The RomanColoniaeof the Near East citizenship for all the inhabitants of the Empire. The status thus automati-
cally lost one aspect of its significance, to be absorbed into the wider range
of Romanising influences in the Greek East, a mutual interaction which was
to give birth to the ‘‘Roman’’ Empire ruled from Constantinople. Whether
taxation privileges were maintained is obscure, as is the real significance and
real applicability ofius Italicum, as a right conferring on the possession of
land in the provinces the status of full ownership in Roman law. Any dis-
cussion of this right ought at least to start from the fact that one of the two
fullest accounts of its distribution (both very brief ) comes from Domitius
Ulpianus, a native of a pseudo-colonia, Tyre, of the Severan period, and the
other from his contemporary Paulus. That in itself is a puzzle, for if there
is one item of social and cultural history which stands out from this survey
of thecoloniae, it is that it was primarily the earliest of them, Berytus, with
Heliopolis as part of its territory, later turned into an independentcolonia,
which created a real and enduring island ofRomanitasand of the use of Latin
in the Near East. (But recently published inscriptions show that the same
was true of Caesarea, at any rate until the end of the third century.) It was
a function of that ‘‘Roman’’ character that Berytus gave birth to law schools
(not a law school) which continued to attract students until the Byzantine
period. It was the city as a whole which fostered the study of Roman law.
Thus Eunapius (VS) describes Anatolius, a native of the place who rose
to the praetorian prefecture in the s, as ‘‘rising to the summit of what is
called legal learning, as having as his native city Berytus, which is regarded
as the mother of such studies.’’
Even Berytus, however, founded in and absorbing an existing Graeco-
Phoenician city, had from the beginning minted coins like a Greek city; in
continuing to do so it expressed its identity as a city in a way unlike all ex-
cept one of the Romancoloniaeof the Latin-speaking part of the Empire (see
n. above). The evidence, however scattered and inadequate, shows that the
latercoloniae, which nearly all minted coins, might do so either in Latin or in
Greek. It shows equally clearly thatcolonia,orκολωνία, competed as a status
designation with the specifically Greek termmetropolis.
Thus to all appearances—and appearances are all that the evidence allows
us to grasp—thecoloniaeof this region, Berytus apart, were gradually re-
absorbed into their environment, as Greek cities among others, with only
the structure of their magistracies, and occasional reappearances of the word
κολωνίαin their formal titulature to single them out. For Jerome, record-
ing Paula’s pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the s, of all the cities (Tyre,
Sidon, Caesarea, Aelia itself ) which were or had beencoloniae, only Berytus
still earned the titleRomana colonia(Ep. , ). Very little, so far as we know,