CULTURE 217The limits of Romanization: cities
It was in the context of the city, for the most part in the western empire, that
Roman and native came into contact and combined to form Romano-
African, Romano-British, or some other particular and original culture.
Cities expanded and multiplied also in the East, but in the tradition of
Hellenic, not Roman, culture. When villagers such as the Tymandeni of
Galatia petitioned an emperor for promotion to city status, they wanted a
polis , not a colonia or municipium. Similarly, when emperors created cities
in eastern areas where before there were none, or promoted communities of
lower status, as Septimius Severus did in Egypt, they gave them Greek, not
Roman institutions. It was Greek, not Latin, that replaced Nabataean as the
offi cial language in Trajan’s newly created province of Arabia.^20
The earlier colonies, those founded by Caesar for Roman civilians and by
Augustus for discharged Italian veterans, as opposed to the later ‘titular’
colonies where promotion did not involve Romanization, are the exception.
The Augustan colony at Beirut, Colonia Julia Augusta Felix Berytus, was
founded, as the coins indicate, in accordance with a traditional Etruscan rite
supposedly employed by Romulus at the foundation of Rome itself. The city
was laid out according to a grid plan like other veteran colonies (Timgad in
Numidia was typical). It was equipped with forum and capitol located at the
intersection of the two main arteries, and was adorned with a fi ne array of
public buildings, including the typically Roman amenities of hippodrome,
theatre and amphitheatre, with the aid of friendly kings, notably Herod the
Great and his grandson Herod Agrippa I. The city was likewise endowed
with Roman- style political institutions, and its citizens were enrolled in a
Roman tribe, the Fabia.^21
Much remains obscure about the cultural development of the early
eastern colonies, Italian islands in a Greek sea. In the six Pisidian colonies
planted by Augustus inland in southern Asia Minor, Latin remained the
offi cial language (for dedications to the emperor and his representatives,
for example) but otherwise steadily lost ground to Greek. The pattern of
development in the Augustan veteran colony of Heliopolis at Baalbek
was broadly similar, to judge from the largely epigraphical evidence.^22
Inscriptional material from nearby Beirut is scanty. However, for the
resilience of the Roman educational system in that city, we can cite the
career of one of its citizens, M. Valerius Probus, eminent Latin grammarian
and editor of Virgil, Horace and Terence in the mid- fi rst century, and more
strikingly, the presence from the late second century, if not earlier, of what
was to become a famous law school. Roman law was a luxury subject in the
East, but appears to have been a speciality of the Phoenician cities, which
produced the great Severan jurisprudents Ulpian and Papinian. The wider
signifi cance of a law school, as both Gregory Thaumaturgus (c. AD 239) and
Libanius (c. 370) bear witness, is that it stimulated instruction in Latin in
places near and far. Gregory recalls that he had learned Latin in distant