After Pompey's settlement, the rock of Amaseia, its royal palaces and its river were all still in place; what had changed was the legal and political position of the people who filled the city. The noble families that came out of the court circle, a large population attached to temple communities, and the farmers living in the villages now had to carry on their lives inside Rome's provincial order. The course of the war and the titles of metropolis and neokoros are the subject of separate articles; here the focus is the society of Roman Amaseia, that is, its people, language, religion and classes.

The Social Setting of the Move from Kingdom to Province

Amaseia was taken in 70 BC by a Roman army under Lucullus and was made by Pompey a free city and one of the administrative centres of the province of Bithynia and Pontus. Around 3 or 2 BC the city was attached to the province of Galatia, to the district called Pontus Galaticus, and under the emperor Trajan, around AD 112, it became part of the province of Cappadocia. Each attachment changed the governorship the city answered to and its relations with neighbouring regions, but everyday social life changed more slowly than these reorganisations.

The most lasting trace this annexation left on the daily life of the townspeople was the way they measured time. Amaseia began its own civic era in 3 BC, the year it entered the Roman provincial order, and counted its years from that point. The year 172 recorded on a tombstone that a father set up for his son corresponds by this reckoning to AD 169. The same count appears on a bronze coin struck under Antoninus Pius: the city's name is written with the epithet "metropolis and first of Pontus", and beneath it is the year 157, that is, AD 154/155. On the reverse sits Sarapis, his arm stretched out over Cerberus. This shared calendar, running from tombstone to coin, shows that the townspeople saw themselves within a timeline that began at the moment they joined Rome.

The first consequences of the transition can be read in the lines left by Strabo, the geographer from Amaseia, who wrote as a contemporary observer. Strabo notes that Amaseia too had once been given to kings but was now a province. He calls his homeland by far the largest and best part of Pontus; yet in the same passage he adds that, because of the Mithridatic War, the country contained many ruined strongholds and large stretches of deserted land. In his account the region is well wooded, part of it suitable for horse pasture and for raising other livestock, and the whole of it well adapted to habitation. The traces of the war showed in the distribution of the population and in the use of the land, but the country remained habitable.

Roman policy left some parts of Pontus for a time in the hands of kings and dependent rulers. Pythodoris, a contemporary of Strabo, is described as a wise woman capable of managing affairs of state, who held Pharnaceia and Trapezus; she took over the rule after the death of her husband Polemon and later married Archelaus. The priesthood of Comana was held for a time by Lycomedes and then by Dyteutus, the son of Adiatorix. Augustus, after leading Adiatorix in triumph with his wife and children, had resolved to put the father and his eldest son Dyteutus to death; the second son told the soldiers that he was the elder, and a long contest followed between the two brothers until their parents persuaded Dyteutus to yield to the younger, since the elder would be the more suitable guardian for his mother and the remaining brother. The younger son was killed with his father; according to Strabo, Augustus was grieved when he learned of it afterwards and gave the survivors this priesthood. The story shows how closely the fate of local nobles in the Roman age depended on the personal decisions of the emperor.

Hüsameddin's History of Amasya, drawing on its own sources, tells these years of transition along a different line. According to him, after taking the city Pompey had the lower and upper citadels pulled down, laid the palace waste and put part of the population to the sword. Hüsameddin also writes that a local lord he calls "Dizutar İlis" governed Amasya for thirty-one years under Roman protection, that when his grandson Castor accused him of rebellion he was tried in Rome, and that he was acquitted thanks to Cicero's defence and returned to the city. The details of this account could not be verified against the contemporary ancient sources used here; it may be supposed that the names have become mixed up with information about rulers of other regions. Even so, it is clear that local historical writing, much like the story of Adiatorix told by Strabo, saw the fate of the local nobles who submitted to Rome as lying in the hands of the emperor and the Roman courts.

The Old Noble Families and Strabo's Circle

How the city's long-established families adapted to the new order is shown strikingly by Strabo's own family. Strabo writes that his mother's grandfather was Dorylaus the tactician. This Dorylaus had received the highest honours from Mithridates Eupator and had also obtained the priesthood of Comana. His nephew, a second Dorylaus, was caught trying to turn the kingdom over to the Romans, and when he was overthrown the family fell into disrepute. Later his mother's uncle Moaphernes rose to distinction in the last years of the kingdom; but when the kingdom was dissolved, Moaphernes and his relatives, apart from those who had left the king beforehand, were again unfortunate along with him.

One of those who had left the king beforehand was Strabo's maternal grandfather. The king had put to death the grandfather's cousin Tibius and Tibius' son Theophilus, and when the grandfather saw that the war against Lucullus was going badly, he set out to avenge them and himself. Taking pledges from Lucullus, he caused fifteen garrisons to go over to him. Great promises were made, but when Pompey succeeded Lucullus the situation changed. Pompey treated everyone who had favoured Lucullus as an enemy; and when he had finished the war and returned to Rome, he saw to it that the Senate did not ratify the honours Lucullus had promised to certain Pontic people, since he thought it unjust that one man should finish the war and another distribute the rewards. Serving Rome was no guarantee of reward for a local noble; relations were woven into rivalries inside Rome itself.

Scholars debate how the family's pro-Roman stance affected its standing in the city and whether it received Roman citizenship as a reward. Since Iranian culture is known to have endured in the city after Mithridates and Tigranes were defeated, the question is a natural one. Strabo's own citizenship status, however, is not stated clearly in the sources, and nothing definite can be said about it.

The great priestly families of the royal age are also remembered through the monumental tombs in the city's cliffs. On the rock tomb known as Aynalı Mağara, which lies on the road from Amasya to the village of Ziyaret, forty-five minutes from the city, there is a two-line inscription. The upper line reads "the high priest Tes"; the lower line has been carefully chiselled away and is largely illegible. The editors of Studia Pontica proposed that Tes was high priest of Mithridates or of Pharnaces and that the king's name had been erased on the orders of the victorious Romans. The classical scholar George Bean, who saw the tomb in 1950, rejected this view: neither Mithridates nor Pharnaces can be read in the erasure, and the letter forms of the lower line differ from those of the upper. In Bean's view the lower line is a second epitaph belonging to a later reuse of the tomb, consisting of a name and a patronymic, and may have been erased because it was cut without authority. Hüsameddin, relying on the French archaeologist Georges Perrot, also writes that the tomb belonged to a high priest as powerful as kings, like the priests of Zela and Comana, who were the greatest men of the country in those ages; according to the same account, the small rock tomb below Aynalı Mağara belonged to a woman of the dynasty named Pythodoris. This last attribution could not be confirmed from another source. That a priest's tomb was taken over generations later by another family suggests that the old spaces of the elite passed to new owners in the Roman age; this, however, is an inference.

Education, Greek and the City's Elite

The cultural language of Amaseia's elite was Greek. Strabo is a geographer who wrote in Greek, and his family's names reflect this mixed world. Alongside Greek names such as Dorylaus and Philetaerus, the name Mithridates comes from the royal dynasty, while the name Moaphernes appears to be of Persian origin. In the late Roman period the city's population is said to have been predominantly Greek-speaking, but this cannot be said to rest on a detailed picture of language distribution.

Naming habits show on the tombstones, too, how this mixed inheritance lived on across generations. On a funerary stele that Bean found built into the parapet wall above the river bank in the courtyard of the Beyazıt Mosque, one reads the inscription of a monument set up in AD 169 by his "unfortunate father" for Cornelius Mithridates, who died at twenty-two. As Bean points out, the royal name Mithridates was still in ordinary use more than two hundred years after the end of the dynasty, and here it stands beside a Roman name, Cornelius. On other stones Roman family names such as Iulius and Aurelius are joined to Greek personal names: Iulius Basileus, Iulius Heraklas, Iulius Statilius, Iulius Zosimos, Aurelius Agricolaus. These names suggest that, as Roman citizenship spread through the empire, the city's families adopted Roman family names; there is no direct document showing which family received citizenship and when.

Strabo's education shows how wide a world this milieu opened onto in the Roman age. He received his first schooling at Nysa from the master of rhetoric Aristodemus, a grandson of the famous Posidonius; Aristodemus had also taught the sons of the Roman commander who took over Pontus. The young Strabo went to Rome around 44 BC and stayed there until at least 31 BC. He studied philosophy with the Peripatetic Xenarchus and grammar with Tyrannion of Amisus, and under the influence of the Stoic Athenodorus he developed Stoic leanings of his own. Most of these teachers were Greek intellectuals who taught the children of the Roman elite. In later years Strabo travelled to Egypt and Kush and as far as the coast of Etruria; on his Egyptian journey the prefect of Egypt, Aelius Gallus, was with him. That Tyrannion came from Amisus, and the mathematician Dionysodorus from Amisene, points to a network of intellectuals in the region built on Greek culture. Hüsameddin, too, calls Strabo "the patriarch of geographers" and, citing the Tabakâtu'l-Hükemâ, relates that he learned literature and logic from Aristodemus and mathematics and grammar from Tyrannion; he also links the name "Medînetü'l-Hükemâ", the city of sages, by which Amasya is known in Ottoman sources, partly to Strabo's having come from this city.

Strabo reports that between 60 BC and AD 19 Amaseia was a gathering place for thinkers, writers and poets. This remark reflects the stability brought by the Roman peace: a country emerging from war had managed, within a few generations, to produce an educated elite again. Inside the city's own walls, according to Strabo, there were two peaks holding both the palaces and the monuments of the kings, joined by a narrow neck; the legacy of the royal age stood in place as part of the everyday scenery of the elite.

The name of the city was part of this elite Greek self-awareness. Strabo relates the account that the name Amaseia comes from Amasis, queen of the Amazons, and the forms Amaseia, Amassia and Amasia all appear on ancient Greek and Roman coins. Describing his city, Strabo praises it as a place that serves as both city and fortress, made by human foresight together with nature. Two bridges crossed the river, one from the city to the suburb and the other from the suburb to the outer territory. Two channels cut into the rock made it impossible to deprive the city of water in a siege. The distinction between those living in the suburb and those living inside the walls suggests a social geography of the city, but Strabo gives no population figure or class detail on the point.

Family Life on the Tombstones

It is the funerary inscriptions that bring the ordinary people of Roman Amaseia closest to us, with their names and their feelings. Most of these stones were later built as material into mosque walls, bridge piers, fountains and house floors; some entered the Studia Pontica collection published in 1910, and some were read anew during the journey of George Bean and P. M. Fraser in 1950. The legible texts show a society in which family ties, marital devotion and love for children were expressed in Greek formulas.

On a stone built into the pier of the bridge that follows the main bridge beside the government house, it is written that Iulius Basileus buried his "most honoured" wife Avidia Theodote. The inscription speaks in the dead woman's voice in a faulty hexameter: God heard her prayer, she died first while her husband was still alive, and she wished that a common tomb might hold them both. Bean finds this satisfaction at dying before her husband strange, and notes that it hardly fits the reference in the same line to an "untimely" death. On a broken stone found in the floor of a house on one of the city's streets, the inscription of a monument that a woman named Philete set up in memory of her husband Eutychus is cut in very bad and irregular letters; the quality of the lettering suggests that such monuments were not confined to wealthy families, though this is an inference.

In the wall of the Yörgüç Paşa Mosque is a funerary stele with a bunch of grapes carved in relief in its pediment. A mother named Glykera commemorates her "dearest" son Aurelius Agricolaus, who died at twenty-six, as a hard-working young man who honoured his parents and his friends; according to Bean the inscription was left unfinished and is faulty in its grammar. On another stone built into a fountain near the Halifet Gazi Mosque, Iulius Heraklas and Iulius Statilius are recorded as having set up a monument for their "foster father" Iulius Zosimos; the space for the year was left blank. That two young men bearing the same family name set up a tomb for the man who raised them may be read as showing that the dependants of a household could also find a place in the family's memory; this is an inference. On a block in the courtyard of an old madrasa, beneath the relief of an animal that seems to be a boar in the pediment, stands a monument that a man had made in memory of his brother Agrippianus.

Hüsameddin records that a Latin inscription cut into a rock at the head of Kuşköprü, south-east of the Şamlar quarter, behind the tannery on the river bank, was reported to carry the following sense: Rufis, head of the family, had this rock adorned during his lifetime and had this tomb made for his son Kleobrat, who drew up the laws; when he died, his own bones were placed here too; in the same place lie the bones of the family's forebears, Timeyis Kroniyon and his son Palikaruniyos. Hüsameddin bases the text on a report passed on to him; the present state and reading of the inscription could not be confirmed from another source. If the text as reported is correct, it points to a tradition in which rock-cut family tombs were used across generations and the head of the family took charge of gathering the dead together.

Necropoleis and Burial Customs

In the shadow of the royal tombs on the cliff, the city's ordinary dead were buried in wide cemeteries on the plain and the slopes. That such a necropolis lies beneath the old Muslim cemetery in today's Şamlar district became clear from a rescue excavation carried out by the Amasya Museum under Mehmet Tektaş in the spring of 1986. In twenty-nine days of work, beneath more than thirty Islamic graves in the top layer, adjoining group tombs came to light, with rubble-stone walls topped by a course of brick, the inside rendered with a smooth reddish plaster, and covered with dressed-stone lids. Some were double tombs; in one the inner surface was decorated in red with symmetrical garlands and stylised flowers set between them. Two vaulted tombs were found to hold two burials each. All the tombs had been robbed earlier; nothing remained but terracotta and glass tear bottles and fragments of jugs.

Tektaş records that there was no fixed rule either in the orientation of the tombs or in the way the dead were laid, and that the examples differed in material and technique. Similar tombs had been found in 1983 at a construction site just north of the excavation area and in 1974 at Kulistepe, about four hundred metres to the north; combining these data, Tektaş concludes that an extensive Late Roman cemetery stretches beneath today's railway and residential areas. Osman Fevzi Olcay, too, in his manuscript Amasya Tarihi Zeyli written in 1932, mentioned sarcophagi that had come to light in the Şamlar quarter and drew a sketch of them; Tektaş thinks these were the arch-covered tomb groups exposed in the railway cutting.

In 2024, while the foundations of a building were being dug in the Hızır Paşa quarter, three more Roman tombs came to light, one of them a family tomb. Hüseyin Onur Erdem of Amasya University, who examined them, stated that the red band decoration painted in ochre over the white lime plaster inside the vaulted tombs most probably dates them to the second and third centuries AD. According to Erdem, it is known from earlier rescue excavations in the city that vaulted tombs wider than 120 centimetres were used as family tombs, in which mother, father and any children were buried together. Built in steps against the slope, these tombs were at the time visible structures standing above ground, which people could approach and visit.

The skeletons from these cemeteries also tell us about the bodies of the townspeople. In rescue excavations carried out by the Amasya Museum between 1992 and 2012 at sites dated to the Roman period in the provincial centre and its surroundings, the remains of fifty-six individuals in total were recovered. According to the study by Pınar Gözlük Kırmızıoğlu and Hanife Akbacak, two of them were infants, eleven children, fifteen women and thirteen men; the sex of fifteen individuals could not be determined. Traces such as fractures, osteoarthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, osteophytes and Schmorl's nodes were identified on the bones. It may be supposed that this wear on the spine and joints was linked to heavy physical labour; but a sample of fifty-six people cannot be said to represent the whole population of the city, and it is not enough to draw firm conclusions about child mortality or life expectancy.

The Iranian Legacy and the Rural Order

The pre-Roman social layer of Amaseia was the Persian-descended Pontic dynasty and its circle. According to scholars, this circle preserved an originally Persian aristocracy and Iranian cults; the five rock tombs of the kings and the twelve priestly tombs on the cliff are said not to have been out of place in Persis. Strabo writes that in Cappadocia the Magi formed a large community, that there were many temples of the Persian gods, and that there were enclosures called Pyraetheia with a fire kept ever burning at the centre, which he saw himself. The same customs were observed in the temples of Anaitis and Omanus, and a wooden statue of Omanus was carried in procession. This cultural inheritance did not vanish at once with Roman rule.

The rural order, too, continued on structures inherited from the kingdom. In the northern lands of Amaseia, as Strabo describes them, the river valley is at first narrow and then widens into the plain called Chiliocomum ("thousand villages"); beyond it the fertile districts of Diacopene and Pimolisene extend to the Halys. The northern part was about five hundred stadia long. In Ximene there were rock-salt deposits after which the Halys is said to have been named. These plain villages formed the economic and social ground of the city; Strabo does not give their number, but the name itself points to the size of the village population.

In neighbouring regions the temple communities formed a separate class of society. At Pontic Comana the temple servants numbered as many as six thousand; in the time of the kings, during the goddess's twice-yearly "exoduses", the chief priest wore a diadem and ranked second in honour after the king. Pompey gave this priesthood to Archelaus, attached to the temple lands an additional territory of two schoeni (sixty stadia) in circuit, and ordered the people to obey him; the priest, however, had no power to sell the temple servants. At Zela the kings had governed the settlement as a sacred precinct of the Persian gods, and the priest had been master of everything. The people of Pontus swore their most important oaths there. Pompey declared Zela a city and enlarged its territory. It is clear that Amaseia was not part of these institutions; but the social structure around it took the form of such a mosaic.

The cities that Pompey founded or renamed also changed the settlement pattern around. He completed a half-finished city under the name Magnopolis, adding territory and settlers; he proclaimed the village of Phazemon a city under the name Neapolis; and he gave city status to Zela and Megalopolis as well. Strabo also records that in these parts of Pontus royal-age palaces and strongholds were deserted or in ruins. This passage from village to city must have meant that the population around Amaseia had to become used to a new political language, that of city citizenship.

Local Cults and the Institutions of the Roman World

Religion was one of the most continuous sides of this society. Cults from the royal period, such as that of Zeus Stratios, are said to have lived on in the Roman age; while local traditions continued, the institutions of the Roman world also entered the city. The figure of Sarapis on the coin of Antoninus Pius's reign shows that this god of Egyptian origin had also found a place among the city's official images. In the late Roman period a temple of the Magna Mater (Cybele) is known to have stood in Amaseia, and Christian sources say that a man named Theodore burned it. The city thus had a layered religious life, running from Persian-descended fire cults to the cult of the Anatolian mother goddess and Greek and Roman worship. There is no solid record showing which group adopted which cult and to what extent; that these religions lived side by side is inferred from indirect evidence in the sources.

Christian Society in the Late Roman Period

From the third century AD in particular, Amaseia became the seat of a Christian metropolitan bishopric in the East Roman world; when it was the capital of the late Roman province of Helenopontus, the sees of Amisus, Andrapa, Euchaita, Ibora, Sinope, Zaliche and Zela were subject to it. The best-known name of this period in the city is Theodore. According to the legend, Theodore, who was of Greek origin, was a soldier in a cohort sent to Pontus for winter quarters. During the Great Persecution, in the time of Diocletian and Galerius, he refused to offer pagan sacrifice; the judges, taking pity on his youth, postponed the sentence, and he then burned the city's temple of the Magna Mater. Arrested again, tortured, he was put to death by burning on 17 February 306. The details of the legend were enriched later; that he was venerated by the end of the fourth century is known.

Hüsameddin tells the same event in a different order. According to him, under Licinius, Theodore, an officer in the Roman army, became a Christian through the persuasion of Asterius, leader of the city's Christians; after a clash he and his companions destroyed pagan temples, and the pagans, gathering under a leader named Otas, killed him in December 307. Hüsameddin presents Asterius as the city's first metropolitan in the reign of Constantine. This chronology cannot be reconciled with the sources showing that Asterius lived from about 350 to 410 and became bishop in the 380s; Hüsameddin appears to have merged two separate generations. The same work records a popular belief told among the Christians of Amasya: in the Çukur Kilise there was said to live a very old saint who over the years had shrunk to the size of a crow and lay in a cotton basket, and who at the start of every year raised his head to ask whether Jesus had come. Hüsameddin writes that he tried to trace the origin of this tale but found nothing beyond hearsay, and regards it as a story made up to keep alive the memory of the city's Christian saints, such as Asterius and Theodore.

The person who describes the late Roman society of the city most vividly is Asterius, who lived from about 350 to 410. Born in Cappadocia, Asterius became bishop of Amaseia between 380 and 390 after a career as a lawyer. Nothing is known of his family; the one fact known about his education is that his principal teacher was a Scythian who in his youth had been sold as a slave to a schoolmaster of Antioch, grew up under him and won fame among both Greeks and Romans, a rare hint of slave tutors in households. Asterius studied Demosthenes closely and became a powerful orator himself; it is also considered highly probable that he wrote the life of his predecessor, Saint Basil of Amaseia. The sources differ on how many of his sermons survive: some speak of sixteen homilies and panegyrics on the martyrs, while those who translated his sermons into English in 1904 state that between twenty and thirty texts are attributed to him, the authenticity of some being disputed. According to the translators, these sermons vividly reflect popular customs and everyday conditions that historians have failed to portray.

His sermon of 1 January 400 attacks the pagan customs and excesses of the Kalends festival and rejects what Libanius had said in its defence. The date of the sermon is inferred from its reference to Eutropius, who had fallen from the consulship the year before, and it is the only fixed date in Asterius's life. The New Year that Asterius describes is a chain of gifts and money: greetings are given grudgingly, the kiss is the herald of the present, a gift received is not kept but taken from an inferior and handed to a superior, until at last, like streams running into great rivers, it collects in the purses of the most powerful men. Bands of beggars and stage jugglers in squads and hordes beset the houses, besieging the gates of officials in particular with shouting and clapping, and the din goes on until evening, until the exhausted householder throws out whatever money he has, even what is not his own. Children go from door to door offering fruit covered in silver tinsel and receive gifts of double the value in return.

The most striking pictures in the sermon concern the relation between town and country and the soldiers. According to Asterius, in these days honest farmers flee the city like hares from nets; those found inside it are beaten, set upon by drunkards, robbed of what they carry and made a laughing stock. Soldiers spend their whole pay on one debauch, mount a chariot as if on a stage and appoint mock lictors to make fun of the offices of state, and some put on women's clothes, dress their hair like women and take up the distaff to spin wool. Asterius says that debt and usury increase with this festival, and that even a man who lives by honest labour is dragged off and flogged like one who has failed to pay the royal taxes. He says that the consuls scatter fortunes on charioteers, flute-players, dancers and beast-fighters, money gathered from the provisions of poor soldiers and from justice put up for sale. How many of these scenes were taken directly from the streets of Amaseia is not certain; given that the sermon was delivered in the city, it may be supposed that Asterius was describing sights his hearers knew.

In his sermon on the rich man and Lazarus Asterius condemns those who wear silk, who have cloth dyed with costly sea dyes, and who go about in garments embroidered with Gospel scenes. In his view, while sheep's wool is enough for winter and linen for summer, the rich gather "the threads of the Persian worms" and have their garments dyed with the blood of the sea snail. The clothes of the wealthy are woven with lions, leopards, bears, bulls, dogs, woods, rocks and hunters; those who go out dressed like this look like painted walls, and children point with their fingers at the pictures on the clothes and follow behind them. The rich who pass for pious have the wedding at Cana, the paralytic carrying his bed and Lazarus rising from the dead woven into their garments. Asterius says that watch-dogs and hunting-dogs are fed and given a roof, beds and attendants, while the poor man at the gate is left on the ground; he adds that the thieves, housebreakers and murderers he had seen before the judgment seat were all poor men, homeless and without anyone. That he addresses his hearers as "gentlemen" gives some idea that the audience was made up of men.

His sermon against covetousness shows the world of property and inheritance of the same society. Asterius speaks of rich men who wish for heavy taxes to be proclaimed for their own profit and for their neighbours to be throttled by money-lenders, and of those who keep many slaves at the loom and live in houses as large as small cities. He describes wills being overturned in the courts with the help of skilled lawyers, orators, bribed witnesses and judges, and sons who covet their father's property and resent the old man even for freeing a slave. In his sermon on divorce he accuses husbands of making light of the marriage contract they signed with their own hands after the dowry had been agreed, and of divorcing their wives easily. The luxury of the rich and the condition of the poor were thus carried into the pulpit of the church of Amaseia, and the social divisions of this age were recorded directly in the sermons.

In 2013, near a site where an illegal dig had been attempted, a Christian mosaic of about twenty-four square metres was uncovered, belonging to the floor of a chapel and showing an apple tree, apples, partridges and geometric figures. Since the sources used give no date, nothing definite can be said about its period; it nonetheless shows that the Christian community built lasting structures in the city.

The society of Roman Amaseia therefore does not fit a single mould. Persian-descended nobles and Greek-educated intellectuals, the rural peasant population and the temple communities around the city, urban families bearing Roman names and slave tutors, pagan temples and the rising Christian community all belong to different layers of the same period, and the sources do not show all of them equally.

Chronology

70 BC: Amaseia is taken by a Roman army under Lucullus.

c. 64 BC: Strabo is born in Amaseia.

44 BC: Strabo goes to Rome for his education and stays there until at least 31 BC.

3/2 BC: The city is attached to the Pontus Galaticus district of the province of Galatia; Amaseia's civic era begins in 3 BC.

c. AD 112: Trajan attaches the city to the province of Cappadocia.

AD 154/155: In the 157th year of the city's era, a coin inscribed "metropolis and first of Pontus" is struck in the name of Antoninus Pius.

AD 169: A tombstone is set up by his father for Cornelius Mithridates, who died at twenty-two.

3rd century AD: Amaseia becomes the seat of a Christian metropolitan bishopric.

306: Theodore is martyred in Amaseia, according to tradition; Hüsameddin places the event in 307.

380-390: Asterius becomes bishop of Amaseia.

400: Asterius preaches his sermon against the Kalends.

Bibliography

Primary sources

  • Strabo, Geography (Geographika), books X, XII and XV (English translation: H. L. Jones)
  • Encyclopedia article on the life, family and education of Strabo
  • Hüsameddin, Amasya Tarihi, vol. 2 (e-book pp. 278, 280-282, 284-285, 287; Pompey's capture of Amasya, Perrot's views on the rock tombs, Strabo, "Dizutar İlis", Theodore and Asterius, the Çukur Kilise belief, the Latin inscription near Kuşköprü): https://amasya.bel.tr/uploads/e-kitap/kitap/1-4/files/basic-html/page284.html

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources