ABSTRACT
There was no major change in the Syrian population base in the early Roman period. The Greek or Hellenised elite remained the upper stratum. Others, however, could become eligible for Roman citizenship. Some recent studies have assumed nascent tensions between the Greek-Roman or assimilated ruling classes and the Semitic base population. There is also a trend to identify a form of Arab nationalism 1,900 years before the event. While such tensions probably did exist, the recent study by Millar on The Roman Near East 31 BC to AD 337 shows a fairly consistent pattern of a largely Aramaean population submitting itself to a gradual process of Hellenisation. The process, however, had its limits and it is worth noting that no Syrians from the local aristocracy held political office in Rome for a very long time; no senators until the Flavian period, for example. Those major figures who eventually gravitated to Rome in the second century AD were descendants of the deposed Semitic princes. A recent writer has warned ‘we must beware of assuming that the emphasis on ethnicity as a primary form of self-identification that we see in modern contexts was equally important in the Roman Empire’.1 Equally it would be foolish to assume that a ‘multicultural’ paradise prevailed. There was certainly a process of ‘mutual enrichment of cultures’ of which the Hellenic tradition was one among many rather than a ruthless drive towards integration. In areas adjacent to the steppe, groups such as the Nabataeans or the Palmyrenes retained their own languages and scripts. The medium of administration and of civic life, however, was fundamentally Greek which, even if not the first language of the majority, was accessible to them.
