Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

142 CHAPTER FOUR

above,perhapsapieceofflatterydirectedattheempress)anddeterminedthe
character of the coinage.^44
Insum,itwouldbemistakentoexplainthecoinageofTiberias,Sepphoris,
Lydda, and, for that matter, Neapolis (which may present a rather different
setofproblems)bypositinganimperiallyordainedchangeinthecomposition
of the city councils. We must rather suppose that the city councillors were
always, like the cities themselves, mostly (not necessarily entirely) of Jewish
background, but that at different times in the course of the later first and
second centuries they came to adopt, at the very least, important elements of
the common urban culture of the Roman east, suffused though this culture
was with Greek, Roman, and Greco-Semitic religion. Some of the cities may
initiallyhavebeeninhibitedfromtryingtodevelopadistinctivelyJewishstyle
ofRomanmunicipalpublicexpressionbytheBarKokhbarevolt,whichproba-
bly generated more hostility to Judaism than the first revolt had done. But
self-defensiveness alone does not explain Tiberias’s (or Neapolis’s) Trajanic
coinage, nor the city councils’ embrace of Greco-Roman urbanism long after
Bar Kokhba had been forgotten, nor Lydda’s indisputably voluntary adoption
of the pagan style at the very end of the second century.

SEPPHORITEARCHAEOLOGY

The very pervasiveness of pagan images in Tiberias and Sepphoris in the
second and third centuries (about Lydda less is known) makes it difficult to
view the culture of these places as having been imposed by outsiders on an
unwilling populace, though therewere, needless to say, Jewish opponents—
amongthem therabbis—whowillbediscussedbelow. Indeed,tojudgefrom
their physical remains, Tiberias and Sepphoris were normal Greco-Roman
cities, with the full range of institutions and public buildings and spaces.^45 If
we could be as confident about the relationship between coin types and cult
as scholars usually are, then we could be quite certain that the cities’ nor-
malcy extended to their possession of pagan temples. There may, as already

(^44) See J. Schwartz,Lod, p. 103, who is constrained to argue that though the emperor thought
he was rewarding the Lyddans, he was mistaken, and to suppose that Severus initiated (or the
change in the city’s status generated?) an influx of pagans into the town, though even Severan
colonies, which Lydda was not, did not receive colonists: see F. Millar, “The RomanColoniaeof
the Near East: A Study in Cultural Relations,” in H. Solin and M. Kajava, eds.Roman Eastern
PolicyandOtherStudiesinRomanHistory:ProceedingsofaColloquiumatTva ̈rminne,2–3Octo-
ber,1987, (Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 91 (Helsinki, 1990), pp. 31–39.
(^45) For Sepphoris, see S. Miller,Studies in the History and Traditions of Sepphoris(Leiden:
Brill,1984).SufficeittosaythatMiller’scityofrabbisandkohanimisinvisibleinthearchaeology
(though the allegedmiqva’otare suggestive), which is not to say that they did not exist, only that
they did not predominate. See also Y. Ne’eman, “Sepphoris in the Second Temple, Mishnah,
and Talmud Periods,” (Ph.D diss., Hebrew University, 1993). The excavations at Tiberias are
summarized in theNEAEHL(English edition), 1464–73 and updated inHA104 (1995): 32–38
(mainly late antique).