece, Asia Minor, and Syria;
the depreciation of the imperial coinageseems(see above) to have been the
factor which brought about the ending of city coinage; the sub-division of
provinces tended to bring the governors closer to the individual city, and it
is in any case noticeable that building in the cities of the later Empire de-
pended more on the initiative of governors than it did on local benefactors.
Equally, the tradition of euergetism seems to have been profoundly damaged
by a change which the emperors themselves introduced, as a way of reward-
ing those who served under them. That is to say that from around..,
various civilian and military ranks in the imperial service started to be con-
ceived of as conferring a permanent named status on their holders; and these
statuses in their turn came to confer a life-long immunity from magistra-
cies (archai), liturgies (leitourgiai), and membership of the council (boulē)ina
man’s city. The ‘‘flight of the councillors’’ into imperial office, so character-
istic of the fourth century, was in fact an artificial creation by the emperors
themselves, whose consequences they tried in vain to limit.^87
After the conversion of Constantine and his subsequent defeat of Lici-
nius, the new freedom and imperial backing given to Christian commu-
nities could be followed, at first slowly and erratically, by Christian at-
tacks on temples, leading sometimes to their destruction and replacement by
churches.^88 None of this meant of course that what we call ‘‘the Greek city’’
simply vanished. On the contrary, work at, for instance, Athens, at Aphro-
disias in Caria, and at Scythopolis in Syria Palaestina has demonstrated how
. These points briefly summarise the conclusions of F. Millar, ‘‘Empire and City, Au-
gustus to Julian: Obligations, Excuses and Status,’’JRS (): ( chapter of F. Millar,
Rome, the Greek World, and the EastII:Government, Society, and Culture in the Roman Empire).
. See G. Fowden, ‘‘Bishops and Temples in the Eastern Roman Empire,..–,’’
JThSt (): .