A Companion to the Hellenistic and Roman Near East

The immediate consequence for the Roman province of Syria was a Parthian invasion, with two successive sieges of Antioch in 51 BCE and then in the winter of 51/50 BCE C. Cassius Longinus, one of the survivors of Carrhae, managed to defeat the Parthians (the victory of Antigonea on 7 October 51 BCE), although the enemy did not leave the region. Thanks to the energy of the new governor of Syria, M. Porcius Bibulus, the Parthians were pushed out and Syria was once again Roman (end of 50 BCE).

During this time, the organization of Judaea continued to preoccupy the Romans. Pompey had found the country to be deeply divided between the legitimate heir of Alexander Jannaeus (102–76 BCE), Hyrcanus II, who was king and high priest; his younger brother Aristobulus II who contested his brother’s kingly title; and a part of the Jews who wanted neither of them. After the capture of Jerusalem and the Temple in 63 BCE, held by Aristobulus II, Pompey and his successors tried several approaches: Pompey first supported Hyrcanus as sole leader after having significantly reduced the reach of Hyrcanus’s kingdom (almost all the Greek cities along the coast and in Transjordan were taken from the king), then Gabinius divided the country into five autonomous districts, leaving Hyrcanus with only the great pontificate. No real end to the unrest was achieved, but it clearly appeared that the true leader of Judaea from then on was Hyrcanus’s mentor Antipater from Idumaea, assisted by his two sons Phasael and Herod; all three men had become loyal allies of Rome.

Even before the assassination of Caesar (March of 44 BCE), Syria was divided between those who supported Caesar and those who opposed him. In 49 BCE, Pompey’s father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, had been given the government of Syria, which he pillaged in every possible way in order to outfit a fleet for the benefit of his son-in-law. After Pompey’s death (48 BCE), having resolved the situation in Egypt (the war in Alexandria where he received effective help from most of the Syrian client princes), Caesar crossed Syria to fight Mithridates VI Eupator’s son Pharnaces, who had taken up arms against Rome in Anatolia. Caesar took advantage of the opportunity to free Antioch (47 BCE) and bestow some gifts upon that city. Despite this, conflicts still arose between those who supported Caesar (Sextus Julius Caesar, governor of Syria, was assassinated and replaced by Cornelius Dolabella) and those who supported Pompey (Q. Caecilius Bassus). After Caesar’s death, one of the “Liberators,” C. Cassus Longinus, succeeded in establishing himself in Antioch and then controlling most of Syria. That allowed one of the conspirators, Labienus, to get help from the Parthians. When the Parthian troops finally arrived, the cause of the “liberators” was already lost since Cassius and Brutus had been routed at the battle of Philippi (42 BCE). Antony had just enough time to install a new governor, Decidius Saxa, launch a raid against Palmyra to plunder it (41 BCE), and designate – with permission from Octavian and the Senate – Herod as the new king of Judaea. Nevertheless, the Parthians invaded almost all of Syria again, finding allies particularly in Judaea where the son of Aristobulus II, Antigonus Mattathias, was trying to take over as king. Nevertheless, the Syrian governor P. Ventidius Bassus managed to drive out the Parthians and get rid of the last Hasmonean, Antigonus (39–37 BCE). Herod was finally able to take possession of his kingdom, which experienced various increases in South Lebanon and then South Syria (around 24–23 BCE), where he was charged specifically with ending banditry. Despite attempts by Cleopatra VII to get Antony to grant her the South Syrian territories that her ancestors had possessed, Antony had enough political intelligence to understand how much his allies, especially Herod, were indispensable to the Syrian government, and he limited himself to granting Cleopatra smaller portions (such as the balsam groves of Jericho). The fact remains that the province of Syria ended up exhausted from the constant developments of the Roman civil war taking place on its territory.

The end of the Roman civil war after Octavian’s victory at Actium (September of 31 BCE) and the inauguration of the principate (27 BCE) did not herald a substantial change in the political and administrative organization of the Roman Near East. Octavian, now Augustus, continued the policy of client states established by Pompey and pursued by Antony. He did not even change Antony’s clients, except for those in Emesa and Amanus, two states that were briefly annexed in 30 BCE before being given over to client princes in 20 BCE. The Roman province of Syria, enlarged with the Cilician Plain and various peripheral districts to the north (Zeugma, Doliche), became one of the most important provinces in the empire, sheltering three or four legions and encompassing many client principalities (Pliny mentions many of them but adds that there were seventeen more so modest that he felt it useless to list them), while many important client kingdoms were situated around the periphery, notably Commagene, Amanus, Cilicia Trachea, Emesa, Judaea, Abilene, and Nabataea. This did not prevent the province from growing here and there, either definitively (Palmyra most likely between 12 and 17 ce) or temporarily (Judaea-Samaria sometime between the death of Archelaos in 6 ce and the restoration of Herod’s kingdom for Agrippa I in 41 ce; Commagene between 17 and 37 ce).

The details of the evolution of these principalities are not well known, except probably what concerns the various principalities that formed when Herod’s kingdom was carved up. When Herod died (4 BCE), Augustus divided the kingdom between Herod’s three sons, none of whom received the royal title: Archelaos received the ethnarchy of Judaea and Samaria; Antipas received the tetrarchy of the Galilee and Peraea beyond Jordan; and to Philip went the tetrarchy consisting of Gaulanitis, Batanea, Trachonitis, and Auranitis, i.e. a strictly South Syrian state. Starting in 6 ce, Archelaos was destitute and exiled to Vienna (Gaul) for reasons of incompetence and excessive violence. Judaea and Samaria were reattached to the province of Syria and entrusted to the administration of a knight bearing the title of prefect, residing at Caesarea. When Philip died (33–34 ce), his principality was briefly annexed to the province of Syria before being granted, along with the royal title, to his nephew Agrippa I (37 ce), who also received Abila of Lysanias, to the west of Damascus. Antipas in turn claimed the royal title, which prompted his exile in Gaul (39 ce) and the transfer of his states to Agrippa I. Claudius, in 41 ce, rebuilt for Agrippa the totality of Herod’s kingdom, but Agrippa’s premature death in 44 ce prompted the return of his entire domain to the province of Syria. Judaea and Samaria were again entrusted to a specific administrator, now a procurator, while the other sectors were administered directly from Antioch. Nevertheless, Agrippa I’s son, Agrippa II, received in 47–48 ce the principality of his uncle Herod, around Chalcis in Lebanon, and next a part of the Galilee and the whole of southern Syria that had belonged to Philip. Agrippa II kept this territory until around 92 ce, although he does not seem to have died until later, shortly before 100 ce. His main mission was to fight banditry, a task he assigned to the garrisons placed around the Trachon plateau and one that seems to have been carried out with definite success.

The annexation by Rome of the Herodian states around 92 ce fits in with the general policy of integrating client states into the province. Although there had been, outside of Judaea, temporary annexations (such as that of Commagene between 17 and 37–38 ce), or definitely those of smaller states – the Amanus kingdom in 17 ce and Palmyra in c. 12–17 ce), the policy of annexation became more systematic starting with the Flavians. Beginning in 72 ce, Vespasian annexed Commagene and its Cilician Trachaea domains, then the principality of Emesa around 72–75 ce, and that of Arca probably a bit earlier, while the principality of Aristobulus of Chalcis disappeared sometime before 92 ce. The tiny tetrarchs of the Lebanese mountains or the Bargylus uplands further to the north were also destined to disappear during this period: in 115 ce, a descendant of these tetrarchs, Lucius Julius Agrippa, no longer visibly ruled over his ancestral lands and was content to demonstrate his euergetism in Apamea. The annexation of the Nabataean kingdom in 106 ce by Trajan, most likely occurring when Rabbel II died, put an end to the presence of client states to the west of the Euphrates. From then on, Rome administered her possessions by way of three provinces: the original province of Syria with its capital Antioch, governed by an imperial legate of the rank of senator; the province of Judaea, severed from Syria by Vespasian in 68 ce and governed from Caesarea by an imperial legate of praetorian rank until 134 ce, and after that by an imperial legate of consular rank, when it took on the name of Syria-Palaestina; and finally Arabia with its capital Bostra, covering the entire expanse of the Nabataean kingdom from the Hauran all the way to the Hejaz (Hegra marking its southern boundary), entrusted to an imperial legate of praetorian rank.