Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 46 (2009) 81-96 Antinoite Citizenship under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius A Prosopographical Study of the First Thirty Years of Antinoopolis Myrto Malouta University of Oxford Abstract Prosopography of Antinoite citizens attested in 130-161 with com- ments about the composition of the citizen body. This paper is a prosopographical study of the first thirty years in the history of Antinoopolis and aims to identify the key issues associated with Antinoite citizenship under Hadrian and Antoninus Pius.1 Antinoopolis was founded by Hadrian in AD 130, during his extensive travels through the empire. The city was named after Hadrian’s favourite, Antinoos, a Greek boy from Bithynia, who had recently drowned in the Nile. The new foundation was much more than just a memorial to Antinoos, and the value attached to it by the emperor himself2 enhanced the political significance of the city.I ts importance persisted in the centuries that followed, and Antinoopolis even became the administra- tive capital of the province of the Thebaid in the Byzantine period. What was special about Antinoopolis in comparison with other Roman foundations3 was that it was designed to be a Greek polis. Apart from Alex- 1 I wish to thank Roger Bagnall for the invitation to participate in the Inaugural Sather Conference in Berkeley, where an earlier version of this paper was given. 2 For his new foundation Hadrian himself chose the site in Middle Egypt, opposite Hermopolis, where, according to Dio Cassius 69.11.3, Antinoos had drowned. 3 E. Kühn, Antinoopolis. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Hellenismus im römischen Ägypten (Göttingen 1913) 85, reports that W. Weber, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Hadrianus (Leipzig 1907) claimed that the Roman colony Aelia Capitolina was also founded in 130 and colonised with Greeks (on the basis of Dio Cassius 69.12.2 and Zonaras, Epit.Hist. 11.23; might it be that the latter actually confused this with Antinoopolis?). 82 Myrto Malouta andria, Egypt already had two Greek cities, Naucratis in Lower Egypt and Ptolemais in Upper Egypt. Although Antinoopolis was meant to fit in with the other Greek cities in Egypt, Antinoite citizenship stands out because of the way it was acquired. More is known about Antinoite citizenship than about the citizenship of Ptolemais and Naucratis, but much is also known about Alexandrian citizenship.4 Its character of Greek polis comes out in both the organisation of Anti- noopolis and the identity of the people who were chosen to colonise it. The citizens were organised in phylai and demes and possessed a council – the only one securely attested in Egypt apart from that of Ptolemais. The laws imple- mented in the new city were those of Naucratis, and its calendar was taken from Miletus, the mother-city of Naucratis. Like Naucratis, Antinoopolis seems to have been a nomarchy and not a nome or part of a nome.5 The colonists, moreover, were meant to be exclusively Greek, and came from Ptolemais6 or the privileged class of the 6,475 Hellenes of the Arsinoite nome. The evidence does not reveal any colonisation from Naucratis, but it would be reasonable to assume that a number of the colonists may have come from that city as well.7 Furthermore, some historians have interpreted single references in papyri as indications also of Oxyrhynchite, Heracleopolite, Panopolite,8 and Lycopolite9 origin. It is obvious that the foundation and organisation of Antinoopolis were very carefully planned, and this also comes out in the underlying intent of the privileges granted by Hadrian to the colonists, to persuade them to embrace Antinoite citizenship. I will briefly summarise the main privileges. One of the most important privileges was the right of epigamia with the local Egyptian population. This applied to both male and female citizens and ensured that their offspring would not be deprived of citizenship in case of intermarriage between an Antinoite and an Egyptian.10 Another privilege, and one that often gets mentioned in the papyri, is that of the exemption from 4 D. Delia, Alexandrian Citizenship during the Roman Principate (Atlanta 1991). 5 Several references are made in the papyri to the nomarch. The clearest references to the status of nomarchia are P.Oxy. 31.2560, P.Oxy. 47.3362, and P.Ryl. 2.170. In literature: Ptol. Geogr. 4.5.61. 6 W.Chr. 26 = P.Würz. 9. 7 H. Braunert, Die Binnenwanderung (Bonn 1964) 123; A.H.M. Jones, Cities of the Eastern Roman Provinces2 (Oxford 1971) 311. 8 Braunert (n. 7) 217; Kühn (n. 3) 87; SB 5.7601; P.Osl. 3.126. 9 Kühn (n. 3) 158, 348; W.Chr. 28 10 F.A.J. Hoogendijk and P. van Minnen, “Drei Kaiserbriefe Gordians III. an die Bürger von Antinoopolis. P. Vindob. G 25945,” Tyche 2 (1987) 71-74; ���������������M. Zahrnt, “An- tinoopolis in Ägypten. Die hadrianische Gründung und ihre Privilegien in der neueren Antinoite Citizenship 83 discharging liturgies outside Antinoopolis. This would have been especially important in the case of citizens who lived in other nomes, a rather com- mon occurrence as we shall see. Furthermore, Antinoites did not have to pay poll-tax,11 thus joining the privileged status of Romans and citizens of other Greek cities.12 They were exempt from a few additional taxes as well, and these included customs taxes on goods imported for their own use.13 A further fi- nancial benefit was an alimentation fund thatH adrian instituted for Antinoite children on condition that they be registered within the first thirty days of their lives. In the sphere of justice, when legal conflicts had to be brought to court, Antinoite citizens had the right to summon their opponents to trial in Antinoopolis.14 As Greeks, Antinoites were also eligible for joining the Roman legions.15 In addition, Hadrian, already in 131, instituted the Antinoeia, athletic games that took place in the city. The grant of all these benefits makes it clear that Hadrian was anxious to make Antinoite citizenship very inviting so as to attract the kind of colonists that he wanted, namely those with as pure a Greek lineage as could be hoped at that time, and in sufficient numbers. The several kinds of declarations that the citizens were required to submit at various stages of their lives also indicate the desire to monitor closely the population of the new city. Who and what were the first citizens of Antinoopolis? We know that they were Hellenes, a privileged subset of what the Romans considered “Egyptians,” and that in the main they came from the Arsinoite nome and Ptolemais. In order to shed more light on this, I have isolated the evidence from the first thirty-one years of the history of the city and included the prosopographi- cal data in the appendix to this paper. The proposed time-span, the reigns of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, I see as indicative, since it was during that time that there was a mass acquisition of Antinoite citizenship. The succession of Antoninus Pius is not disruptive, since, in the emperor’s own words,16 his Forschung,” ANRW 2. 10.1 (1988) 690-693; P. Schubert, Les archives de Marcus Lucretius Diogenes et textes apparentés (Bonn 1990) 26. 11 W.Chr. 52 and Zahrnt (n. 10) 693. 12 R.S. Bagnall, “The People of the Roman Fayum,” in Portraits and Masks: Burial Customs in Roman Egypt, ed. M. L. Bierbrier (London 1997) 7. 13 Hoogendijk and van Minnen (n. 10) 53-55. 14 See P.Fam.Tebt. 43 and 37; P.Mich. 6.365 for this ius evocandi ad forum Antinoense. See R. Taubenschlag, “Die kaiserlichen Privilegien im Rechte der Papyri,” in his Opera minora (Warsaw 1959) 2:49-50, for possible limitations. Inter alia he says that we cannot be sure whether this privilege was offered by Hadrian or was given later. 15 Schubert (n. 10) 20. 16 P.Iand. 7.140: edict by the prefect L. Munatius Felix, communicating to the Anti- noites the statement of Antoninus Pius that he intends to follow Hadrian concerning 84 Myrto Malouta intention was to follow his predecessor’s policy towards the new foundation. The drawback of this method is of course that the amount of evidence is rather restricted, but at the same time it hopefully excludes the distortions that arise by drawing conclusions from later evidence, which may be reflecting very dif- ferent circumstances. Only about seventy papyri and ostraca survive from the period of 130 to 161 that mention Antinoopolis or its citizens. Just seven or eight of them actually come from Antinoopolis itself. The vast majority of the others come from the Arsinoite nome, but the Oxyrhynchite and Hermopolite nomes also feature in the evidence. The pattern of distribution of documents after 161 is a lot more varied: there are still many documents mentioning Antinoopolis or its citizens that come from the Arsinoite nome, but all in all the provenance of later documents is more diverse, with the Oxyrhynchite and Hermopolite nomes now being major sources, while the Aphroditopolite nome also fea- tures extensively in the later evidence. More importantly, the percentage of documents that come from Antinoopolis itself is significantly higher, as is the number of the literary texts found there, only a handful of which are assigned to the second century. It is important to keep in mind that the fact that only few papyri of An- tinoite interest of the mid-second century were found in Antinoopolis and elsewhere does not exclude the possibility that there may have been plenty of them and that they have just not been found (yet or at all).