Friend and Ally of the Roman People

Rome arrived in the eastern Aegean at the beginning of the second century BC, and Chios, with the commercial instinct that runs through its entire history like a wire, was on the right side early and unambiguously.

During Rome's war against Antiochus III of Syria (192–188 BC), Chios served as a Roman naval base, supply depot, and forward anchorage, and a substantial fleet action was fought off the island in 190. When the war ended and Asia Minor was carved up at Apamea, the loyalty was rewarded on a generous scale. Chios became a civitas libera et foederata — a free and allied city — with its own laws, its own magistrates, immunity from Roman taxation, and a formal treaty relationship recorded on stone in which the two states describe each other as friends and allies.

The free-city centuries were long and comfortable. Chian wine now had access to the richest single market that had ever existed, and the Roman literary record from Horace to Pliny testifies to how thoroughly the island exploited it. Chian marble — the reddish-purple breccia the Romans called marmor chium, known in Renaissance Italy as portasanta, "holy door," from the use to which it was put in the doorframes of St Peter's — was quarried and shipped for imperial building projects, and can be seen today in Rome, in Istanbul, and in half the great churches of Italy. Chian sculptors continued to work. Chian ships continued to trade.

The monumental centre of the town was rebuilt on a Roman scale, with a theatre, baths, an aqueduct, and temples. Roman senators and equestrians invested in Chian property. The inscriptions of the period record gymnasia, festivals, benefactions, priesthoods, and the entire self-satisfied machinery of a prosperous provincial city that has arranged its affairs well and intends to go on doing so.

Twice in five hundred years the arrangement broke down. The second time was an earthquake. The first time was a man called Zenobius, and it was worse.