The Roman conquests in the western Mediterranean saw the arrival of Roman coins, but in the east the local coinages at first remained and were manipulated.

Chapter 2 considers the so-called cradle of Christian martyrdom: Second-century Asia Minor. Beginning with an analysis of the economic, political, and social relationships between Christian, Jewish, and Greek social structures in the face of the Roman Empire’s centralization of power, I outline the circumstances of Christian martyrs during the first centuries following Jesus’ death. Using legal statutes alongside letters between Pliny the Younger and the emperor Trajan, I analyze the contours and relative scope and depth of Roman persecution. Through an analysis of the language used by Christian theologians and the period’s popular Acta Martyrum, I consider the way martyrdom was performed in recognition of a separate pax Deorum—agreement with God—that challenged that of the Roman state. I proceed to show how martyrs were interpreted as imitators of Christ’s sacrifice, and the meaning that designation brought to martyrs and their audience. Finally, I highlight the parrhēsia—bold, free speech—demonstrated in martyrdom to articulate the centrality of truth-telling to Christian martyrs, a theme to which I return throughout the book.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the anonymous Stadiasmos, written no later than the 3rd century AD but possibly as early as the 1st, whose surviving extracts add up to a gazetteer of towns, harbour facilities, and distances from Tunisia around the eastern Mediterranean as far as the southern Aegean. The chapter introduction discusses the author’s use of technical terms and their meanings, and the work’s relationship to the Latin Maritime Itinerary, suggesting that in light of its detailed navigational content it was probably a ‘piloting manual’ rather than a desk-based study for an ‘armchair geographer’ or an administrative document. Four new maps show a selection of places along the coasts described.

Alexander III inherited the Persian campaign from his father Philip II, who had aimed to conquer Asia Minor, probably in order to secure a permanent source of income from the revenues of its rich cities. Going further, Alexander ended the reign of the Achaemenid dynasty established by Darius I in 522/21 BC and campaigned to the borders of Achaemenid influence in the Indus region. Contrary to the panhellenic propaganda preserved by the Alexander historiographers, the war was about the acquisition of territory, influence and wealth – not a war of ‘liberation’ or ‘reprisal’. Since there exists no Persian historiography and the extant numismatic, administrative and archaeological sources reveal little of political history, it is difficult to view the events from a Persian perspective. However, scholarship’s traditional biased images of the Persian empire as weak, chaotic, compromised by decadence and inner strife, and hence doomed to fall, have come to be rejected as reflecting Greek and Roman stereotypes. In current scholarship, it is stressed that Alexander appropriated and adapted most of the political and administrative structures of the Achaemenid empire: it was the existing system that supported his conquest.

This chapter argues that the authorial persona of Herodotus Book 2 is much closer to that of the rest of his work, and suggests that Herodotus’ use of speeches in historical narrative was not (as suggested by Fornara) a momentous innovation but a technique he owed to narrative elegy, some of it presenting as early as the seventh century an account of conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks in western Asia Minor.

This book is concerned with a region, and a regional culture, which in antiquity neither formed a distinct political unit nor served as a focus of local identity; the region is therefore designated with an invented name, ‘Hieradoumia’. The boundaries of Hieradoumia in time and space are defined on the basis of a distinctive shared set of commemorative practices. The institutional history of the region in the pre-Roman period is described in detail, with emphasis on the unusual political organization of the region in the later Hellenistic period into two large federal associations of villages (the koinon of the Maionians in the Katakekaumene and the dēmos of the Mysoi Abbaitai). The polis was a late and marginal development in Hieradoumia, and the village continued to be the primary focus of local identity and loyalty down to the end of antiquity. The difficulty of disentangling ethnically Lydian, Mysian, Macedonian, Phrygian, and Greek elements in the region’s population and cultural practices is emphasized.

The chapter surveys the economy of Asia Minor from the late archaic period to the end of the Hellenistic era. Asia Minor forms the largest land mass in the northern Mediterranean and is characterized by a diverse geography with different levels of integration into the Greek world and its economy. Throughout time, urbanization significantly intensified; nevertheless, many regions preserved a rural character. Agriculture was most important, in both the land of the poleis and land controlled by the Achaemenid and Hellenistic kings. Production was directed to local needs, but some agrarian products also served as exports; non-agrarian production was less significant. Asia Minor was rich in natural resources, and fishing was important in a few coastal cities. The birthplace of coinage in the late seventh century, Asia Minor saw the circulation of many coinages over time and was highly monetarized at least by the end of the Hellenistic period. These coinages mirror the frequent changes in a political landscape that was characterized by different strata of authority, from the royal administration down to the city-states and villages. Through taxation, public expenditures, and by securing an institutional framework, these authorities shaped the complex conglomerate of Asia Minor’s economy.

In the Hellenistic period, cities were the cornerstones of imperial rule. Cities were the loci for the acquisition of capital and manpower, and imperial agents (philoi) were recruited for a large part among Greek civic elites. This chapter departs from the dual premise that premodern empires are negotiated enterprises and that they are often networks of interaction rather than territorial states. The relentless competition between three rival superpowers in the Hellenistic Aegean – the Seleukid, Ptolemaic and Antigonid Empires – gave cities a good bargaining position vis-à-vis these empires. The fact that the imperial courts were dominated by philoi from the Aegean poleis moreover meant that these cities held a central and privileged place in Hellenistic imperialism, and benefited greatly from it. Royal benefactions structured imperial-local interactions. They were instrumental in a complex of reciprocal gift-exchange between empires and cities. Empires most of all needed capital, loyalty and military support. As kings were usually short of funds, the gifts by which they hoped to win the support of cities against their rivals often came in the form of immaterial benefactions like the granting of privileges and the protection of civic autonomy.

After brief discussion of the manuscript evidence for the Epistula Apostolorum, the primary focus of the Introduction is on questions of genre and provenance. While the (modern) Latin title presents this text as a letter, its focus on revelation also links it to Christian apocalyptic texts. Yet the Epistula is most fundamentally a gospel, with close thematic connections to other early gospel literature, especially the Gospels of Matthew and John, of which the author makes selective use at a number of points. While a question-and-answer session between Jesus and his disciples on Easter morning occupies the bulk of the text, it also includes a collection of miracle stories and an account of the ascension, confirming its gospel-like character. To describe it as an ‘apocryphal’ gospel is, however, anachronistic given its early date. References to the apostle John and the heretic Cerinthus suggest an Asian provenance, and a date of around 170 CE would account both for Jesus’ announcement of his return after 150 years and for the emphasis on the worldwide plague expected to precede that return, identifiable as the ‘great plague’ spoken of by Galen and later writers.

The Treaty of London detailed the post-war Italian gains and wartime inter-allied coordination in Europe, but it only vaguely mentioned the colonies. Negotiations over the post-war colonial settlement revealed how little British and Italian goals really overlapped.