Download PDF | Stephen Mitchell - Anatolia_ The Celts in Anatolia and the impact of Roman rule. 1-Clarendon press (1995).
290 Pages
I would like in particular to thank three friends who have been among my closest colleagues during the period of the composition of this book. Barbara Levick has read the whole manuscript and offered a host of suggestions for improvement at all levels. Her levelheaded good sense and boundless energy have been a constant inspiration and encouragement. I have also been privileged to spend long hours and days in the field with two of the finest archacologists working in Turkey today, David French, the director of the British Institute at Ankara; and Marc Waclkens.
What | owe to their publications may be judged from my footnotes; it is outweighed by what I have learnt at first hand from their efforts to make sense of the material legacy of Hellenistic and Roman Anatolia, which has only begun to receive the attention that it deserves in recent years. The documentary record of Anatolian history
has been extensively and brilliantly explored over the last century; archaeologically most of the region remains terra incognita. It is certain that the picture of the culture and society of Anatolia offered in this book will require alteration in the light of new finds in the years ahead. | am certain that new archacological discoveries and further appraisal of the non-documentary record will be the cause of the most drastic revisions. The index is largely the work of Bill MacKeith and | hope that readers will be as grateful to him as | am.
1 owe a debt of another kind to my family. My parents have been a constant source of moral and material support. The full brunt has fallen on my wife. Only she knows what the effort of composition has cost. I trust to Gocthe’s lines to express the feelings behind my dedication.
Introduction
Anatolia, the vast region of mountains and upland plateaux which extend across the interior of modern Turkey from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea coasts to the Euphrates and to the Syrian desert, is a land mass whose importance may easily elude casual enquiry. In historical times it never contained a great city; it has produced no major writers or thinkers whose works have made a decisive contribution to our collective culture, either in the Western or in the Islamic tradition; and, apart from three widely separated periods—that of the Hittite empire in the second millenium sc; the eleventh to thitteenth centuries AD, when the Seljuks controlled a great kingdom from Konya; and modern times, when Ankara has become the capital of Turkey—Anatolia has not been an independent political unit but part of a larger political structure. Its history has thus often been ignored while attention has focused on the imperial capitals, under whose control it lay.
The story of Anatolia, under Persia, Rome, or Constantinople, is indistinct and ill-articulated. Indeed, like many provinces of larger empires, it is, in one sense, a land without history.
The landscape itself has contributed to this perception of the region’s character. In the words of its most persistent explorer, ‘the plateau is like a continuation of central Asia, vast, immobile, monotonous.’ That description will be instantly familiar to anyone who has taken the night train from the bustle and colour of Istanbul and woken in the early morning to look over the bare, treeless, and dun-coloured steppe between Eskigehir and Ankara. Cicero, who travelled along the highway across the southern part of the Anatolia in 51/50 Bc, had the same experience; and there have been many like him for whom the land and its people offer a dry and dusty monotone, and who cannot wait, if not for the turmoil of Roman republican politics, at least for the culture and variety of the classical cities of the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines.
But for others, who have stopped to observe and absorb, the vast horizons and subtle variations of the Anatolian landscape exercise a powerful spell. ‘The tone everywhere is melancholy, but not devoid of a certain charm
which, after a time, takes an even stronger hold of the mind than the bright varied scenery of the Greek world.’' Charm seems too weak a word with which to describe the fascination, almost the compulsion of a country which, like the desert of Arabia or the steppes of central Asia, has powerfully captured the imagination of travellers and explorers. It is not strange that this should be so, for in one geographical perception the plateau of Anatolia represents the westernmost outpost of central Asia, a continental land mass rudely thrust into Mediterranean surroundings.
A prehistorian has no need to be convinced of the significance of Anatolia in the development of the social organization and material culture of the Old World. It is one of the paradoxes of archaeology that the most dramatic example of quasi-urban development at the beginning of the Neolithic Age should be found in this area, where cities have rarely flourished, at Catal Hiiyiik. The centres of the prehistoric civilizations of ancient Turkey throughout the Bronze Age remained bound to the central plateau, moving from Hacilar in the south-west, to Alaca Hiiyiik, and, in a final culmination, to Bogazkéy, the capital of the Hittite empire, in the north-cast.
In the carly first millenium sc the focus of power moved west to Gordium in Phrygia, the centre of one of the major cultures of the Iron Age.
After the collapse of the Phrygian kingdom at the end of the seventh century Bc, if we discount eighty years of Galatian independence between about 270 and 189 BC, no permanent and autonomous political power established itself on the Anatolian platcau until the end of the cleventh century AD. Indced for the 300 years between the end of the old Phrygian kingdom and the time of Alexander the Great, neither written sources nor archaeological discoverics have much to tell us about its history. Under Persian domination, and in the Hellenistic Age, it was traversed by two famous overland routes, the royal road from Sardis to Susa, and the koine bodos, the common highway, which took a more southerly line from Ephesus to the river Euphrates and beyond.” The royal road linked the Persian court with its western satrapies, and the koine hodos was famous as an artery of trade, but neither couriers nor merchants will have spared much time for the empty expanses which they had to cross in the course of their business.
From the early third century sc the history of Anatolia begins to acquire more substance. From then until the beginning of the seventh century AD, the span of time covered by this study, historical documentation and archaeological evidence can be used to provide a far fuller account of the region, set against the background, first of the history of the Hellenistic kings who inherited the domains of Alexander the Great, and then, above all, of Rome and her empire. Indeed the shadow of imperial domination, whether cast from Rome or from Constantinople, dominated Anatolia’s history for the best part of a millenium, and provided the essential—if changing—backdrop against which Anatolia’s political and social development must be interpreted.
But the relationship between a ruling power and its subject territories has never been onesided. An empire without provinces is no empire, and while Rome, with her possessions in the western as well as the eastern Mediterranean, would have been a major power without Asia Minor, it is arguable whether the same could be said at an earlier period of Persia, still less afterwards of Byzantium and the Ottoman empire. All of Asia Minor’s political masters drew constantly on its resources of manpower and rural economic strength. In the pre-industrial age Anatolia was the chief power house of the Levant.
A hundred years ago it seemed impossible even to Mommssen to make sense of the history of Asia Minor as a whole. Anatolia duly received relatively scanty and superficial treatment in the two classic studies of Rome’s provinces, Mommsen’s own The Provinces of the Roman Empire (1886; English trans. 1909), and Rostovtzeff's Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1st edn. 1926). The yawning gap was handsomely filled with two formidable studies by American historians, T, R. S. Broughton’s Roman Asia Minor (1938), and D. Magie’s Roman Rule in Asia Minor (1950). Both drew together a prodigious quantity of material, but deliberately limited their historical Perspectives, in the first case to the economic conditions of Rome’s provinces in Asia Minor, and in the second to the spread of Roman power, influence, and administrative practices, with their direct and indirect consequences for the region’s development.
Broughton and Magie took full account of the flood of new information concerning Anatolian history which had become available since Mommsen’s day, above all the thousands of inscriptions discovered between around 1880 and 1914. Neither, however, could fully reflect the transformation of our understanding of the history and culture of Asia Minor which was due to the efforts of Louis Robert. Between the 1920s and the 1980s Robert devoted the best part of his genius and his scholarly energies, which were hardly inferior even to Mommsen’s, to the study of Asia Minor.
The historical documentation of the region in the Graeco-Roman period, in particular the epigraphic record, has always been remarkable for its richness and variety. Robert’s achievement was to make sense of and realize the potential of this material, to a degree that would have been unimaginable to a historian of an earlier generation. What Robert has done for the study of ancient history can be fruitfully compared with the contribution of his contemporary, Fernand Braudel, to the study of early modern Europe. In all of Robert’s enormous @uvre geography and the written record, ‘la terre et le papier’, are woven scamlessly into a single historical fabric. Just as Braudel’s Mediterranean is an attempt to realize not the partial but the total history of the Mediterranean world of the sixteenth century, so Robert’s life work, and indeed the studies of many who have been inspired and guided by his example, have transformed our knowledge of Asia Minor to such a degree, that so far from being the region which defied even Mommsen’s historical ambitions, it is now perhaps the one part of the ancient world where the writing of a total history can at least be envisaged as a possibility. The richness of the material evidence, and the astonishing acumen and empathy of Robert’s countless studies, offer a challenge to the historian to produce a book which measures up to the diversity, if not to the totality, of Anatolia’s past.
In an attempt to bring some order to the complex variety of the subject, | have provided these volumes with three central themes, marked off from one another both by chronology and by the nature of their subject matter. The first part takes as its subject the invasion and the settlement of the Celts, who occupied the central Anatolian plateau in the second quarter of the third century sc, and remained the dominant ethnic group there at least until the end of the first century BC. The appearance of these Celtic tribes, the Galatians, and their impact on the cities of the Greek East, provides one of the most important and best-documented episodes in the great expansion and migration of Celtic peoples from central Europe between the fifth and third centuries BC.
The account contains two substantial narrative chapters. Chapter 2 is concerned with the relationship, always uneasy and often violent, between the newcomers and the cities and indigenous peoples of Asia Minor; Chapter 3 documents their role during the first century BC, as Rome’s principal allies at a period when Roman influence, or outright control, was extended over much of Anatolia for the first time. The final chapter of this first part is an attempt to sketch out an ethnography of these castern Celts, and to show that although they were partially assimilated into the culture of Hellenized Asia Minor, they retained many of the distinctive characteristics of their kinsfolk in western Europe.
Under the first emperor Augustus, most of Anatolia was annexed to the Roman empire. Although Roman influence was already strongly marked in the region, provincial status in the new framework of the Roman principate was decisive in shaping the history and organization of Anatolia for the next three centuries. The chapters of the second part of the book are designed to identify, illuminate, and as far as possible explain the crucial changes which the region underwent under Roman rule.
Obviously these included a new administrative structure and a permanent, well-defined military presence. More important, and more characteristic still, was the emergence for the first time of a network of cities in central Asia Minor, and the accompanying growth of urban institutions. With these came radical changes in the pattern of land-ownership and land exploitation, and the systematic integration of the region into the social and economic organization of the Roman empire.
The urban structure of the empire underwent a profound crisis in the third century, plain in Asia Minor as elsewhere, which led to a sharp decline in the visible prosperity and to radical changes in the organization of all but the largest cities. However, behind the appearance of disruption there are strong indications of continuity. Much that was important in the provincial life of the high Roman empire was transmitted over the third century crisis into the world of late Antiquity, first by an uninterrupted classical culture, and then, more crucially, by the resilience of rural institutions and the agricultural economy. The spectacular flowering of urban life between the first and third centuries AD should not be allowed to hide the fact that this had been built on vastly expanded and improved agricultural production, in the villages and on landed
estates. The countryside, which appears to have been far less affected by the adverse conditions of the third century than the cities, remained the key to economic prosperity, and to imperial recovery in the fourth century.
The third part of the study is principally concerned with the culture of the late Roman and early Byzantine period from the third to the seventh century AD. The overriding theme is the emergence and rise of Christianity, which had been introduced to Anatolia by St Paul within a generation of the Crucifixion. To take this perspective does not entail losing sight of wider issues of social and political history. For one thing, the overwhelming majority of sources for this later period are, in one way or another, connected with the Church: ecclesiastical histories, the lives of saints, or the letters and sermons of bishops, which often touch on matters beyond the doctrinal or purely theological concerns of the Church, For another, and much more significantly, the lives of both communities and individuals were increasingly dominated by the Church, to the extent that it became not only the chief, but almost the only source of political power in a regional context, and provided by far the most important structures and principles according to which society was organized. With the decline of the autonomous civic life of the imperial period, the role of bishops and other church leaders became all-important, both in exercising authority locally over their congregations, and in establishing relationships between their communities and the emperors, who were now based in Constantinople.
The organization of the hierarchy of the early Church reflected the administrative structure of the Roman empire; authority was vested in bishops, who resided in the cities. The influence of a bishop was confined by the status and standing of his city. Even during the fourth century a bishop was hard-pressed to exercise control or moral authority over rural society, and conditions favoured the emergence of an independent, less political Christian tradition, whose moral strength was derived from conspicuous asceticism. The development of the monastic movement in Asia Minor, as elsewhere, reflected and was abetted by the decline of civic institutions.
The decline of the cities led to a renewed emphasis on the rural communities, and it is no coincidence that evidence from late antiquity brings us closer to the realities of rural life in Anatolia than almost any evidence that has survived from the Hellenistic or Roman periods. The chief resource of Anatolia has always been its land, which sustained the two principal occupations of the peasant population, agriculture and stock-raising. Fittingly, therefore, the work can end by analysing an account of the mid-seventh-century Life of St Theodore of Sykeon, which is richer in details about rural life, agricultural production, and village organization than any other single source for Anatolia in Antiquity. Theodore’s Life also provides by far the most explicit illustrations of the nature of popular Christian belief and the power-structure of Christian society in an age where the authority of the bishops had greatly diminished.
Within a few years of the death of Theodore in ap 613 the Persians, under Chosroes, invaded Anatolia. According to one interpretation that invasion, and the Byzantine response to it, brought to an end the whole classical period of Graeco-Roman Antiquity in Asia Minor.‘ The truth of this theory is subject to debate, and it is doubtless facile and arbitrary to divide up the seamless fabric of history by eras and periods, but the Persian invasions of the early seventh century AD provide a stopping point that is more convenient and convincing than most. They herald, for Anatolia at least, a genuine Dark Age. During the rest of the seventh and eighth centuries almost the entire history of central Asia Minor remains impenetrably obscure.
The geographical scope of the book requires further definition. In Antiquity Anatolia was clearly differentiated from the Mediterranean and Aegean coasts. The lonians of the fifth century sc looked on Anatolia as ‘up-country’, ta dvw tho ‘Iwving ywpla, and the same terminology was used during the Roman empire to describe the interior parts of western Asia Minor by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles; and by a native of the region, Aelius Aristides, in his Sacred Tales.’ Nevertheless, despite the obvious and recognized differences between the coastlands and the interior, it is virtually impossible to set a dividing line between the two, and thus establish a clear cut-off point for the material which has been included and studied. Neither administrative nor geographical boundaries will serve adequately.
The boundaries of Roman provinces have often been used to define areas of regional study in the ancient world. That is desirable where Roman provinces coincided with existing cultural or economic units, and particularly where the main object of investigation is the impact of a particular pattern of Roman administration on the region in question. It is inappropriate in this case, both because the Roman division of Asia Minor into provinces notoriously cut across cultural and other pre-existing boundaries (see below, Ch. 11 §1), and because the book as a whole is not intended, except briefly in Chapter 5 and incidentally elsewhere, to illuminate the structure and pattern of Roman administration.
Furthermore, in Asia Minor more than in any other part of the empire, provincial boundaries were frequently altered. This is true both for the late republic, when Roman provinces were acquired haphazardly in the course of war and diplomacy, and were in any case often better defined as areas of operations than as geographically distinct regions with fixed frontiers; and more unusually for the imperial period, when provincial boundaries elsewhere in the empire usually remained stable, at least until the radical reorganizations of the third and fourth centuries AD.
In Anatolia, however, except for the proconsular province of Asia which remained unaltered from the time of Augustus to around 250 AD, boundaries were frequently redrawn. I have attempted in Vol. II, Appendix x to establish the chronology and extent of these many changes, but have made no systematic attempt to explain them. The sources are largely silent about the reasons for these alterations, which may be sought in administrative practice, in the overall thrust of Roman foreign policy, or in the vagaries of local history.’ Similarly, I have attempted no more than a bare record of the changing provincial boundaries of the late empire, until the time of Justinian, in Vol. Il, Appendix 2. Although the sources preserve important information about the division of Cappadocia in aD 371 (see Vol. I], Ch. 17 §v at n. 196; App. 2 at n. 55), and for the new arrangements introduced by Justinian in aD 535 for Pontus, Paphlagonia, Cappadocia, Armenia, Isauria, Lycaonia, and Pisidia,® as a rule specific contemporary evidence about the reasons for these changes is as sparse as in the earlier period.
Natural boundaries have more permanence than administrative frontiers, and the basic geography of inland Anatolia changed little throughout Antiquity. There was no drastic geomorphological change in the interior, as occurred along the west and south coasts of Turkey, where the aggradation of river silt and changes in the sea level radically altered the fortunes of some coastal cities.
As far as the limited evidence allows us to judge, the vegetation cover of the interior also remained broadly similar from the early Hellenistic period until the end of Antiquity. Doubtless intensive agricultural exploitation and widespread timber cutting in the Roman imperial period brought previously untilled land under cultivation (see below, Chs. 10 § 1) and 14 §111), and eroded the forest cover in specific locations, but not to the extent of fundamentally altering the landscape’s appearance. The central Anatolian plateau was as treeless in Antiquity as it is today (Ch. 1o §1); despite the heavy exploitation of the timber forests of Bithynia, Paphlagonia, and Pontus in the north;? Mysia in the north-west;'® and Lycia and Cilicia in the south,’' the tree cover was not destroyed or significantly reduced.
Coastland and interior were separated not by clear divisions but by gradual zones of transition. In the north and south, it is true, the Pontic mountain chains and the Taurus range present formidable barriers between the sea and the central plateau, but to the east and west the limits cannot be so simply drawn. The land rises gradually from the Aegean in the west. The boundary between the Mediterranean zone and that of the continental interior is irregular since the low-lying basins of the major rivers, the Caicus, Hermus, Cayster, and Maeander, allow a Mediterranean style of cultivation far into the interior, while the hilly country that separates them brings the world of inner Anatolia close to the coast. Lydia, Mysia, and Caria occupy transitional geographical zones between the coastlands and the higher plains of Phrygia, many of which lie close to 1,000 metres above sea level.
To the east, Galatia and Lycaonia form a basin in the centre of the peninsula at a slightly lower median altitude, whose terrain is for the most part flatter than that of Phrygia. This extends as far as the river Halys, where the country begins to climb again, through Pontus and Cappadocia, as far as the next major line of demarcation, the upper valley of the river Euphrates. Any line drawn across the unfolding interior of Turkey, as it rises in gradual steps from the west to the highlands beyond the Euphrates, is necessarily an arbitrary one.
Culture and human settlement offer a third useful criterion by which to define the interior of Anatolia. The Phrygians, Mysians, Lydians, and other native peoples of the interior are distinguishable from one another (though often with difficulty), and can themselves be subdivided into smaller ethnic or tribal units. However, they had important features in common which set them apart in turn from the peoples of the Pontic mountain chains in the north and of the Taurus mountains in the south: settlement in agricultural villages (see below, Ch. 11 §§1t11—1V), linguistic similarities which are especially clear in the onomastic evidence (Ch. 11 §11), and a shared religious culture (Chs. 11 § v and Vol. II, Ch. 16 §§ 1-111). One negative cultural criterion is even more pronounced.
Little of the interior of Anatolia was Hellenized before the emergence of Roman rule in the late Hellenistic and early imperial period. ‘Apart from a handful of exceptional communities founded by Hellenistic rulers, which were designed to protect their territory in western Asia Minor or to establish the land route between the Aegean and Syria along the valleys of the Maeander and the Lycus and then across the northern edge of Pisidia, there were virtually no Greek cities in Phrygia, Lydia, Galatia, Lycaonia, or further east.
This cultural criterion offers a valuable distinction between the world of inner Anatolia and, for instance, the highland communities of Pisidia, whose inhabitants, despite their reputation for barbarian intransigence, had been profoundly Hellenized during the third and second centuries Bc.'* Although central Anatolia was part of Alexander’s empire, and was claimed as territory by his Hellenistic successors, it was in no sense integrated into the classical Greek world. The adventurous Macedonian settlers, who made a home on the fringes of the central plateau in the late fourth and third century BC, occupied isolated oases in what, for a Greek, was a cultural desert (see below, Ch. 7 §11). It is no wonder that the Seleucids and the Attalids strove to confine the Galatian invaders, whom they represented as the archetypal enemics of Greck civilization and culture (Ch. 2 §111), in the centre of Anatolia around Ancyra.
The character of Anatolia under Roman rule, and the consequences of integrating the region into the Roman empire, are not best studied by limiting oneself to a single province, even to one which covered as broad an area as Galatia-Cappadocia in the time of Trajan. In Part Il, therefore, | have largely ignored Roman provincial boundaries and have extended coverage to any area of the interior where evidence survives to illustrate important themes in the region’s development between the principate of Augustus and the third century aD. The early stages of urbanization can be followed clearly in Galatia, Lycaonia, and Pontus, where towns were virtually unknown before the introduction of Roman rule, and where it was essential to create a network of cities with dependent territories in order that the existing machinery of Roman administration could function at all (Ch. 7). The imperial cult, whose overall significance in the development of Roman Asia Minor has been the subject of an outstanding recent study,'* had a key role to play as a vehicle for urbanization in these previously uncivilized regions (Ch. 8). On the other hand the later development of a provincial urban culture in Anatolia can only be studied in cities where inscriptions, coins, and monumental remains are more abundant, and it is necessary to look to Bithynia, Phrygia, and to the mountainous zones of the south, to form a sharper impression of city life during the heyday of the second and third centuries AD (Ch, 12).
The foundation of cities, which flourished only for a relatively brief period in the long evolution of Anatolian history, modified but did not supersede the indigenous pattern of settlement which has, in many respects, persisted until the present day. Asia Minor as a whole, and in particular the interior, remained a land of villages, many of which belonged to large landed estates. The core of any general investigation of Asia Minor must be a study of the countryside. Since there have been virtually no archaeological surveys or excavations devoted to rural settlements between the Hellenistic and Byzantine periods, attention must be focused on the country regions which have produced large numbers of gravestones, votive steles, and other inscriptions; notably Phrygia, a huge area which spanned the provincial boundary dividing Asia from Galatia; and Lydia (Ch. 11).
The evidence for landed estates, their proprietors and administrative personnel, which were another key feature of Roman domination, may be well studied in the central Anatolian plateau. The results of this investigation can be controlled, and interesting differences observed, by surveying the plentiful evidence which also exists in Phrygia, Bithynia, and northern Lydia (Ch. ro).
Roman rule was enforced, where necessary, by a military presence. In the reign of Augustus this was concentrated in and around the Pisidian section of the Taurus, whose tribesmen and cities had successfully resisted all attempts by Hellenistic kings to control them, and who therefore offered a constant threat not only to neighbouring regions, but also to the land routes running between western Asia Minor, the south coast, and Syria. The pacification of the Taurus was essential if Anatolia was to be integrated successfully into the empire. Military activity, the foundation of a network of colonies of veteran soldiers, and the construction of a major highway, the via Sebaste, offer a paradigm example of Roman methods of subduing mountainous zones (Ch. 6).
Thereafter the focus of military attention moved to the upper Euphrates frontier, where permanent garrisons were stationed from the early years of Vespasian. The history of this fortified frontier lies beyond the scope of this study, but its impact on the remainder of the Anatolian hinterland was profound. Roads, regular movements of supplies and troops, military contingents stationed at key points in the communications network, recruitment for legions and for auxiliary contingents, and the resettlement of veterans, not in colonies but viritim in their former communities or near the post where they had served, were important ways in which the military presence on the Euphrates directly affected the inhabitants of central Asia Minor. The military influence is naturally most pronounced in areas which lay on the direct routes to the frontier but it is necessary to cast the net wide to take in the evidence for smaller military units, which were stationed elsewhere in Anatolia, especially in mountain regions (Ch. 9).
Asia Minor in the later first and second centuries AD was not primarily controlled by demonstrations of military force, and soldiers were rarely to be seen in most of the cities of the interior and in the countryside off the main roads. This state of affairs altered drastically at the beginning of the third century, when military movements and the consequences of military deployment made a much wider impact on civilian life. In order to understand the changes of this period it is necessary to range over the whole peninsula, taking in the external threats from Goths in the north and northeast, and from the Sassanians in the south-east, which prompted not only very intensive troop movements along the main military axis which linked the Balkans with Syria, but also self-defence measures in cities across the whole of Asia Minor (Ch. 13).
In assessing the impact of Roman rule on Anatolia the focus has to move from one area to another according to the subject and period under scrutiny. The same remains true in tracing the rise of Christianity and the gradual recession of traditional forms of pagan worship. The Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians throw an intense spotlight on a very restricted area at a narrowly defined period, the south Galatian communitics, above all Pisidian Antioch, where Paul preached in the middle of the first century ap (Vol. II, Ch. 15). Christianity did not establish a firm hold on large numbers of the population before the third century ap. The distribution of evidence requires that attention is transferred to Lydia and Phrygia, whose inscriptions give the best picture of an intelligible pattern of pagan worship, and to Phrygia alone for the emergence of powerful Jewish and Christian communities, which were well established by AD 250 both in the cities and also in many villages of this predominantly rural environment. Anatolian pagan beliefs, which were accompanied by a severe moral code, provided soil where Judaism and Christianity readily took root (Ch. 16).
From the fourth century onwards, attention again shifts castwards, above all to Cappadocia, where the enormous literature produced by the three great Fathers of the Cappadocian Church makes it possible to study in detail what the conversion of a whole Anatolian region to Christianity meant for the structure, organization, and practices of society. The picture of a new Orthodox Christian world in Cappadocia invites comparison with contemporary developments in Galatia, where paganism was more deeply entrenched, particularly among, intellectual circles at Ancyra; and in Phrygia and Lycaonia, where the traditional morality of the rural population provided a solid foundation for the development of the rigorist Novatian Church (Ch. 17).
After the fourth century the evidence becomes too fragmented for these regional differences to be properly observed. The growth of monasticism and ascetic practices appears to have had an important part to play in the transformation of Christian society in the fifth and sixth centuries, but it is easier to form hypotheses about these developments than to test their general validity (Ch. 18). The most revealing fifth-century source for the beliefs and behaviour of a Christian ascetic community, the Life and Miracles of St Thecla, illuminates the world of the southern city of Seleuceia on the Calycadnus and its neighbourhood, a region which looked more to Syria and to the East than to Anatolia north of the Taurus.'° The balance cannot be redressed until the late sixth and carly seventh century, when the Life of Theodore of Sykeon draws attention once more to the north-west corner of the central Anatolian plateau, an area of Galatia which enjoyed close relations with Nicomedia in Bithynia and with the capital Constantinople (Ch. 19).
The decision to range widely across the landscape of Anatolia in the second and third parts of this book, therefore, has been determined in large part by the survival of evidence which can throw light on the dominant themes of Anatolian history in the first seven centuries AD. 1] hope that what has been lost in rejecting a precise geographical definition is compensated by the wider overall view that this approach entails.
As those who have worked on the study of Asia Minor well know, the historical material, in the form of literary texts, inscriptions, locally minted coins, and archaeological remains, is extraordinarily abundant but often not easily accessible. The dispersion of the evidence has discouraged attempts at historical synthesis. It need hardly be said that much of the published work on Asia Minor is of extraordinarily high interest and quality, but it has concentrated on the clucidation of specific topics, and especially on explaining the significance of particular inscriptions and other documents. It is difficult for those not already familiar with this detailed evidence to make headway in a world of highly specialized study. In this book, I have cited a very wide range of evidence, drawn from this specialized work, in order to throw light on the broader problems of Anatolia’s history. Sometimes this accumulation of material makes clarity of exposition difficult to attain, but 1 have generally preferred to retain rather than excise material for two reasons. Firstly, direct citation or summary allusion to the particulars of the evidence provides far more immediate access to the world of ancient Anatolia than a more hypothetical reconstruction of social and historical developments. Secondly, ] have been conscious of the need to provide those interested in the subject with a map to this historical terrain, on which they will be able to identify as many landmarks as possible.
I anticipate that readers may be interested not only in the overall exposition of the subject matter, but also in the abundant brief allusions to items in the historical record, to which they may attach a particular significance. The footnotes at these points draw attention to published discussions which take the investigation further than is possible in a general study. Since the geographical range of the work is so wide, and the topography both of ancient Anatolia and of modern Turkey is unfamiliar to many, I] have also used maps as generously as possible to make the subject more accessible and intelligible.
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