THE PRESENCE OF CILICIA AND ITS TOWNS IN THE GREEK WRITERS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (I-II Cent. A.D.)

Yıl 2003, Sayı: 8, 123 - 144, 01.11.2003

Paolo Desıderı

Öz

THE PRESENCE OF CILICIA AND ITS TOWNS IN THE GREEK WRITERS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (I-II Cent. A.D.)

Öz

Two and a half years ago, on the occasion of the second meeting on
Cicilia which was held in Istanbul1, I had the opportunity of once again
examining two of the most interesting speeches of the Bithynian sophist
Dio of Prusa2. These speeches, which were delivered to the general assembly
of the Cilician metropolis Tarsus, offer the possibility of tracing the
elements of the social and political situation of this great town and of the
territory of the Roman province of Cilicia, in the period from the Flavians
to the first years of the reign of Trajan. From this point of view, no other
written text of the first to the beginning of the third centuries of our era
can be compared with these Dionean lÒgoi, which provide first hand
information about the internal enmities between citizens and non-citizens,
the external feuds with other towns of the province, or the troubled
relations with the Roman governors3. In any case, there are, in this same
period, many other “literary” texts –in the broad sense of texts preserved
thanks to a manuscript tradition, besides any other consideration– which
can be profitably scrutinised in order to obtain more evidence about our
region, its towns, and its geographical and environmental elements.
Therefore, today I’d like to propose some reflections upon a selection of
this kind of texts, excluding in particular the Christian ones (since one of
our colleagues is going to speak on Paulus of Tarsus), with the aim of
recovering the idea(s) of Cilicia of which each text can be considered the
bearer. Indeed, none of these testimonies have the immediacy of Dio’s
speeches, which build up a vivid, though biased, picture of a dramatic
moment in the history of the region. On the contrary, they are all embedded
–so to say– in some particular context, which will have to be filteredin
order to arrive at the result we are interested in.

Kaynakça

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