1 CHAPTER VII. The Organisation of Asia Minor. Of the total problem presented to Augustus by the Greek East two parts had thus been dealt with. He had fitted Egypt to be the milch-cow of the Empire, and had solved or rather failed to solve the purely economic problem presented by Greece itself. He had thus begun with the two ends of a chain, and the intermediate links of Asia Minor and Syria had been comparatively neglected. This was the great field in which Augustus and Agrippa were now to labour, and in which their efforts were to be seconded or continued by scions of the Imperial house, like Tiberius and Gaius Cæsar, by provincial governors like Quirinius, Lollius, and Varus, and by such tools of Empire as the half barbarian Herod. 1 Augustus himself went on from Greece to Samos, the island so conveniently placed in the near neighbourhood not only of Ephesus and Smyrna, but also of the main road into the interior, and there spent the winter of B.C. 21. He crossed over into Asia in the spring, re-organised that province and Bithynia, 2 and then proceeded to Syria, whence he returned in time to winter once more at Samos, and finally left the East for Italy in 1 Tacitus' "instrumenta servitutis." 2 Both were senatorial provinces, and should therefore, if the so-called "dyarchy" had been a reality, have been organized by the Senate. Cf. Dio liv. 7, and supra p. 27 for the Emperor's power in senatorial provinces. W B.C. 19. We know from two chance references in the letters of the younger Pliny that Augustus then regulated with considerable minuteness the law of the Bithynian cities. Dio tells us that he did as much in Asia, and in particular that he re-apportioned the taxes among the Asian cities, some of which had paid too little and others too much. He planted a Roman colony in Alexandria Troas, 1one of the two cities in the province of Asia which enjoyed that honour under the early Empire. He gave Samos its "freedom "-a natural and proper attention to his host, and a privilege which Mytilene in Lesbos, by means of the deputation under Crinagoras to Spain,2 had secured already, and on the other hand, deprived Cyzicus of the like privilege which it had, from the Roman point of view, justly forfeited by outrages upon Roman citizens. The controversy between Ephesus and its great Temple of Artemis, which formed a kind of Leonine City exempt from municipal jurisdiction, must have then come before him, though the final settlement was not reached till some fifteen years later. Above all, he came to terms with Parthia-the one great Oriental State which asserted its 1 This is the colony Augustus alludes to when he says in the Monumentum Ancyranum :-" colonias in . . . Asia, Syria militum deduxi.” Strabo, p. 593, writing under Tiberius, mentions it as a recent colony. Of course the colony may have been founded shortly after Actium, but on the whole it is more probable that it came in the connexion indicated in the text. Berytus (the Syrian colony alluded to in the above passage from the Mon. Anc.) was founded by Agrippa not long afterwards. 2 I infer from Crinagoras xxxix. (p. 90 of Rubensohn's edition) that the deputation found Augustus recovering from his fatigues at some baths on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. They certainly found him somewhere in Spain, and got what they wanted from him. 3 For the details see infra pp. 231-2. |