NEW CITIZENS IN ASIA MINOR
That Caracalla’s edict was quite rapidly put into effect in Asia Minor is well-attested through the onomastic changes that followed it. It is in fact a text from Saittai in Lydia, a funerary inscription erected to a certain Bassa by her family and dated to 3 March 213, which provides the earliest firmly dated piece of evidence for the universal grant of citizenship, and which thus, as pointed out by Peter Herrmann, militates against re-dating it following Fergus Millar’s suggestion to AD 213 or 214.23 This is further confirmed by a rescript of Caracalla from Takina in Pisidia, responding to a local petition concerning abuses by Roman soldiers.24 The consular dates do not survive in full, and there is some debate concerning their expansion, as some scholars doubt, unnecessarily in my view, that the dating of a local document could mention a suffect consul.25 Arguably, however, we have a petition submitted to the emperor by a whole group of Aurelii as early as the second half of the year 212 itself.
If the Constitutio Antoniniana did not mean the disappearance of local laws of Asia Minor cities, it was not because the province of Asia was slow to react to it in other respects.Furthermore, as noted already by Bickerman in his seminal 1926 dissertation on the Constitutio Antoniniana, citizenship penetrated into rural areas of Asia Minor, outside the territory of any urban communities, which shows that there was no real attempt to exclude the underprivileged categories of the local population, whose access to Roman justice in any form would likely always have been very limited, from the grant (whatever the infamous clause excluding the dediticii meant in reality).26 It is noteworthy that at least in the Republican period the legal status of peasants on large estates in Asia Minor could be seen as a locally established form of serfdom.
This, at least, is the most natural understanding of the mention in Varro’s agronomical treatise of numerous obaerarii in Asia, Illyricum, and Egypt.27 Minor matters like that do not seem to have been allowed to stand in the way of Caracalla’s generosity, any more than an earlier privileged status excluded people whose origo was in, for example, Aphrodisias or Chios.Conceivably, however, a distinction between the new Aurelii and Roman citizens of longer standing could still have been felt for some time. A suggestive example can be seen in the two fragmentary honorary decrees from Chios, published by D. Evangelidis in 1927 and neglected since.28 Inscribed on one side of the marble stele is a decree of the council and the people of Chios in honour of a certain Aur(elius) Neikandros, son of Neikandros. The use of the abbreviation Aur. suggests a date post-212, and perhaps not long after, to judge by the use of a Greek filiation formula. On the other side of the stele (seemingly both were made to be
ana on Anatolian onomastics as a chapter of his 2015 D.Phil. thesis; for a study of its effects in a single community, Heberdey 1929, 15-28. General observations in Buraselis 2007, 94-120.
24 SEG XXXVII 1186 = Hauken 1998, 217-41 no. 6.
25 For dating by suffect consulships in provincial contexts, cf. Eck 1995, 62.
26 Bickermann 1926, 37, followed by Sherwin-White 1973a, 280 n. 2. On the legal situation in Roman Phrygia, cf. Kantor 2013. For dediticii who were not freedmen in the post-CA period, though in a very different part of the Empire, note a neglected piece of evidence in CIL XIII 6592 (13 August 232), a dedication by a unit Brit(tonum) deditic(iorum) Alexandrianorum on the Rhine border, with Kerneis 2009, 379-80.
27 iique quos obaerarios nostri uocitarunt et etiam nunc sunt in Asia atque Aegypto et in Illyrico complures (Varr. R.R. I.17.2). Compare also IGRR IV 808, ll. 7-8 (Hierapolis, 2nd∕3rd cent.
A. D.) where a benefactor of the city performed building works in the theatre [δια τ]ης των | iδiων αγροiκων βοηθεiας (“with the assistance of his own villagers”). These “rustics” were clearly not slaves, but perhaps less than independent tenants.28 Ευαγγελiδης 1927-28, 27 no. 8. I am grateful to Charles Crowther, who is working on the forthcoming Chios fascicle of the IG, for confirming to me that the lettering of the two sides is consistent with a roughly contemporaneous date for both. Both texts are ignored by Holtheide 1983 in his catalogue.
visible at the same time), we have a decree of the Chian gerousia for L. Ulpius Glycon from the tribe Sergia.[102] Although Glycon’s citizenship was in all likelihood also relatively recent, the contrast between the ways in which these two men are presented is clear. Could it be that Chian authorities continued for a while to distinguish between those honoured with Roman citizenship prior to Caracalla’s announcement and those who were included in the blanket grant?[103]
While this is obviously conjecture, and the evidence is not sufficient for any firm conclusions, it is worth noticing in this context that at least one other community of Asia Minor is known to have shown in its public inscriptions, earlier in the imperial period, how difficult coming to terms with the socio-legal consequences of various ways of acquiring Roman citizenship could be. A remarkable series of inscriptions from the city of Sillyon in Pamphylia commemorating benefactions to various groups of the city population of a local notable Menodoras, son of Megak- les, includes in the list grants of 3 denarii per head ουινδικταρiοις δε κ[αi] ∣ aπελευθεροις, “to the uindictarii and freedmen.”[104] Now a grant of freedom in Roman fashion, by uindicta, obviously made the freedman a Roman citizen, or, as expressed with fine exaggeration in a much discussed inscription from Maionia in Lydia, “a born free man.”[105] The right way to designate those manumitted by uindicta in Pamphylia, if they were to be distinguished from the other απελευθεροι at all, would have been “the Romans”, 'Pωμαtοι, but this appears to have been too much for the gerusia and people of Sillyon.[106] This serves to show how a local community could, up to a point, resist the disturbance of traditional social divisions brought about by the spread of Roman citizenship.
The reaction of the imperial power to that trend through the development of the honestiores/humiliores division in criminal law (establishing a different range of penalties for more and less privileged social groups) has been a much debated subject in modern scholarship since Peter Garnsey’s seminal monograph.[107] What concerns us here, however, is the way in which these local statuses were still to a certain extent overriding imperial law. The Martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus and Agath- onice (dated in the Latin version of the text as late as the reign of Decius, perhaps unreliably) shows how local citizenship could still be seen as the central fact of somebody’s legal identity in the third century: “The proconsul then left Carpus and turned to Papylus and said to him: ?Are you a senator?’ ?I am a citizen,’ he replied. ?Of what city?’ asked the proconsul. Papylus said: ?Of Thyatira.’”[108] As at Aphrodisias, local citizenship mattered (for the authors of the acts, if not for the real Pa- pylus), and it is at least a possible hypothesis that in some communities the great levelling act of Caracalla in fact made local pride more fierce and the maintenance of local status more vigorous.[109]
4.