City Titles as Cultural Strategy

City Titles as Cultural Strategy: A Discursive Approach to Civic Identity and Interurban Dynamics in (Late) Roman Egypt and Asia Minor

(SNSF)

Laufzeit: 01.04.2026–31.03.2028

The adoption of city titulatures was a distinctive feature of competitive civic culture throughout much of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Roman Empire, and several studies (Heller 2006; Guerber 2009) have investigated this phenomenon for (Western) Asia Minor in particular. By contrast, even if Roman Egypt offers unique conditions due to the nature of its source material and the status of its urban communities, most previous research on city titles in this region has restricted itself to reviewing the papyrological evidence and to establishing chronologies (e.g., Hagedorn 1973; Litinas 1995). A recent exception is Free 2024 on Hermopolis, situating the adoption of titles by this city in the historical context of “municipalization” and the accompanying cultural transformation. Building on my close analysis of the city titles of Roman Heracleopolis during my PhD, the proposed project aims to transcend the thematic and/or spatial limitations of previous research on city titles in (Late) Roman Egypt, integrating them with other types of evidence of civic and elite self-representation and introducing a cross-regional comparative perspective. An important inspiration is Muccioli’s in-depth study of Hellenistic royal ideology through the lens of official epithets (Muccioli 2013). Instead of approaching city titles in Roman Egypt as a self-contained topic, the project aims to use them as a unique lens through which to explore understudied dimensions of civic identity, interurban competition, and elite cultural self-representation. In particular, I will reconstruct the system of urban titulatures in (Late) Roman Egypt (third to fifth centuries) with its expected translocal entanglements, building on a systematic collection and critical reappraisal of the papyrological evidence (c. 500 attestations of about twenty different titulatures for eight metropoleis and two poleis) and taking account of the dialogical and competitive character of city titles established in research on Asia Minor. Another major goal is to trace the civic identities condensed in these titulatures by reconstructing their underlying local encomiastic discourses; I will do so by interpreting titles in the light of the ancient rhetoric of urban praise, an innovative method I developed during my PhD and applied to the titles of Heracleopolis. Finally, by comparing the qualities advertised through titulature with key themes in the (self-)representation of Egyptians in literary discourse, I will introduce city titles into the debate on the self-Hellenization of local elites and the cultural capital associated with local, non-Greek identities in Egypt and across the Eastern Roman Empire. Throughout, my analysis of city titles in Egypt will be informed by a comparative perspective based on the epigraphic evidence from the province of Asia, which will highlight the distinctive nature of the phenomenon in both regions. This project will make a notable contribution to the integration of the papyrological evidence from Egypt – which is, despite its enormous potential, still too often overlooked or ignored by scholars not trained in papyrology – into the broader field of ancient history. It will do so by using city titles in documentary papyri to shed light, in three peer-reviewed articles, on timely research topics such as civic identities, interurban rivalry, and strategies of elite self-representation that are rarely explored in the Egyptian context due to a presumed lack of relevant evidence (e.g., civic coinage) and the non-poliadic legal status of most Egyptian urban communities.