Roman Syria

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Roman Syria began its life not as a conquest but as a disposal. In 64 BCE, Pompey the Great had the last Seleucid king, Antiochus XIII Asiaticus, executed and installed a Roman governor in his place. What had been the rump of a once-vast empire became, overnight, a Roman province at the edge of the known world. The man Pompey chose to run it was Marcus Aemilius Scaurus, the first in a long line of governors who would grapple with the same fundamental challenge: how do you hold together a territory that had never been one thing? The Aramaic-speaking farmers of the inland plains, the Greek-speaking merchants of Antioch and Apamea, the Phoenician traders along the coast, the Arab clans of Hauran and Trachonitis, the Jews of Judaea, the caravan city of Palmyra with its mix of Aramaeans, Arabs, and Amorites - all of them now subjects of Rome, whether they knew it yet or not. This documentary traces how Rome tried to govern that mosaic, how it repeatedly redrew the map when governing became too hard, and how a series of catastrophes in the third century nearly tore the whole arrangement apart. Along the way, it asks a quieter question: what did it actually mean to be Syrian under Roman rule?

• 2. Pompey's Annexation

  ›

  Pompey's arrival in Syria in 64 BCE came at the tail end of the Third Mithridatic War. The immediate trigger was the defeat of Tigranes the Great, King of Armenia, who had made himself the protector of the Seleucid dynasty. With Tigranes broken, the Seleucids had no shield left. Pompey had Antiochus XIII Asiaticus executed. His successor, Philip II Philoromaeus, was deposed rather than killed, but the dynasty was finished either way. Marcus Aemilius Scaurus took up the governorship, and Syria formally joined the Republic's growing list of eastern provinces. During the early empire that followed the Republic's fall, the Roman army in Syria maintained three legions with auxiliaries. Their primary job was watching the Parthian border to the east. The province sat between two of the ancient world's great military powers, which meant its governors carried unusual weight. As the historian Theodor Mommsen would later note, the governor of Syria held for a long time alone in all of Asia a command of the first rank. That distinction would eventually become a liability.

• 3. A Fractured South

  ›

  In 6 AD, Emperor Augustus moved to consolidate the region's complicated southern patchwork. He deposed the ethnarch Herod Archelaus and merged Judea, Samaria, and Idumea into a new Roman province of Judea, placed under the direct authority of the Legate of Syria, Publius Sulpicius Quirinius. Quirinius in turn appointed Coponius as Prefect of Judea. The arrangement was a nested one: a legate overseeing a prefect, with the Syrian governor holding ultimate authority. That structure came under stress as the Herodian client kingdoms were wound down one by one. After the death of Herod Philip II in 34 AD and the removal of Herod Antipas in 39 AD, Ituraea, Trachonitis, Galilee, and Perea were all absorbed into Syria's jurisdiction. From 37 to 41 AD, a brief reversal: much of the southern region was peeled off to become a client kingdom under Herod Agrippa I. After Agrippa's death his kingdom was slowly re-absorbed, and the process was only finally complete after the death of Herod Agrippa II. The administrative map of Roman Syria's southern borderlands was, in short, never fixed for long. It shifted with each death, each deposition, each political arrangement between Rome and its client rulers.

• 4. War and the Road to Empire

  ›

  The First Jewish-Roman War of 66-70 AD pulled Syria's legions into a conflict that would reshape Roman politics at the highest level. In 66 AD, Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria, marched the Syrian army south to restore order in Judaea. His core force was Legio XII Fulminata, backed by auxiliary troops. At the Battle of Beth Horon, Jewish rebels ambushed and destroyed the legion - a result, the sources note, that shocked Roman leadership. The disaster forced Rome to send someone with greater resources and stature. That man was Vespasian, the future emperor. He took charge of the campaign to subdue the revolt, drawing on Syrian units for support. In the summer of 69 AD, with the war still unresolved, Vespasian used his position and those same Syrian forces to launch a bid for the imperial throne. He defeated his rival Vitellius and ruled for ten years before being succeeded by his son Titus. Syria's armies had, in effect, made an emperor - echoing what Mommsen described as the province's earlier role when its governor Vespasian had done the same. The province would do something similar again, though with a very different outcome, in the third century.

• 5. Division and Diminishment

  ›

  Septimius Severus arrived in Syria after putting down a rival. The province had backed Niger for emperor, with the capital Antioch holding out against Severus with particular resistance. Once he prevailed, Severus reordered the province as punishment and policy combined. He split Syria proper into two halves: Syria Coele in the north, with Antioch as its capital, and Syria Phoenice in the south, with Tyre as its capital. The northern governor received two legions; the southern governor received one. Mommsen, quoting the decision directly, called it the moment when Severus finally withdrew the first place in the Roman military hierarchy from the Syrian governor. The Hadrianic reform had already started this erosion: Hadrian had earlier taken one of the governor's four legions and given it to the governor of Palestine. Severus completed what Hadrian began. By the late second century, notable Syrians had also begun appearing in the Roman Senate itself. Claudius Pompeianus and Avidius Cassius were among them. The province was shrinking in military terms but expanding its reach into Roman civic life.

• 6. Crisis, Conquest, and Palmyra

  ›

  In 244 AD, Rome had a Syrian emperor. Marcus Iulius Philippus, known to history as Philip the Arab, came from Philippopolis in the province of Arabia Petraea - modern-day Shahba. He became the 33rd emperor of Rome at the moment of the city's millennial celebration. His rise was a measure of how thoroughly provincial elites had threaded themselves into the Roman imperial system. But the province he came from was about to suffer serious damage. In 252 or 253 AD - the date remains disputed - a Roman field army was destroyed at the Battle of Barbalissos by the Persian king Shapur I. The defeat left the Euphrates unguarded. The Persians pillaged the region. In 259 or 260 AD, Shapur I struck again, defeating another Roman field army and capturing the emperor Valerian alive at the Battle of Edessa. Cities were taken, sacked, and pillaged a second time. Syria's ordeal continued. From 268 to 273, the province was absorbed into the breakaway Palmyrene Empire, a state that had grown from the caravan city that once counted Aramaeans, Arabs, and Amorites among its population. Rome eventually recovered Syria, but the province that emerged was smaller and more fragmented than the one that had existed before Shapur I's campaigns.

• 7. People and Identity

  ›

  Estimates for the population of the entire Levant in the 1st century range from 3.5-4 million to 6 million people - levels not matched again until the 19th century. The distribution across that population was uneven in ways that mattered culturally. Rural inland Syria was predominantly Aramaic-speaking, descended from West Semitic peoples. Arabs dominated Hauran, Trachonitis, and Emesa. The Phoenician coast retained a Phoenician-speaking majority well into the end of the 2nd century, with Tyre, Sidon, and Berytus as its main centers. Greeks held the Hellenistic urban cores - Antioch, Apamea, Cyrrhus, and the cities of the Decapolis - settlements that had been founded under Seleucid patronage. The peak populations are striking. Antioch and Palmyra each reached between 200,000 and 250,000 inhabitants at their height. Apamea counted 117,000 free citizens around 6 AD. Combined with dependent villages, Apamea and Cyrrhus may each have reached 500,000. Even the sparsely settled Syrian Coastal Mountain Range held around 40,000-50,000 people. What held all of this together was not a shared culture but a shared framework. Unlike Jews, who maintained collective historical memory as a unifying force, Syrians had no equivalent. Greek civic structures and Roman imperial narratives provided the common vocabulary. The word Syrian, in practice, functioned more as a geographical label than an ethnic or cultural identity.

• 8. Byzantine Inheritance

  ›

  After Diocletian's reforms, Syria Coele was folded into the Diocese of the East. Sometime between 330 and 350 AD, likely around 341, the new province of Euphratensis was carved from Syria Coele's territory along the western Euphrates and the former Kingdom of Commagene, with Hierapolis as its capital. After around 415, Syria Coele split again: Syria I, or Syria Prima, kept its capital at Antioch; Syria II, or Syria Secunda, established its capital at Apamea on the Orontes. In 528, the emperor Justinian I created the small coastal province of Theodorias from territory belonging to both. The Diocese of the East that contained all of this was, by Byzantine reckoning, one of the major commercial, agricultural, religious, and intellectual zones of the empire. Its exposed position facing the Sassanid Empire gave it military weight as well. That exposure proved decisive. Sassanian forces occupied the region between 609 and 628, before the emperor Heraclius reconquered it. Then came the Battle of Yarmouk and the fall of Antioch to advancing Muslim armies. The city of Antioch was retaken by the Byzantine emperor Nikephorus Phocas in 963, along with other parts of the region then under Hamdanid rule. But a Muslim reconquest followed in the late 970s, led by the Fatimid Caliphate. The Seljuks finally captured Antioch in 1084, after three decades of incursions. The Comnenii recovered the city in the 12th century, though by then it was considered part of Asia Minor rather than Syria - a geographical reclassification that marked, in its quiet way, the end of the Roman Syrian world.