empire was therefore in a true sense “Greek.” With only few exceptions, namely the
above-mentioned colonies and the military sphere, nearly all business was conducted
in Greek koine, the dialect in use in the eastern Mediterranean in Roman times along-
side a variety of Semitic and other non-classical vernaculars. The Roman upper class
aspired to be assimilated to Greek culture in general, and to be instructed in Greek
mythology in particular (Cameron 2004). Above all, rather than filling the lands with
its own imperial officials, Rome managed to rule the enormous subject area in the
east through the existing structures of the quasi-autonomous cities and the collab-
oration of their leading citizens. Though the final say in all truly important matters
(i.e. taxation and military decisions) lay of course with Rome, civic culture in the
eastern provinces was Greek, or, as it is usually named in order to accentuate the
particular development which the cities’ civilization underwent under Roman rule,
“Greco-Roman” (Millar 1993b).
In the ideal type of the Greek city of the Roman period, territorial division of the
citizen body found religious expression in public cults: each civic tribe had its own
representative deity (A. Jones 1940). As regards Palmyra, the social structure of this
desert city was built up around large clans and family groups, which we could also
call “tribes,” but tribes in a non-classical sense. Each of those groups had its own
set of specific deities to look after, which makes it often difficult to distinguish between
a deity functioning as a civic symbol for the inhabitants of one of the city’s districts,
and one acting as an ancestral god for a clan. Civic tribes (based on territorial divi-
sion) and familial tribes (based on a historical or legendary common descent) are
not mutually exclusive, and when Palmyra came firmly within the orbit of Roman
power, new civic structures were introduced into the city, including tribes based on
classical models, with their own civic cults (Kaizer 2002).
A second pattern of religious culture known from the Greco-Roman cities that
can also be encountered at Palmyra is the phenomenon known as “euergetism”: the
system by which the upper class of the citizen body voluntarily made large dona-
tions to the city’s public works, among which, of course, were the construction of
temples and the maintenance of rituals and priestly functions (Veyne 1990). The
symbolic language used in the monumental Greek inscriptions which were erected
throughout cities such as Antioch and Ephesus, especially in their public places, served
to create a situation in which the benefactors and their descendants would be remem-
bered “for ever.” As regards Palmyra, the public inscriptions which reflect the city’s
social life were written not only in Greek, but also in a local dialect of Aramaic, and
this “exotic” facet runs the risk of us focusing too much on local peculiarities, for
example on the otherwise unknown names of the Palmyrene gods. However, the
symbolic language that commemorated individual benefactions to the local cults at
Palmyra was very much that of the Greco-Roman world at large.
In the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, the relationship between the human
world and the divine sphere found expression in a combination of different sacrificial
acts and other rituals, mirroring the various ways in which humans dealt with each
other (Veyne 2000). Again, despite a number of local and oriental features at Palmyra
(especially with regard to the Aramaic terminology used to describe ritual practice),
there was a substantial correspondence between the Palmyrene sacrificial system and
Religion in the Roman East 451