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

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.

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