Philippi

Based on Wikipedia: Philippi

The City Where Rome Clashed and Christianity Took Root

In October of 42 BC, on a windswept plain in northern Greece, the fate of the Roman Republic was decided in a single afternoon. Two armies faced each other near a city called Philippi—on one side, the forces of Brutus and Cassius, the men who had stabbed Julius Caesar to death on the Senate floor; on the other, the armies of Mark Antony and the young Octavian, Caesar's adopted heir who would one day rule the world as Augustus. The Republic died that day. And the obscure Macedonian city where it happened would go on to play another starring role in history, this time as the place where Christianity first gained a foothold in Europe.

Philippi's story stretches across two thousand years, from its founding as a colonial outpost to its abandonment during the Ottoman era. It's a story of gold, war, faith, and the relentless march of empires. Few cities better illustrate how the ancient world worked—or how it fell apart.

From Fountains to Philip's City

The site where Philippi would rise was originally called Crenides, which translates simply as "Fountains." Greek colonists from the island of Thasos, just offshore in the Aegean Sea, established a settlement there around 360 BC. The location made strategic sense: the town sat at the foot of Mount Orbelos (now called Mount Lekani) and controlled an important passage between mountains and marshland.

But what really mattered was the gold.

The Pangaion Hills to the south contained some of the richest gold deposits in the ancient Mediterranean. Whoever controlled this region controlled a fortune. The Thasians knew it. And so did Philip II of Macedon.

Philip was the father of Alexander the Great, but he was a formidable conqueror in his own right. In 356 BC—the same year Alexander was born—Philip seized Crenides and renamed it after himself. Philippi became a Macedonian possession, and Philip immediately set about exploiting its advantages. He built imposing fortifications that blocked the mountain pass, partially drained the surrounding marshes to increase farmland, established a mint to coin his new gold, and sent colonists to secure his claim.

The city flourished. Though it maintained some autonomy, including its own citizen assembly, Philippi was fully integrated into the Macedonian kingdom. For nearly two centuries, it remained a prosperous but unremarkable provincial town, guarding its mountain pass and producing its gold.

Then Rome arrived.

The Republic Dies

In 168 BC, the Romans crushed the Macedonian kingdom at the Battle of Pydna, ending the Antigonid dynasty that had ruled since the death of Alexander. They carved Macedonia into four administrative districts, with the capital of the eastern region placed at nearby Amphipolis rather than Philippi.

For the next century, Philippi faded into obscurity. We know almost nothing about the city during this period. Archaeologists have uncovered fragments—walls, a Greek theater, house foundations—but the written record falls silent.

That silence ended dramatically in 42 BC.

Julius Caesar had been assassinated two years earlier, stabbed twenty-three times by senators who feared he was destroying the Republic. His killers, led by Marcus Junius Brutus and Gaius Cassius Longinus, fled east to raise armies. Caesar's supporters—primarily Mark Antony and the nineteen-year-old Octavian—pursued them.

The two sides met at Philippi.

Why here? Geography. The Via Egnatia, the great Roman road that ran east-west across the Balkans, passed directly through the city. Controlling Philippi meant controlling the main land route between Rome and its eastern provinces. Neither side could afford to let the other hold it.

The battle actually consisted of two engagements, fought about three weeks apart. In the first, Brutus defeated Octavian's forces while Antony routed Cassius. Thinking all was lost, Cassius killed himself—not realizing his ally had won his half of the fight. In the second battle, Antony and Octavian's combined forces overwhelmed Brutus, who also took his own life.

The Republic, already dying, breathed its last on that plain.

A Miniature Rome

The victors transformed Philippi. Antony and Octavian settled veteran soldiers from their legions there, probably men from the Twenty-Eighth Legion who had fought in the campaign. The city was refounded as a Roman colony with the grandiose name "Colonia Victrix Philippensium"—the Colony of Victory at Philippi.

After Octavian defeated Antony at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC and became sole ruler of Rome, he reorganized the colony again. More settlers arrived, possibly veterans of the elite Praetorian Guard along with other Italians. The city received another name upgrade: Colonia Augusta Iulia Philippensis, incorporating both Octavian's new title "Augustus" and his family name "Julius."

What happened next reveals how Roman colonization actually worked.

Surveyors arrived and divided the surrounding territory into squares using a system called centuriation—a grid pattern of property lines that can still be detected in aerial photographs of some former Roman territories today. This land was distributed to the colonists, creating a class of Roman citizen-farmers far from Italy.

The city itself became what the Romans called a "miniature Rome." It operated under Roman municipal law, governed by two officials called duumviri who were appointed directly from the capital. The colonists spoke Latin, worshipped Roman gods, and built Roman-style buildings. If you visited Philippi in the first century AD, you would have found a city that looked, sounded, and felt distinctly Italian despite being located in Greece.

This wasn't accidental. Roman colonies served as anchors of Roman culture in conquered territory, creating loyal populations who identified with Rome rather than local traditions. The abundance of Latin inscriptions found at Philippi, rather than Greek, shows how thoroughly this cultural transplant succeeded.

Paul Arrives

Around AD 49 or 50, a traveling Jewish tentmaker named Paul walked into Philippi and changed everything.

Paul—originally Saul of Tarsus—had spent years persecuting the followers of Jesus before a mystical experience on the road to Damascus converted him into Christianity's most energetic missionary. By the time he reached Philippi, he had already established communities of believers across the eastern Mediterranean. But Philippi was different.

It was Europe.

According to the Acts of the Apostles, written by Paul's traveling companion Luke, Philippi was the first place on the European continent where Paul preached the new faith. He arrived with a small group: Silas, Timothy, and probably Luke himself. They found no synagogue in the city—likely because the Jewish population was too small to support one—so they went to a place by the river where they expected to find people praying.

There they met Lydia.

Lydia was a dealer in purple cloth, an expensive luxury item that required painstaking extraction of dye from thousands of murex sea snails. She came from Thyatira, a city in Asia Minor famous for its dye works. As a merchant of luxury goods in a Roman colony, she was probably wealthy. She was also, according to Acts, already a "worshipper of God"—meaning she had adopted Jewish religious practices without fully converting.

She and her entire household were baptized, becoming the first recorded Christian converts in Europe. She then insisted that Paul and his companions stay at her house, providing them with a base of operations.

Paul returned to Philippi at least twice more, in AD 56 and 57. His Letter to the Philippians, written around AD 61-62 while he was imprisoned (probably in Rome), reveals a warm relationship with this community. Unlike his letters to some other churches, which are full of corrections and rebukes, Philippians overflows with affection. These were people he loved.

The Church Flourishes

The Christian community at Philippi grew steadily over the following centuries. Around AD 160, Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna who had reportedly known the apostle John personally, wrote a letter to the Philippian Christians—evidence that the community remained active and connected to the broader church network.

The earliest identifiable church building in Philippi was a small structure, perhaps originally just a prayer house, that archaeologists call the Basilica of Paul. A mosaic inscription in its floor names it, and a bishop of Philippi named Porphyrios is recorded as attending the Council of Serdica in AD 343, giving us a date for when the building was already in use.

But the real explosion of church construction came in the fifth and sixth centuries.

By then, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire, and civic pride increasingly expressed itself through church building. Philippi's residents—or perhaps more accurately, their bishops—engaged in what looks like ecclesiastical competition. Between the mid-fourth century and the late sixth century, seven different churches rose within the city.

Some of these buildings rivaled anything in Thessalonica or even Constantinople. Basilica B, whose ruins remain impressive today, shows clear architectural connections to Hagia Sophia and Saint Irene in the imperial capital. The cathedral complex that replaced the original Basilica of Paul at the end of the fifth century was built around an octagonal central church, an ambitious design that put Philippi in elite company.

The city's inhabitants attributed their prosperity directly to Paul. Fifteen hundred years after his visit, he remained their founding figure, their link to the apostolic age, their claim to significance in the Christian world.

The Long Decline

Nothing lasts forever. Philippi's decline began in the sixth century and would stretch across eight hundred years.

Multiple catastrophes struck in rapid succession. Slavic invasions disrupted Macedonia's agricultural economy, cutting off the food supplies that sustained urban populations. The Plague of Justinian—a pandemic that may have killed as many as twenty-five million people across the Mediterranean world between AD 541 and 549—struck Philippi around 547. Then, around 619, a massive earthquake devastated the city.

Philippi never recovered.

The site remained inhabited, but barely. What had been a prosperous city became, in the seventh century, little more than a village. The Byzantine Empire may have maintained a garrison there—the location remained strategically important—but urban life had effectively ended.

In 838, Bulgarian forces under a commander named Isbul captured the city. They celebrated their victory with a monumental inscription carved into the stylobate (the platform supporting the columns) of the already-ruined Basilica B. The Byzantines attempted to retake Philippi around 850, and administrative seals from the first half of the ninth century prove Byzantine officials were present, but the city's glory days were over.

There were flickers of recovery. Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas rebuilt fortifications in 969 as part of a campaign to push back Bulgarian power. Bishop Basil Kartzimopoulos restored some defenses in 1077. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi, writing around 1150, described Philippi as a center of business and wine production—evidence of at least modest prosperity.

But the Fourth Crusade in 1204 shattered the Byzantine Empire, and Philippi changed hands repeatedly in the chaos that followed. Franks, Serbs, and eventually Ottomans all passed through. In 1354, a pretender to the Byzantine throne named Matthew Cantacuzenus was captured there by Serbian forces—a reminder that the old Via Egnatia still mattered as a route, even if the city guarding it had crumbled.

At some point—we don't know exactly when—the last inhabitants left. When a French traveler named Pierre Belon visited in the 1540s, he found only ruins that Turkish builders were using as a quarry for construction materials. The city's name survived in a small Turkish village on the plain called Filibecik ("Little Filibe"), which has itself since disappeared, and later in a Greek mountain village.

Rediscovery

Travelers had noted the ruins of Philippi before, but the first modern archaeological description came from Georges Perrot, who visited in 1856 and published his findings in 1860. The following year, the French Mission Archéologique de Macédoine, led by archaeologist Léon Heuzey and architect Honoré Daumet, conducted more extensive investigations.

Formal excavations began in the summer of 1914, just weeks before World War One erupted across Europe. Work resumed in 1920 after the war and continued until 1937, with French archaeologists uncovering the Greek theater, the Roman forum, two of the great basilicas, the bath complex, and sections of the city walls.

After World War Two, Greek archaeologists took over. Between 1958 and 1978, teams from the Archaeological Society of Athens, the Greek Archaeological Service, and the University of Thessalonica excavated the bishop's quarter, the octagonal church, large private residences, and additional basilicas in the cemetery area east of the city center.

In 2016, UNESCO designated Philippi a World Heritage Site. The organization cited three reasons: the exceptional quality of Roman architecture, the urban layout that reflected Rome itself in miniature, and the city's importance in early Christianity.

All three elements are visible in the ruins today. The forum, built in stages between the reigns of emperors Claudius (AD 41-54) and Antoninus Pius (AD 138-161), spreads across two terraces flanking the ancient road. The theater, originally Greek but expanded by the Romans to host gladiatorial games, still hosts performances. The basilicas, though ruined, still convey the ambition and wealth of the Christian community that built them.

Why Philippi Matters

Philippi was never one of the ancient world's great cities. It was no Rome, no Alexandria, no Athens. At its peak, it was a prosperous provincial town, noteworthy mainly for the famous battle fought nearby and for its early Christian community.

But that's precisely what makes it valuable.

The great cities of antiquity have been studied, rebuilt, and transformed so many times that understanding their original character requires peeling back centuries of accumulated layers. Philippi is different. It rose, flourished, declined, and was abandoned. What remains is a snapshot of a Roman colony in the Greek East, preserved by its very obscurity.

Walk through the forum today, and you see how Roman civic life worked in practice. Visit the churches, and you witness the physical transformation that Christianity brought to Mediterranean cities. Read the Latin inscriptions, and you understand how thoroughly Rome could transplant its culture to foreign soil.

And if you know where to look, you can find the place by the river where Lydia met a traveling preacher named Paul, and where the history of Europe quietly pivoted toward something entirely new.