The political and physical topography of Early Imperial Graeco-Roman Ancyra

Abstract

In his magistral study of Anatolia in antiquity, S. Mitchell drew attention to the way Rome presided over the process of urbanisation in Galatia specifically through the founding of three new city states at Ancyra, Tavium and Pessinus. He further observed that the political model adopted for this process was the settlement Pompey imposed on Pontus in c. 64 BC, by which that newly annexed territory was divided into eleven poleis, each given an assigned political centre and a constitution to ensure the successful administration of both polis and chora. Mitchell's account of the method in Galatia, however was deliberately summary in form, and thus he did not assess in detail either the municipalisation or the monumentalisation of the region as a whole, nor the specific case of Ancyra, metropolis provinciae Galatinae - except for giving an account of the explicit exemple of Ancyra's Temple to Augustus and Roma.