Antonello Mastronardi is a PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. At ANAMED, he investigates changes in the socio-economic structures of western Anatolian communities during the Mithridatic wars (88–63 BCE). Whereas the standard look at the late Roman Republic prioritizes the effect of hegemonic power, his project focuses on local evidence as a privileged standpoint from which to describe such communities. Accordingly, his approach combines numismatics, epigraphy, and ancient historiography.
As the tides of the conflict progressively found their epicenter in the florid cities of the West, both parties focused on gaining local support by appealing to certain social groups at a local level, translating the military conflict into a sort of bidding war fought on political and economic terms. While scholarship tends to portray this support in a polarized way, describing Mithridates as a quasi-populist instigator and vice versa identifying the Romans with the elites, he aims to demonstrate that both parties were in fact appealing to marginalized groups, with the promise of better conditions in exchange for their unconditional allegiance.
These bids, which could take the form of debt cancellations, enfranchisement, and sophisticated forms of monetary intervention, inevitably altered the socio-economic picture of western Anatolian communities for years to come.
Antonello Mastronardi
“The most humane kind of allies”: Financial exploitation and Social Struggle in Western Anatolia during the Mithridatic Wars (88-63 BCE)
It is definitely hard to recall the good times once the good times are over, but have you ever tried doing it while they are still with you? As my ANAMED experience is inexorably coming to an end, I am asked to look back at it from a scholarly perspective, yet I cannot help going over all those moments of daily life that inevitably affected my research. If we are what we eat, we write what we live, and – no matter how dry and dull it can get at times – academic prose makes no exception to this rule. As my dissertation project focuses on socioeconomic issues in the cities of western Anatolia during the early first century BCE, ANAMED represented an obviously appealing opportunity. Back in late 2022, I applied as I expected this research center to offer me a completely fresh, and more erudite, perspective to talk about Anatolia in my PhD dissertation. Now I can say without a doubt that I was not disappointed.
My project focuses on the socio-economic effects endured by western Anatolian cities during the Mithridatic wars, a conflict between the Romans and the kingdom of Pontus that affected the entirety of Anatolia between 88 and 63 BCE. As scholarly investigations into Roman imperialism have shifted away from the conventional focus on the relationship between the Roman administration and local elites, my dissertation aligns with this trend by means of a multidisciplinary approach that integrates numismatics, epigraphy, historiography, and contemporary political theory.
As their denomination itself suggests, the Mithridatic wars have traditionally been examined from a Roman viewpoint.[i] Only recently have scholars meritoriously shown interest in Mithridates, paving the way for a fresh perspective on his foreign policy.[ii] My attempt, in this sense, is to shift the focus onto the third player of this conflict, namely those western communities that represented the main target of both imperialistic bids, and whose social fabric was inevitably altered by the conflict.
During my year at ANAMED, I focused on the first two chapters of my project. In Chapter 1, I examine Mithridates’ iconographic and economic platform. Motivated by his offers, at the beginning of 88 BCE the locals carried out mass killings of thousands of Italians, who lived in the area profiting through moneylending, activities connected with tax collection, and other financial services. The event amounted to a genocidal slaughter that showed no mercy, sparing neither wives, children, nor freedmen.
As it usually happens for the big adversaries of Roman rule, Mithridates has been vastly depicted as a relentless populist, and his agenda for the communities in western Anatolia described as a series of clichés meant to fuel the lowest instincts of the rabble. My goal is to pinpoint the king’s intended audience and thus attribute agency for the genocide of Italians. On epigraphic grounds, I argue that – rather than the local poor – it was the upper-middle class that, burdened with debts owed to both Roman and local moneylenders, was motivated to act upon the promise of a new social contract.
Chapter 2 looks at the broad socioeconomic repercussions of the conflict, mainly in light of numismatic and epigraphic evidence. The chapter starts from the case study of Notion, also known as new Colophon, or Colophon-by-the-sea, where I am taking part in the excavation project conducted by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Adnan Menderes Üniversitesi, Aydın, and Sinop Üniversitesi.
As I subsequently move to consider the broader picture, I consider the rationale behind the disproportionate monetary penalty that the Romans levied on the deserting communities in 85 BCE, right after the first war with Mithridates. I argue that through the imposition of this disproportionate penalty, the Romans engaged in a novel form of economic imperialism, which involved artificially creating a debt crisis within the communities. Through this tactic, the Romans pursued a dual objective: firstly, to reintroduce the presence of their financial stakeholders, with whom the Graeco-Anatolian population was compelled to once again contract debts. Secondly, the Romans aimed to exert tighter control over these communities, whose economic fortunes became reliant on the dispensation of exemptions and relief measures by the imperialistic power. In the last section of my chapter, I analyze some of these acts as further stages of the clampdown initiated by Roman authorities on the financial autonomy of western Anatolia. Based on numismatic evidence, I contend that those relief measures led in fact to an exhaustion of precious metal in the communities, which resulted in an abrupt cessation of local silver coinage, for which scholarly explanations remain inconclusive.[iii]
Quite surprisingly, my scholarly interests were pretty unique in the landscape of ANAMED, and this inevitably made me feel compelled to present my research in an informative, public way, during my “Fellow In-House Presentation” on December 6th. On the other hand, the diversity also presented an exceptional opportunity for me to enhance my knowledge of Anatolian history and cultures, with the result that I was able to learn methodologies proper to fields and contexts different from the one I work on. Concurrently, I capitalized on this fellowship to improve my knowledge of the Turkish language, to facilitate my professional engagements in the country I am studying and, more trivially, to consume Turkish scholarship on my subject of interest.[iv]
On January 18th, I presented a talk at the “Legacies of the Roman Republic: Law, Text, and Spaces” conference in Helsinki, where I also got acquainted with the research project that, thanks to the funds of ERC and the University of Helsinki, produced the conference. Thanks to the logistic support offered by the broader Koç academic family, I was also able to attend the “Üçüncü Uluslararasi Akdeniz Dünyasinda Para Tarihi ve Numismatik Kongresi,” organized by AKMED and held in Antalya from the 1st to the 4th of April. Even though I did not present a talk at this event, I had the opportunity to enhance my expertise in digital numismatics and to interact with scholars whose work inspired me when I was structuring my project and keeps being of daily interest for my research efforts.
On account on the flexible and supportive environment at the research center, I managed to take a few days off during the month of February, in order to visit the Izmir area and explore some of the sites that are of interest to me, and that I had not managed to visit during the excavation season in Notion. Moreover, during May I will travel to Sinop, in order to visit the former capital of Mithridates’ kingdom and meet some local scholars whose work is fundamental for my project.
This latter one, perhaps, represents the opportunity I value the most from this fellowship. As a scholar who is two times international – both at Michigan, where I am pursuing my PhD, and here in Türkiye – I had the chance to visit sites and meet people that I would have never had the possibility to access without this fellowship. Given the institute’s attention to anything that is ultimately Anatolian, I think that this particular side-effect should represent a great source of pride for anyone that contributes to make ANAMED run.
[i] See the foundational works by and David E. Magie, Roman Rule in Asia Minor, vol. I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950); A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Foreign Policy in the East: 168 B.C. to A.D. 1 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); and the very recent work by Bradley Jordan, Imperial Power, Provincial Government, and the Emergence of Roman Asia, 133 BCE-14 CE, 1st ed. (Oxford University PressOxford, 2023).
[ii] After the first scholarly endeavor by Brian McGing, The Foreign Policy of Mithridates VI Eupator King of Pontus (Leiden: Brill, 1986), other significant efforts have been produced in this direction by: Luis Ballesteros Pastor, “Mitrídates Eupátor, un enemigo de Roma en el Epítome de Justino,” in Studi sull’Epitome di Giustino. 3: Il tardo ellenismo. I parti e i romani, by Alessandro Galimberti and Giuseppe Zecchini, Contributi di storia antica 14 (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2016), 63–98; Murat Arslan, Mithradates VI Eupator: Roma’nın Büyük Düşmanı (İstanbul: Odin Yayıncılık, 2007); Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2010); Andrea F. Gatzke, “The Propaganda of Insurgency: Mithridates VI and the ‘Freeing of the Greeks’ in 88 BCE,” Ancient World 44 (2013): 66–79.
[iii] See François De Callataÿ, L’ Histoire Des Guerres Mithridatiques Vue Par Les Monnaies (Louvain- la-Neuve: Département d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art., 1997); Lucia Francesca Carbone, The Hidden Power: Late Cistophoric Production and the Organization of the Provincia Asia (128-89 B.C.), Numismatic Studies 42 (New York, NY: American Numismatic Society, 2020).
[iv] I am here particularly referring to Arslan, Mithradates VI Eupator: Roma’nın Büyük Düşmanı.