Philippi Archaeological Site (Φίλιπποι)

Philippi

 

Location: Map

 

Description of Archaeological Site

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.

 

Historiographical sources

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.

 

Macedonian and Hellenistic origins

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.

 

Foundation

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.

 

City institutions

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.

 

Urban setting

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.

 

Theater

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.

 

Macedonian tomb, a heron

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.

 

Roman era

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.