The RomanColoniaeof the Near East:
A Study of Cultural Relations
*Introduction
‘‘The history of Roman colonisation is the history of the Roman state’’: so
Ernst Kornemann, in his standard article on Romancoloniae.^1 The follow-
ing survey of thecoloniaewhich the emperors created between the late first
century..and the middle of the third century..in the Fertile Cres-
cent—or, on a different definition, in those provinces of the Roman Empire
where both Greek and various Semitic languages were spoken—cannot of
course contribute directly to an understanding of the earlier phases of that
history. But it does very vividly reflect the rapid progression in the nature
of the ‘‘colonising’’ process itself, from the one unquestionable militarycolo-
niaof the Augustan period, Berytus, with its wide territory extending over
the Mount Lebanon chain into the Bekaa valley, to the threecoloniaeof the
first and second centuries.., all in or on the borders of Judaea, to a wholly
new phase in the Severan period and the following decades, when the title
coloniawas granted to towns all over the region, including the new province
of Mesopotamia, and thus came into use almost as far east as the Tigris.
*First published in H. Solin and M. Kajava, eds.,Roman Eastern Policy and Other Studies in
Roman History(Helsinki, ), –.
This paper, aVorarbeitforThe Roman Near East (..–..)(), owed an im-
mense amount to comments, corrections, and additions from various friends and col-
leagues, Sebastian Brock, Hazel Dodge, Louis H. Feldman, Martin Goodman, Christopher
Howgego, Beniamin Isaac, Nikos Kokkinos, Barbara Levick, Aharon Oppenheimer, Jean-
Paul Rey-Coquais, and Alla Stein. I was also very grateful to Heikki Solin and his colleagues
in Helsinki for the colloquium in autumn which provided the impulse for the paper,
and for contributions on that very enjoyable occasion, and to Mika Kajava for the care taken
in the editing of this complex text.
. F. Kornemann,REIV (), s.v. ‘‘coloniae,’’ cols. –, in col. ; ‘‘Die Geschichte
der römischen Kolonisation ist die Geschichte des römischen Staates.’’