Location: Map
Philippi (Ancient Greek: Φίλιπποι / Phílippoi) is an ancient city
founded by the Macedonian king Philip II in 356 BC. BC, abandoned in
the 14th century after the Ottoman conquest, today an archaeological
site located in the nome of Kavala in Greece.
A modest
Macedonian foundation, Philippi occupies a notable place in History
due to two major events: the Battle of Philippi in October 42 BC; BC
and Pauline preaching in 49 or 50. The heirs of Julius Caesar made
it a Roman colony on the Via Egnatia, populated by Italian veterans.
The passage of the apostle Paul - and his martyrdom in Philippi
according to certain modern Greek historians - led during late
Antiquity to the construction of vast basilicas, perhaps centers of
pilgrimage. Hard hit by an earthquake at the beginning of the 7th
century, the city was covered in ruins. It subsequently underwent
ephemeral Bulgarian, Latin and Serbian occupations, alternating with
returns of Byzantine domination, until the Ottoman conquest in the
14th century, followed by its complete abandonment.
Rediscovered by scholars in the 19th century, Philippi, attached to
Greece in 1913, was gradually excavated by archaeologists from the
French School of Athens, then by their Greek counterparts, who
uncovered the theater, the monumental forum of the 2nd century and a
series of paleo-Byzantine churches.
The Church of Greece made
Philippi a place of Pauline commemoration. In 2016, the
archaeological site is the eighteenth Greek site listed as a UNESCO
World Heritage Site.
Remaining a small city during Antiquity and the Middle Ages,
Philippi is rarely cited in ancient texts, except for two historical
moments, the battle of Philippi in 42 BC. AD, and around 50 AD. AD
the preaching of Paul of Tarsus.
It is mainly known through
the archaeological excavations carried out since June 1914 by the
French School of Athens, then, from the end of the 1950s, by the
University of Thessaloniki and the archaeological service of Greece.
The explorations concern an area larger than that of Pompeii (63.5
hectares in Pompeii compared to 67 hectares of which only
approximately 40 hectares were buildable due to the steep relief,
and barely a fifth is explored by archaeologists). The site has been
abandoned for thirteen centuries and has been spared by modern
reconstructions, which facilitates research, but it piles up levels
from various eras, then is devastated, having long served as a
quarry for neighboring villages, which makes it more complex.
historical understanding.
Epigraphy is another source of
historical information about Philippi. Patiently fed by more than a
century of records on the city and its territory, the epigraphic
corpus includes in 2014 nearly 1,500 Latin and Greek inscriptions,
mostly from the Roman period. It is in number the richest corpus of
the Roman colonies in the eastern part of the Empire, rivaling those
of the colonies of Corinth and Antioch of Pisidia, although more
important cities.
Site
Philippi is established on the site of the Thasian colony of
Crenides3, at the foot of an overhang of Mount Lekani, a massif south of
the Rhodope Mountains, on the northern edge of the marsh which occupied
the entire plain in Antiquity. To the south of this plain rises Mount
Pangea, and the hills of Symbolon block the flow of water towards the
sea. The city is located on a natural terrace at the foot of an isolated
eminence which culminates at almost three hundred meters altitude and
dominates the plain. This conical-shaped hill, elongated in a
southeast-northwest direction, is the acropolis of Philippi, formed of a
gray rock mass of white marble at the break, a material exploited since
Antiquity by several quarries for the construction of the city and its
fortifications.
The philosopher Theophrastus, student of
Aristotle, wrote in the 3rd century BC. in Book V of his work Causes of
Plants that “in Philippi the air used to be heavy; it is much less so
since the land was drained and became entirely cultivable. The air is
lighter for two reasons: drying and cultivation. Indeed, the wasteland
is colder and the air is heavier there. Because of the vegetation which
prevents sunlight from passing through and air from circulating and
because it is full of water which oozes and stagnates. It was like this
around Crenides when the Thracians occupied it; the whole plain was
covered with ponds and trees.”
Appian describes the site in the
1st century BC as follows: “Philippi is a city which formerly bore the
name of Datos, and before this, the name of Crenides, because of the
large number of springs of living water (ϰρῆνας) which emerge from the
the eminence on which it is raised. […] It is located on a fairly steep
mound, and its size is exactly that of the summit of this mound. On the
north side, it is covered by woods […]. On the south side is a marsh
which extends to the sea. To the east, it has the Sapéens and Corpiles
gorges. To the west, a plain which extends as far as Murcinum and
Drabiscum, and as far as the river Strymon, over a space of three
hundred and fifty stadia, and on a fertile and beautiful land.
Philippi was founded by the King of Macedonia, Philip II, in 356 BC, on the site of Crenides. The objective of this foundation was as much to take control of the gold and silver mines of Mount Pangea as to establish a garrison on a strategic crossing point: the site controls the road between Amphipolis and Neapolis, a segment of the great royal road which crosses Macedonia from east to west and which will later be rebuilt by the Romans under the name of Via Egnatia. Philip II provided the new city with important fortifications, which partly blocked the passage between the marshes and the Orbèlos, and sent numerous settlers there. The discovery of new gold mines around the city, in Asyla, contributed to the enrichment of the kingdom of Philip II who established a monetary workshop there. However, according to Victor Martin's study of the duration of exploitation of these mines, they were quickly exhausted, and monetary minting does not seem to go beyond 344 BC. BC, bringing the wealth of the city back to its agricultural land.
Philippi is an independent city allied to the Kingdom of Macedonia. According to inscriptions dated from the Greek period, it has its own calendar with the names of months derived from the Twelve Gods, different from the Macedonian calendar, it has its own political institutions, with among others an eponymous priest, an archon assisted by other magistrates, its council chamber, its treasurer. It was only integrated into this kingdom in the last years of the reign of Philip V, or under his successor Perseus.
The archaeological remains of the city dated with certainty to the
Macedonian and Hellenistic era are rare, which maintains uncertainty
about the exact appearance of the city in its first centuries of
existence. The urban fabric can be guessed by faint marks identified by
scattered surveys: houses with Greek foundations, a crossroads mark
dedicated to Apollo indicate street layouts and suggest an initial
subdivision of the Macedonian foundation into rectangular islets, with
dimensions estimated at 27 × 82.9 meters, perpendicular to the road
which crosses the city. The monuments which, in their initial state,
date back to this period are the enclosure, the theater, the foundations
of a house under the Roman forum, a small temple and above all a
Macedonian tomb, preserved between the cathedral church and its
baptistery, interpreted as a Hellenistic heron (temple dedicated to a
hero).
Despite everything, the city remains modest in size; and
when the Romans definitively destroyed the kingdom of Macedonia in 167
BC. BC to divide it into four distinct entities called merides, it is
Amphipolis and not Philippi which becomes the capital of the first
meris.
The surveys of the enclosure were published in 1938 by
archaeologists, Jacques Roger, for the lower enclosure, Paul Lemerle and
Henri Ducoux for the upper enclosure and the acropolis. The enclosure
poses dating problems due to its continued reuse until the end of the
Byzantine era. Successive reconstructions have hidden the Macedonian
foundations, except in the upper part on the acropolis, where often only
the first foundation, cut from the rock, of this first state remains.
Excavations of the theater, which rests on the eastern curtain wall,
nevertheless made it possible to uncover several layers of the rampart
in the 1990s, whose bossed structure is characteristic of the
Hellenistic period. Their dating is confirmed by a Greek inscription
commemorating the intervention of two Macedonian epistates, named
Pythodôros and Isagoras, perhaps during the reign of Philip V. In the
plain, on the other hand, proof has never been provided with certainty
of the presence of these levels. Some historians, like Georges Perrot,
gave the city a very small surface area, leaning against the rock, more
in agreement with their reading of the literary testimonies, which
placed the rampart further north at the foot of the Acropolis, while
Léon Heuzey anticipated that the city and its Hellenic rampart extended
towards the plain. During the only systematic exploration of the
defensive system of the lower city, in 1937, the high level of the water
table in the plain of Philippi, which was then in full sanitation
operation, prevented archaeologists from reaching the foundations of the
rampart . Nevertheless, the occasional surveys reached the large blocks
of Macedonian foundations, reused as foundations of the Byzantine
ramparts. On the southern part of the site, the Byzantine rampart can be
seen as a line of embankment from which sections of ruins emerge from
point to point, and Jacques Roger believes that this Byzantine layout
must also take up the primitive foundations there.
The enclosure
has the rough shape of a truncated rectangle with a perimeter of 3.5 km,
oriented almost exactly on the cardinal points, from north to south: the
small north side is the only one to have a sinuous layout, which follows
the line of the crest of the acropolis by joining its two summits. The
other sides of the enclosure are generally rectilinear with some
occasional deviations, mainly on the east side, where the curtain wall
describes some recesses quite close to the rack teeth which characterize
certain Greek fortificationsn 2. Two monumental gates marked the passage
of the road which crossed the city, “gate of Neapolis” to the east,
“gate of Crenides” to the west, another more modest one opened onto the
plain and the marsh, a last one at the top of the acropolis served the
fortress. The latter, at the northwest corner of the enclosure, is
almost everywhere replaced by Byzantine constructions.
The theater leans against the bottom of the slope of the acropolis,
at a place where the slope bends. 200 meters from the main road, it
dominates the city and opens onto the plain, with a south-southeast
orientation. The western wall of the theater (the analemma) follows the
contour of the surrounding wall. A little ahead of this point of
tangency, a buttress connects the wall and the edge of the theater. The
similarity of architectural device allows us to estimate that the
theater and the enclosure are contemporary constructions.
The
work undertaken in 1914, then from 1921 to 1924, cleared the orchestra
and the side entrances (parodoi). The deterioration of the tiers (κοῖλον
/ koilon) is such that we cannot reconstruct their appearance in the
Hellenistic period. The original orchestra could be a circular space
with a radius of 10.8 meters and the parodoi, open to the sky, measure
25.65 meters on the east side and 24.17 meters on the west side.
The elements of a fence of which only three levels of the plaster
remain delimit a square location which covers a perfectly preserved
underground vaulted burial chamber: five rectangular niches, intended to
receive funeral urns, open into the walls of the chamber rectangular,
which contains as its only furniture a votive table in the northeast
corner. Although the entrance door was found intact, the tomb was
obviously looted in ancient times. The looters would have passed through
an opening spotted during the 2013 surveys: the niches were found empty,
apart from a few ashes and bones, while a few shards collected in the
tomb clearly date from after its construction. On the other hand, a cist
placed under the center of the chamber revealed a particularly important
intact burial: it contained the skeleton of a young adult or a child
adorned with rich gold jewelry (a crown of oak leaves 3, a diadem
bearing Isiac insignia, a pendant). The dead man is identified by an
inscription on the lid of the tomb: ΕΥΗΦΕΝΗΣ ΕΞΗΚΕΣΤΟΥ (Euèphénes, son
of Exèkéstos). This name appears on a fragment of an inscription found
in Philippi, giving a list of mysts, that is to say initiates of the
mysteries of the Great Gods of Samothrace. The pieces of gold work that
covered the corpse were a sign of divinization in the Greek world. The
child had been deified and dedicated to the gods of Samothrace and to
Isis, because of his premature death, which made him a beloved of the
gods, according to a well-attested religious practice widespread at the
end of the Hellenistic era.
According to these inscriptions and
the goldwork, the tomb dates from the 2nd century BC. The presence of a
tomb inside a Hellenistic city is extremely rare: it indicates the
presence of a person of great importance in a space which could be the
agora. The remains of construction which topped it, a temple-shaped
building surrounded by a fence delimiting a temenos, are often linked to
the commemoration of a founding hero (κτίστης / ktístès) of the city and
are identified as a herôon.
New colonization
The city reappears in the sources on the occasion
of the Roman civil war which followed the assassination of Julius
Caesar: his heirs Marc Antony and Octavian faced the partisans of the
Republic, M. Junius Brutus and C. Cassius Longinus, in a double decisive
battle on the plain west of the city in October 42 BC. Winners, Marc
Antony and Octavian dismissed part of their veterans, probably from the
XXVIIIth legion, which they installed in the city, refounded as a Roman
colony under the name of Colonia Victrix Philippensium. In 30 BC,
Octavian, who eliminated his rival, reorganized the colony and made a
new deduction of veterans from Italy, accompanied by a Praetorian
cohort: the city took the name of Colonia Iulia Philippensis, completed
in Colonia Augusta Iulia Philippensis after January 27 BC BC, when
Octavian himself received the name Augustus from the Senate. The colony
benefits from the ius italicum, which legally assimilates it to an
Italian territory, populated by Roman citizens, attached to the Voltinia
tribe. It constitutes a Latin islet in Greek and Thracian country,
occupying the plain with at least ten Latinized agricultural villages
and a city where the dominant class formalizes Latin, maintaining a
preponderance over Greek which lasts three centuries, without excluding
it from popular practice: for example, construction workers continue to
mark building blocks in Greek.
Following this second deduction -
and perhaps from the first - the territory of Philippi was the subject
of a centuriation and was distributed to the colonists. The city retains
its Macedonian limits, materialized by the enclosure, and its plan is
only partially revised with the development of the forum a little to the
east of the probable location of the agora.
The “unimportant
locality” according to Strabo is experiencing significant growth linked
to the wealth brought to it by its extensive territory including the
port of Neapolis and its privileged position on the Via Egnatia. This
richness results in a particularly imposing monumental setting
considering the size of the urban area.