Rome and the East
remained of that brief but very distinctive phase, occupying roughly the first
half of the third century, which momentarily gave a very precise meaning to
the notion of ‘‘Graeco-Roman’’ civilisation as represented by cities, and also
saw both the largest number of individual city mints (under Septimius Seve-
rus for the Greek East as a whole, and under Elagabal for the Syro-Palestinian
region) and the greatest overall volume of production of city coinages. But
in the third quarter of the century all such minting ceased.^217 Thereafter our
quite extensive evidence for the life of this region and its cities provides no
more than the most slight and erratic evidence to suggest that the status of
coloniawas still remembered. Only Berytus, the earliest and most profoundly
Romanised of these colonial foundations, continued to play its historic role
as the source of Roman law for the early Byzantine world.
. See A. Johnston, ‘‘Greek Imperial Statistics: A Commentary,’’RN () and Harl
(n. ).