Chapter 20 | Table of
Contents | Chapter 22
The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia
W. M. Ramsay
1904
Chapter 21: Pergamum: The Royal City: The City of Authority
Pergamum was, undoubtedly, an ancient place, whose foundation reaches back into the
beginnings of town life in Asia. The situation is marked out by nature for a great
fortified town, but is too large for a mere village. If we could fix the date of its
foundation, we should know also the period when society has become so far developed and
organised as to seek for defence against foreign invasion, and for offensive power, by
combination on a great scale and the formation of a large centre of population. Beyond all
other sites in Asia Minor it gives the traveller the impression of a royal city, the home
of authority: the rocky hill on which it stands is so huge, and dominates the broad plain
of the Caicus so proudly and boldly. The modern town is below the hill, where the earliest
village was.
It is difficult to analyse such impressions, and to define the various causes whose
combination produces them; but the relation of the vast hill to the great plain is
certainly the chief cause. It would be impossible for any stronghold, however large and
bold, to produce such an impression, if it stood in a small valley like those of Ephesus
and Smyrna, for if the valley and the city were dominated by the still greater mass of the
enclosing mountains. The rock rules over and as it were plants its foot upon a great
valley; and its summit looks over the southern mountains which bound the valley, until the
distant lofty peaks south of the Gulf of Smyrna, and especially the beautiful twin peaks
now called the Two Brothers, close in the outlook. Far beneath lies the sea, quite fifteen
miles away, and beyond it the foreign soil of Lesbos: the view of other lands, the
presence of hostile powers, the need of constant care and watchfulness, all the duties of
kingship are forced on the attention of him who sits enthroned on that huge rock. There is
here nothing to suggest evanescence, mutability, and uncertainty, as at Sardis or Ephesus;
the inevitable impression is of permanence, strength, sure authority and great size.
Something of the personal and subjective element must be mixed up with such impressions;
but in none of the Seven Cities does the impression seem more universal and unavoidable
than in Pergamum.
The history and the coinage of Pergamum can be traced back into the fifth century; but
its superiority and headship in Asia began in 282, when Philetaerus threw off allegiance
to King Lysimachus and founded the kingdom of Pergamum, which was transmitted through a
succession of kings, named Eumenes or Attalus, until 133. During those 151 years Pergamum
was the capital of a realm varying in size from the first kingdom, simply the Caicus
Valley (and hardly all of it), to the range of territories summed up in the vague
expression "all the land on this side of Taurus." For the first few years the
Seleucid dynasty supported Philetaerus in opposition to Lysimachus; but soon the rivalry
of Seleucid and Pergamenian kings became the governing political fact. The former steadily
lost ground until about 222 BC, when Antiochus the Great restored the power of his
dynasty, reduced Attalus I to the original bounds of Pergamenian authority, and threatened
even the existence of his kingdom. Roman aid expelled Antiochus in 190, and enlarged the
Pergamenian kingdom to its widest extent.
In 133 Attalus III bequeathed the whole kingdom to the Romans, who formed it into the
Province of Asia. Pergamum was the official capital of the Province for two centuries and
a half: so that its history as the seat of supreme authority over a large country lasts
about four centuries, and had not yet come to an end when the Seven Letters were written.
The impression which the natural features of its position convey was entirely confirmed to
the writer of the letters by its history. It was to him the seat where the power of this
world, the enemy of the Church and its Author, exercised authority. The authority was
exercised in two ways--the two horns of the monster, as we have seen in chapter 9--civil
administration through the Proconsul, and the State religion directed by the Commune of
Asia.
The first, and for a considerable time the only, Provincial temple of the Imperial cult
in Asia was built at Pergamum in honour of Rome and Augustus (29 BC probably). A second
temple was built there in honour of Trajan, and a third in honour of Severus. Thus
Pergamum was the first city to have the distinction of Temple-Warden both once and twice
in the State religion; and even its third Wardenship was also a few years earlier than
that of Ephesus. The Augustan Temple (Figure 7, chapter 10) is often represented on its coins and on those struck by
the Commune. As the oldest temple of the Asian cult it is far more frequently mentioned
and figured than any other Asian temple; it appears on coins of many Emperors down to the
time of Trajan, and is generally represented open, to show the Emperor crowned by the
Province.
The four patron deities of Pergamum are mentioned in an oracle, advising the people to
seek safety from a pestilence through the aid of Zeus, Athena, Dionysos, and Asklepios.
These represent, doubtless, four different elements in the Pergamenian population. Zeus
the Saviour and Athena the Victory-Bearing had given the State is glorious victories over
foreign enemies, and especially the Gauls; and the greatest efforts of Pergamenian art
were directed to glorify them as representatives of the Hellenic spirit triumphing over
barbarism. The great Altar with its long zone of stately reliefs, showing the gods of
Hellas destroying the barbarian giants, was dedicated to Zeus Soter.
While the first two of those gods represent the Greek spirit and influence, the last
two were more in accordance with the Anatolian spirit, and their worship bulked far more
largely in the religious life of the city. Both of them were near the animal type, and if
we could penetrate beneath the outward appearance imparted to them in art by the Greek
anthropomorphic spirit, and reach down to the actual ritual of their Pergamenian cult, we
should indubitably find that they were worshipped to a great degree as animal-gods, the
God-Serpent and the God-Bull. Where the Pergamenian kings were insisting on their Hellenic
character or blazoning in art their victory over barbaric enemies, they introduced Zeus
and Athena, but when they were engaged in the practical government of their mixed people,
mainly Anatolian, though mixed with Greek, they made most use of Asklepios and Dionysos.
Dionysos the Leader (Kathegemon) was the god of the royal family; and the kings
claimed to be descended from him, and to be in succession his embodiment and envisagement
on earth, just as the Seleucid sovereigns of Syria were the incarnation of Apollo. This
cult owed its importance in Pergamum to the kings; and its diffusion through Asia must be
attributed to them; but the worship, having once been established, persisted through the
Imperial period, for religious institutions were rarely lost so long as paganism lasted.
The worship was practised in Imperial times by a religious society, bearing the name
Ox-herds (Boukoloi), at the head of which was the Archi-Boukolos; it was accompanied by
mysterious rites, and the mystic name of the god seems to have been the Bull.
The anthropomorphic spirit of Greek religion retained very few traces of the bull
character in the Hellenic conception of Dionysos; but Asklepios was more closely
associated with the serpent. The Hellenic religious spirit represented the god as a
dignified human figure, very similar in type to Zeus, supporting his right hand on a staff
round which a serpent is twined. His serpent nature clings to him, though only as an
attribute and adjunct, in the fully Hellenised form. In the Anatolian ritual the god was
the Asklepian serpent, rather than the human Asklepios. Thus in Figure 23 the Emperor
Caracalla, during his visit to Pergamum, is represented as adoring the Pergamenian deity,
a serpent wreathed round the sacred tree. Between the God-Serpent and the God-Emperor
stands the little figure of Telesphorus, the Consummator, a peculiarly Pergamenian
conception closely connected with Asklepios.
Figure 23: Caracalla adoring the God-Serpent of Pergamum
Asklepios the Saviour was introduced from Epidauros in a comparatively recent period,
perhaps the fifth century. He appears on coins from the middle of the second century BC
and became more and more the representative god of Pergamum. On alliance coins he
regularly stands for his city, as in Figure 10, chapter 14.
As Asklepios was imported to Pergamum for Epidaurus in Argolis, it may be asked why his
character in ritual was so strongly Anatolian and so little Hellenic. The reason is that
he belonged to the old Pelagian stratum in religion, which persisted most strongly in such
remote and rural parts of the Peloponnesus; and he had participated little in the
progressive Hellenisation of the old Greek gods; now the Pelagian religion was closely
kindred in character to the Anatolian.
On the royal coinage Athena and other Hellenic gods are almost the only divine types;
but on the cistophori, which were intended to be the common coinage in circulation through
the whole Pergamenian kingdom after 200 BC, neither kings nor specifically Hellenic gods
appear, but only symbols taken from the cults of Dionysos and Asklepios. On the obverse is
the cista mystica of Dionysos (Figure 24) within a wreath of his sacred plant the
ivy: the lid of the box is pushed open by a serpent which hangs out with half its length.
The relation of the God-Bull to the God-Serpent in the Anatolian ritual is well known:
"the bull is father of the serpent, and the serpent of the bull": such was a
formula of the Phrygian Mysteries. On the reverse are two Asklepian serpents with their
lower parts intertwined and heads erect: between them is a bowcase containing a strung
bow.
Figure 24: Obverse of Cistophorus with serpent and mystic box
of Dionysos
The monogram of the first three letters of the name Pergamum is the only indication on
these coins of Pergamenian origin and domination. It was clearly the intention of the
kings in this coinage to avoid all appearance of domination over Asia, and to represent
the unity of their realm as a voluntary association in the common religion of the two
deities whose ritual is symbolised in barbaric Anatolian forms on the cistophori, without
the slightest admixture of Greek anthropomorphism, and whose worship we have already
traced in several cities of the Pergamenian realm. The cistophori were struck at first in
Pergamum, but soon in most of the great cities of the Pergamenian realm. Only those struck
in Pergamum bore the Pergamenian monogram. The others bore the name or symbols of their
own place of coinage. These coins are a true historical monument. They express a phase of
administration, the Pergamenian ideal of constructive statesmanship, which is attested by
no historian and hardly by any other monument.
Figure 25: Reverse of Cistophorus with serpents and bowcase
The cistophori show clearly the point of view from which the symbolism of the
Apocalypse is to be interpreted. They reveal a strong tendency in the Asian mind to
express its ideas and ideals, alike political and religious, through symbols and types;
and they prove that the converted pagan readers for whom the Apocalypse was originally
written were predisposed through their education and the whole spirit of contemporary
society to regard visual forms, beasts, human figures, composite monsters, objects of
nature, or articles of human manufacture, when mentioned in a work of this class, as
symbols indicative of religious ideas. This predisposition to look at such things with a
view to a meaning that lay underneath them was not confined to the strictly Oriental
races; and the symbolism of the Apocalypse ought not to be regarded as all necessarily
Jewish in origin. Much of it is plainly Jewish; but, as has been pointed out in chapters
11 and 12, a strong alloy of Judaism had been mingled in the composition of society in the
Asian cities, and many Judaic ideas must have become familiar to the ordinary pagans,
numbers of whom had been attracted within the circle of hearers in the synagogues, while
purely pagan syncretism of Jewish and pagan forms was familiar in various kinds of ritual
or magic.
Except for archaeological and antiquarian details, which are numerous, little more is
known about Pergamum. Its importance and authority in the Roman administration of the
Province Asia are abundantly proved by the evidence which has been quoted above; and yet
they are not directly attested by any ancient authority except the Apocalypse, and have to
a great extent escaped notice. In the latest study of the Province Asia, a large volume
containing an admirable summary of the chief results of modern investigation, published in
the summer of 1904 by Monsieur V. Chapot, Pergamum is treated as a place quite secondary
to Ephesus and Smyrna in the Roman administration while Ephesus is regarded as in every
sense the Roman capital. Consideration of the fact that Pergamum was honoured with the
first, the second, and the third Neokorate before any other city of Asia shows beyond
question its official primacy in the Province. The Imperial religion "was the
keystone of the Imperial policy"; the official capital of the Province was
necessarily the centre of the Imperial ritual; and conversely the city where the Imperial
religion had its centre must have been officially regarded as the capital of the Province.
In many Provinces there was only one seat of the Imperial religion; but in Asia the spirit
of municipal pride and rivalry was so strong that it would have endangered the hold of the
State cultus on the other great cities, if they had been forced to look to any one city as
the sole head of the religion. Roman policy showed its usual adaptability by turning
municipal pride to its purpose and making it act in an Imperial channel, so that the
object of competition among all the great cities was to attain higher rank in the State
religion.
Pergamum, then, as being first promoted to all three stages in the Imperial worship
must have been the official capital and titular seat of Roman authority; but there were
several capitals (metropoleis), three, and seven, and more than seven.
The name of the city lives in literary language through the word "parchment"
(Pergamena), applied to an improved preparation of hide adapted to purposes of
writing, which had been used in Ionia from a very early period.
The Jewish community in Pergamum is mentioned in Josephus, Ant. Jud, xiv, 10,
22.
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