From Trophy Towns to City-States: Urban Civilization and Cultural Identities in Roman Pontus

By Jesper Majbom Madsen

In 66 BCE, in the woods of Armenia Minor, Pompey the Great defeated Mithridates VI Eupator, making him one of the most successful Roman generals of all time. The victory presented him with the enormous challenge of organizing not only Mithridates' kingdom but also large parts of Anatolia and the Near East that were now placed under Roman rule. Pompey's solution was to found six new cities and to convert two existing communities, Zela, a temple community dedicated to the goddess Anaïtis, and Amaseia, the former royal residence, into cities as well. There would now be eight city-states, each with the responsibility of administering the territory known to the Romans as Pontus.

It has often been argued that in their eastern provinces the Romans based newly founded cities on the model of the Greek city-state and that Roman culture had less influence there than in the West. Jesper Majbom Madsen, however, describes civic development in Roman Pontus as a process by which Roman and Greek elements were introduced simultaneously. He contends that the Pompeian cities were neither traditional Greek poleis nor entirely Roman settlements with Roman laws and legislation; nor were they Greek cities gradually influenced by Roman rule. Instead, they represented a third category, in which a citizen could be an Anatolian, Greek, and Roman at the same time as well as a member of the elite, a priest in the imperial cult and in a cult to Asclepius, a local politician and a member of the Pontic koinon, all without contradiction.

Bringing together a wide range of literary, historical, and political sources, From Trophy Towns to City-States examines how Pompey's cities were initially organized, how they developed over time, and how inhabitants in this part of the Roman Empire defined themselves culturally and politically.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812297300

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Introduction

In 66 BCE, in the woods of Armenia Minor, Pompey the Great defeated Mithridates VI Eupator, making Pompey one of the most successful Roman generals of all time. At the same time, this presented him with the enormous challenge of organizing not only Mithridates’ kingdom but also large parts of Anatolia and the Near East that were now placed under direct Roman rule. His answer was to expand the province of Cilicia and found two new provinces: Syria in the heartland of the Seleucid kingdom, and the province of Pontus at the core of Mithridates’ kingdom, which he then joined to Bithynia. It was a brave and difficult choice. Three provinces in hostile country would stretch Rome’s administrative means to their very limit; the dangers of riots from within and of invasions by both ambitious neighbors and far-from-reliable friends were factors Pompey needed to take into account in his plans.

In the case of Pontus, the name the Romans gave to the province, the decision to place the region under direct Roman rule was further challenged by the size of the area—stretching from Paphlagonia in the West to Armenia Minor in the East—and by the lack of a civic culture in the hinterland on which the organization of the province could be based.¹ In addition, the new province was culturally diverse, the home of various different Anatolian people, and geographically varied, with large rivers and high mountains that divided the coastal areas from the hinterland and that considerably complicated communications. Pompey’s solution was to found six new cities, and to convert the two existing centers—Zela, the temple community dedicated to the goddess Anaïtis, and Amaseia, the former royal residence—into cities too. There would then be eight city-states, each with the responsibility of organizing considerable territories.

To found a province in a very hostile area and simultaneously to establish eight city-states all within a few years was a complicated task, on a scale that Rome had never carried out before. Considering the manner in which Pompey assumed the command against Mithridates VI and Tigranes II, using his influence with the tribunes in Rome and his popularity among the people, the general was running a considerable risk. If the province proved impossible to defend or if the cities failed to thrive, he would be the one to blame and could expect harsh allegations from members of the political elite in Rome, who would do what they could to weaken the victorious general by politically attacking him with his status as the one who conquered the East.

There were other options available. A safer but surely less glorious solution would have been to follow Rome’s strategy elsewhere in the East and place the entire region in the hands of various client kings whose loyalty could be reasonably predicted. It is worth bearing in mind that Pompey did in fact keep a considerable part of the province under the rule of client kings. Tigranes II continued as king of Armenia just as Cappadocia carried on as a client kingdom under Ariobarzanes II. The decision to turn the kingdom of the Mithridatic kings into a province with the administrative challenges caused by a lack of a civic culture stands out as particularly ambitious. In comparison, the decision to found a province in Syria and enlarge the territory under the jurisdiction of Cilicia, although a considerable administrative task, was still less demanding. A Syrian province would be vulnerable to ambitious neighbor states such as Parthia, but the web of well-established cities, particularly those in Syria, offered the kind of legal and institutional framework and civic culture that were familiar to Rome—something that would have to be supplied largely from scratch in the province of Pontus.

Pompey’s plans for Pontus and Bithynia and the reorganization of the East have occupied scholars for generations. They have discussed both the motives behind the urbanization and the types of civic communities Pompey wanted to establish. It is generally agreed that the web of cities that the general founded in the hinterland represents an attempt to break the previous royal organization of the region, in which a large rural population living in villages worked on the land as serfs overseen by the trustees of the king. There are, however, many different views on what Pompey wanted to achieve with the urbanization per se and on what kind of community the general hoped to establish.

One school of thought sees the foundation of the urban network as an attempt to civilize the hinterland of Mithridates’ old kingdom by introducing what are believed to have been civic communities modeled on Greek urban traditions and a form of political organization that was based on Greek thought. In his Römische Geschichte, first published in the 1850s, Th. Mommsen argues that the urbanization of Roman Pontus was a way to move the population toward the West and replace what Mommsen saw as oriental military despotism with an urban culture modeled on Greek and Italian traditions. According to Mommsen, Pompey was keen to establish a civic culture in the sparsely urbanized parts of Anatolia and was responsible for the spread of Greek culture throughout the region.²

In his Roman Republic of 1923, T. Rice Holmes shares Mommsen’s thought that the cities were intended to draw the people in the East toward Rome. Like Mommsen, Rice Holmes sees Pompey as one who promotes the spread of Greco-Roman civilization.³ A similar view is found in the 1932 contribution to the Cambridge Ancient History series by H. A. Ormerod and M. Cary, who wrote that Pompey’s cities are said to have provided new impetus to the diffusion of Hellenic civilization in Syria and Asia Minor.⁴ J. G. C. Anderson and A. H. M. Jones also believed that Pompey’s cities were founded on a Greek model. In his treatment of Pompey’s reorganization of Pontus, Anderson suggests that as a result of the Greek population already living in the cities, Amaseia was fairly Hellenized by the time Pompey won the war. Jones argues in his The Greek City: From Alexander to Justinian (1940) that the new settlements followed Greek traditions in order to promote Greek civilization in what he calls the backwater regions of Asia Minor and the Near East.⁵

In his Roman Rule in Asia Minor: To the End of the Third Century After Christ (1950), D. Magie sees Pompey’s choice of government as a form of constitution that was inspired by Greek traditions of self-government but one in which ex-magistrates’ right to lifelong membership of the city councils and the introduction of the censorial institution to oversee council members are recognized as characteristically Roman elements. However, much focus is devoted to the Greek terms for the cities’ political institutions and to how the city names included the term polis, from which Magie concluded that Pompey aimed to Hellenize the region.⁶ In his From the Gracchi to Nero (1959), H. H. Scullard saw the urbanization of Pontus as a deliberate attempt to turn the region toward Rome and away from Parthia; Pompey is thought by Scullard to have aimed for a continuous line of provinces around the coast of Asia from Pontus on the Black Sea in the north to Syria in the south. Inspired by Alexander the Great, Pompey is seen as having introduced city-states with institutions modeled on Greek urban traditions.⁷

What constituted these so-called Greek communities is often far from clear, but they are sometimes defined as self-governing entities, where the political power was divided between the assemblies, councils, and magistracies, and as a political structure in which a comparatively large part of the civic body was eligible to participate in the decision-making process. While the latter element may differ from the oligarchic nature of Roman or Latin cities—at least when the Greek cities were organized along democratic principles—it does not differ from a form of organization with the same division of political power that Rome introduced in Italy and the West. From a constitutional point of view, it is therefore difficult to draw a clear distinction between what is a Greek city and what is a city modeled on Roman norms. This will be discussed in Chapter 2.

Another school of thought has questioned whether Pompey really did establish city-states with developed civic landscapes. Instead, the cities are seen as legal frameworks with the necessary political institutions needed to administer and, more importantly, tax the newly conquered region. Even if the cities’ institutional landscape seems to have been modeled on Greek traditions, it is not generally believed that the introduction of cities was motivated by an attempt to introduce Greek culture into the rural parts of Anatolia. In their Municipal Administration in the Roman Empire, F. F. Abbott and A. C. Johnson maintain that the urbanization was an attempt to facilitate taxation by letting the local magistrates help settle standards for how much tax was to be collected.⁸ The same line of thinking was followed by T. Frank in his Roman Imperialism of 1914. Frank sees the urbanization and the foundation of the new provinces in the East as an attempt to increase the area under Roman rule and so to extend the land that the publicani, Pompey’s alleged supporters, were allowed to farm.⁹

Frank argues that Pompey continued Alexander’s strategy by inviting Greek settlers to live in the most fertile parts of the hinterland in order to form a nucleus of civilization. Even if the civilization of the hinterland was not the main objective, this settlement provided, along with improved cultivation of the land and a system of taxation, the spread of Hellenic culture and a model of how to live in a civic culture.¹⁰ On the other hand, W. G. Fletcher sees no indication that Pompey tried to introduce an urban culture when he turned the kingdom of Mithridates into a province. Once again, the purpose of the cities is mainly described as an attempt to ease the collection of tax and as a way to split up Mithridates’ kingdom into smaller parts. In order to tackle the administrative challenges, the rural population had to be set free and the tax collection had to be placed in the hands of local institutions in order to administer the region by Roman standards.¹¹ J. Van Ooteghem also identifies financial and administrative motives behind the settlements. In his Pompée le grand, bâtisseur d’empire of 1954, he does not see the cities as intended to promote Greek civic culture, though he agrees that the administration was modeled on Greek tradition.¹² That the cities were founded to facilitate tax collection is also claimed by R. M. Kallet-Marx in his Hegemony to Empire of 1995.¹³

In another approach to the question of taxation, K. Morrell has recently argued that Pompey was hoping to improve the government of Rome’s provinces. Pompey is seen to have chosen a different way forward when he, according to Morrell, practiced another form of conquest than his peers in the mid-first-century BCE. Pompey is here seen both as a general who tried to avoid unnecessary bloodshed and as a rather un-Roman politician who seemingly did not have the interests of the publicani at heart when he expanded Roman rule farther into the Near East.¹⁴

Other studies have paid more attention to the sort of community Pompey wished to introduce and to the implications of the provincial legislation, the lex Pompeia. In an article on the lex Pompeia in the Journal of Roman Studies, A. J. Marshall views the overall aim of the urban settlement in the hinterland as a way to dissolve the long tradition of centralized royal rule. Marshall examines two laws designed to keep the cities, particularly the new settlements, well populated. One law allowed sons of Pontic mothers to obtain Pontic rights, which is seen as the right to citizenship in one of the Pontic city-states; the other law prevented cities in Pontus and Bithynia from granting legal rights to individuals who already held citizenship in one of the other cities in the province.¹⁵ With references to the correspondence between Trajan and Pliny the Younger on how to handle the cities’ individual legislation, Marshall concludes that even if the lex Pompeia did set a constitutional standard for the entire province, it did not impose uniform internal organization on the cities.¹⁶

Discussion about what sort of civic community Pompey hoped to introduce has continued into more recent studies. In his Anatolia: Land, Men, and Gods in Asia Minor (1993), S. Mitchell points to how the urbanization of the Pontic hinterland was necessary in order to turn Mithridates’ kingdom into a province, which Pompey could then add to the recently founded province of Bithynia. The urbanization of the Pontic hinterland is seen by Mitchell as an attempt to establish a system whereby communities were self-governing, as a way both to organize the heartland of the former kingdoms effectively and to provide the necessary administrative stability for Rome in the region.¹⁷ That the cities were modeled on Greek traditions is also the thesis of C. Marek, who, in his Stadt, Ära und Territorium in Pontus-Bithynia und Nord Galatia from 1993, points to how Pompey would have depended on Greek advisors, some of whom served at Mithridates’ court, when the decisions in the new province was being made. According to Marek, it is only reasonable to assume that they would have promoted a form of organization that followed Greek practice and that it was also likely that they could persuade a busy Pompey, who, as we shall see in the following, was anxious to finish what he had started and return to Rome.

Also, Marek repeats the point about how Rome in the East modeled the cities they founded after a Greek fashion in order to promote Greek culture in the region and to facilitate the taxation in the newly won territories.¹⁸ In his Geschichte Kleinasiens in der Antike (2010), Marek interprets Pompey’s use of the term polis for the city names as evidence for how he modeled the cities after a Greek fashion. Again, the meaning of the term polis or a polis status is seen to have implied a certain form of Greek civic organization that was already established in Bithynia. This leads Marek to conclude that there was no reason for Pompey to introduce a form of organization other than the one already in place in the other part of the newly joined province.¹⁹ Even if the introduction of censors and lifelong membership of the city council did bring changes to the city council in a democratic model, the foundation of the cities and the reorganization as a whole are seen as deliberate attempts to introduce a number of civic centers inspired by Greek civic standards across the whole of Asia Minor.²⁰

The assumption that Pompey was looking to model the new settlements on Greek traditions finds some support in the strong influence from Greek culture visible in the imperial period, when various Greek institutions such as the gymnasium, Greek deities, and Greek as the official language dominated the cities in the hinterland.²¹ But what seems to inspire this consensus among modern scholarship is a widespread belief that Rome’s admiration of Greek civilization and its readiness to sustain an already-working form of administration in provinces such as Asia and Bithynia encouraged Roman authorities to employ a Greek model of urban culture.²²

Another school of thought sees the constitution Pompey introduced as a form of government with a clear Roman imprint. M. Wörrle in Stadt und Fest im kaiserzeitlichen Kleinasien (1988) and H.-L. Fernoux in Notables et élites des cités de Bithynie aux époques hellénistique et romaine (2004) both interpret the lex Pompeia as a radical revision of the Bithynian polis model and as an attempt to make the Greek model fit Roman standards.²³ The introduction of a minimum age of thirty years for magistrates and council members, the right to lifelong membership of council for ex-magistrates, and what Fernoux believes to be the introduction of property qualifications for council membership are all seen as indicative of an oligarchic form of constitution, which effectively ensured the political elite control over the political process.²⁴

Wörrle and Fernoux focus on the changes that the lex Pompeia brought to political culture in the well-established cities in Bithynia. The early phase of Pompey’s reorganization of Pontus has generally not enjoyed the same attention as the cities in Asia or in Bithynia. This may be because physical evidence from the cities in Pontus is sparse, but it is also because the cities in the new province have been seen either as administrative centers founded to facilitate the collection of tax, with little actual urban development, or as communities in which the population had little experience of life in a city-state. In both cases, this has led scholars to believe that in the Republican period the cities did not develop into vibrant urban communities. Another reason why the cities’ early period, in particular, has been less studied may have to do with the relatively short period of time between the foundations in the 60s and the moment Antony dismantled the Roman province sometime in the mid-30s. Antony’s choice has led some scholars to assume that the level of development in the cities was too modest to be useful to Antony, who therefore decided to redistribute the territory between loyal dynasts and leave the administrative and military burden in their hands.²⁵ A recent alternative to the notion that the cities were abandoned because they had not developed into vibrant communities has been suggested by T. Bekker-Nielsen, who points out how the offer of territory to local dynasts is a classic example of divide and rule. By dissolving the province of Pontus and other parts of what was previously under direct Roman rule, Antony prevented any single dynast from gathering the former Mithridatic kingdom behind him in war against Rome, which Pharnaces, the son of Mithridates VI, had done only ten years earlier.²⁶

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, the aim is to discuss the motives behind the choices Pompey made following the victory against Mithridates. Apart from the military and administrative reasoning behind the new provincial structure in Anatolia and the Near East and the large-scale urbanization of the Pontic Hinterland, this study also considers the political situation in Rome from the 80s to the early 60s BCE. I will argue that the political climate in Rome played a key role in the decisions Pompey made in the years leading up to the war against Mithridates and in the choices made in the course of the campaign and with regard to the subsequent reorganization of Anatolia and the Near East, where Pompey hoped the campaign he waged and the war he won would further improve his position at the center of Roman politics.

Second, the other question to be discussed is what kind of civic community Pompey chose for the Pontic hinterland, and also how these cities evolved over time from their early phase in the age of the republic to the imperial period, when they were once again placed under direct Roman rule. Some of the basic questions that will be addressed are what role the cities were expected to fulfill, how they were organized politically, what we can deduce about the people living there, and how they perceived themselves and the lives they lived in what gradually became civic communities organized along the principles of Greco-Roman civic traditions.

This study follows the cities from the early phase (mid-60s to mid-30s BCE) to the third century CE, when most of Pompey’s settlements stood as well-established urban centers in which Greek culture played a key role both in urban landscapes and in people’s everyday lives. The investigation focuses on three questions.

First, why did Pompey choose to establish a new province in a previously unfriendly region where urban civilization was largely nonexistent? The alternative of leaving the kingdom in the hands of one or more client rulers, as Antony did thirty years later, would have been a safer choice and would have been in line with Rome’s previous practice in Anatolia. The chance Pompey took was considerable. With few friends in the Senate, his position at the center of Roman politics might well have been weakened if the project proved unsustainable and future generations would be left with the impression of an overly ambitious, bold, and vain general who chose the most difficult solution in the hunt for glory and extraordinary military achievements.

Pompey knew the implications of failing. His uneasy relationship with the Senate went from bad to worse as he assumed the position of one of Rome’s most successful generals on whom the city had had to rely time and time again—granting him one important command after another—even though he was not part of the Senate until the year 70. After he had used his popularity with the people to acquire the command against the pirates, with powers that were previously unheard of, and later to hold the command against Mithridates and King Tigranes, he could expect little help or sympathy from the members of Rome’s aristocratic elite. But, as is argued below, there are elements to suggest that it was precisely the combination of a poor relationship with large parts of the Senate and Pompey’s own desire to supersede his peers that encouraged him to pursue results in the East that would ensure his return to the center of Roman politics.

Second, what was the intended role of the cities and how were they initially organized? The consensus that the cities were Greek is questioned together with the general notion that Pompey settled the cities either to promote Greek civilization in the rural parts of the East or to accommodate tax collection to meet the expectations of the equestrian publicani who were among Pompey’s trusted supporters.

In what follows, Pompey’s settlements in the first phase are not regarded as having been particularly Greek or seen as a way to offer members of the equestrian order easier access to the wealth of Mithridates’ former kingdom. Instead, it is suggested here that Pompey had higher ambitions on behalf of the cities than simply to tax the region, even if taxation was an integral part of Roman foreign policy. The urbanization of the hinterland was a necessary next step if the new province were to develop into a thriving community in the land of what had been one of Rome’s most difficult enemies since the Punic Wars. Yet the cities were also a commemoration of his triumph in the war against Mithridates and Tigranes and a symbol of his achievement in bringing one of Rome’s most resilient enemies to a fall. There are elements to suggest that the general, or those assisting him in organizing the new province, aimed at a form of organization that would give a larger part of the population a role in the political process. As I shall discuss below, access to the city councils seems not to have been restricted by property qualifications, and laws were passed so that sons of Pontic women would obtain citizenship in their mothers’ hometowns no matter where their fathers were from, while rules against double citizenship, in both parts of the province, would discourage citizens from moving from one town to another.

Third, how did the cities develop? There is little to suggest that the cities were replicas of Greek civic communities with Greek immigrants as a significant part of the population or a variety of Greek institutions that would encourage a life in which Greek norms and values were at the center. Greek was the official administrative language, but the people living in the cities were not Greek. Instead, they were local Anatolian people and an unknown number of Roman veterans who stayed behind when the rest of Pompey’s army left for Italy. Their everyday language and customs would therefore in the first phase have been Anatolian and Roman more than they would have been Greek.

While the influence of Greek culture appears to be limited in the cities’ early phase, it was considerably more pronounced from the late first century CE onward, when epigraphic and archaeological material testifies to a number of different cultural institutions, such as gymnasia, theaters, and cults to a number of Greek deities. In the age of the High Empire, Greek culture had become a well-established part of the cities’ everyday life and there is every reason to assume that a significant part of the population would have seen themselves as Greek. The question of people’s identity is therefore essential to understanding how the cities developed culturally. Inspired by A. Maalouf’s and A. Sen’s thoughts on how people’s identity is formed by the sum of groups and memberships to which they belong, it is here discussed whether the population in the cities simultaneously felt a sense of belonging to Greek, Roman, and different Anatolian groups all at the same time, and whether they define themselves as Greek, Roman, and, say, Paphlagonian, again at the same time without much contradictions in terms.²⁷

Chapter 1 focuses on the motives behind the organization of three provinces in the East and on the urbanization of Pontus. The discussion revolves around the question of why Pompey made the choices he did and sees the ambitious reorganization of Anatolia and the East in the light of the political struggle among members of the political elite in Late Republican Rome. Pompey’s untraditional route to power and his complicated relationship with the senatorial aristocracy are here seen as some of the main reasons why Pompey chose the ambitious solution he did when he placed the kingdom of Pontus under direct Roman rule. The victory against Mithridates and Tigranes and the comprehensive reorganization of Anatolia and the Near East provided exactly the kind of military and organizational achievement that would allow Pompey the chance to return to Roman politics as conqueror of the East and so as one of Rome’s most successful generals of all time.

Pompey was driven by ambition and a quest for glory and prestige. Mithridates posed a threat to Roman interests in the region, but being the general who brought about his final fall was a driving factor. It seems, however, clear from the strategy Pompey followed when he entered the Near East that he was not looking to prolong the war by invading some of the large and resourceful kingdoms, such as Parthia. Instead he backed away when the opportunity to engage Parthia presented itself. The analysis of Pompey’s policies in Anatolia and the Near East is therefore relevant also to the still-ongoing discussion of whether Roman imperialism was defensive and motivated by fear, or by the urge for glory and the need to conquer prestigious and resourceful enemies.

The strategy suggests a different set of motives in the East than fear of Parthia or an almost unstoppable urge for military glory and the enormous wealth that victories against kings of the old world would be expected to produce. As we shall see in Chapter 1, the choices Pompey made suggest that he was keen to settle the East and bring stability to the region but also that he was determined not to prolong the campaign more than was necessary for him to return as the undisputed victor.

Chapter 2 is devoted to the types of cities Pompey settled in the hinterland. Key questions here are how their constitutions were organized, how political power was divided between average citizens and the elite, and what kind of influence the people in the cities could hope for. There is much to suggest that Pompey did not follow one form of constitution but a combination of democratic and oligarchic principles. There seems to have been no property qualification and the average member of the citizen body had access to the council and a role to play in the preparation and implementation of the laws that were afterward presented to the assembly. The city constitutions allowed the people to have a role in the decision-making process, but they favored members of the political elite granting lifelong membership of the councils to ex-magistrates.

The choices Pompey made are here seen in the light of the ambitious decision to establish two new provinces, Pontus and Syria, and the extension of Cilicia. In order to succeed, in the case of Pontus, Pompey needed not only symbols of victory and military success but also thriving city-states able to organize the administration and taxation of the hinterland—a project that would have to depend on local forces and their initiative, efforts, and resources. One of the commentators on the cities’ early development was the local geographer Strabo from the city of Amaseia. In his brief account of Pompey’s settlement, he draws a clear distinction between what he describes as Greek cities on the northern Black Sea coast and the cities in the hinterland that (to his eyes) bore no resemblance to the former. In Strabo’s view the latter cities were not inhabited by Greeks and therefore not to be counted among Greek towns, even though Greek was the official administrative language and, as time went on, these settlements would have hosted still more Greek institutions. The cities Pompey founded in the province of Pontus could well prove to be a special case. Other cities, such as the Nicopolis Octavian founded at Actium, were inhabited by families with a Greek cultural background, and the cities had Greek cultural institutions such as a theater and a stadion; festivals and worship of Apollo formed a part of the city urban landscape right from the start. But the choices Pompey made for the Pontic hinterland indicate that we should not too readily adopt the notion that Rome was looking to Hellenize the rural part of the East by introducing cities modeled after Greek fashion.

Chapter 3 is devoted to the institutional landscape in the cities and in the region where the koina councils served as a link between Rome and the cities in the province. The argument here is that many of the institutions that were being introduced in the cities’ early phase were Roman or oriented toward Rome, not toward Greek cultural institutions. Roman citizenship, emperor worship, and the provincial councils are here seen as essentially all Roman institutions. The imperial cults and the provincial councils found inspiration in Greek ruler worship and supra-civic leagues. But despite their roots in Greek political thinking, emperor worship and the provincial councils were for the largest part modeled after Roman rules and regulations. It is worth remembering that Rome and Roman authorities in the regions oversaw emperor worship. The provincial councils may have been inspired by the Greek city leagues but were also introduced by Roman authorities to ensure a channel of communication between Rome and the provincial communities. This chapter engages in the broader discussion of how emperor worship developed and whether it was Rome or the provincial communities that set the tone in the way this practice was organized. The approach here challenges the common view among scholars that the imperial cults in the eastern provinces were Greek institutions introduced along principles of Hellenistic ruler cults, suggesting that emperor worship was a Roman institution, whereby Roman authorities (the Senate, governors, or the emperor himself) not only approved the cult but also set the standards in how it was organized. What is suggested here is that the cult depended more on Rome and the emperor than is often assumed by modern scholars, who, inspired by the work of Beard, North, and Price, have seen the imperial cult