RP-28 Epirus, Epirus Vetus, and Epirus Nova

Epirus: a coast connected to a difficult interior

Epirus occupied a landscape of coastal plains, river mouths, rugged uplands, and passes. Its communities had long participated in Greek and Adriatic affairs, while inland and northern districts possessed different regional histories. Roman conquest brought severe violence and enslavement in the second century BCE, followed by new patterns of landholding and dependency.

The region’s harbours connected it with Italy, but inland movement remained constrained by mountains. This combination made coastal cities and route junctions especially important. Buthrotum’s colonial development and the growth of Nicopolis created different Roman urban centres within the same wider landscape.

Nicopolis and the old province

Augustus founded Nicopolis after Actium as a monument to victory and a regional reorganization of settlement. Populations and resources from surrounding communities were drawn into the new city, changing the balance between old civic centres and the imperial foundation. Its games, public buildings, and symbolic associations linked local life with the founding memory of the Principate.

The later separate province of Epirus inherited this Nicopolitan core. Government depended on coastal access and routes into the interior. Farming, livestock, local manufacture, maritime exchange, and the movement associated with festivals and administration all supported provincial life.

Epirus Vetus

The late old province preserved the core Epirote districts and Nicopolis’s administrative importance. Its Ionian setting connected it with southern Italy and Greece. Local cities and episcopal centres acquired authority within a Christian provincial society, while the economic relationship between coast and interior continued.

Political change did not remove the value of harbours and fortified towns. Their capacity to maintain contact with the eastern empire could outlast secure control of surrounding uplands. The province’s later history consequently differed from that of inland districts more exposed to shifts in military and settlement patterns.

Epirus Nova

The new province centred farther north, with Dyrrachium as a principal city. Its position at the Adriatic end of the Via Egnatia gave it a communications role linking sea crossings to Macedonia and the eastern Balkans. Apollonia and other settlements belonged to the province’s broader historical landscape, although their relative fortunes changed over time.

Epirus Nova was a late administrative formation, not simply a second half of an ancient Epirote kingdom. Its territory drew on earlier provincial arrangements and contained communities with varied linguistic and cultural inheritances. The label expressed Roman administrative geography rather than a single unchanged ethnic identity.

A late Adriatic frontier

The two provinces belonged to the Macedonian diocesan sphere, but their coastal orientation gave them distinctive strategic importance. Officials, armies, merchants, churchmen, and migrants crossed the Adriatic or travelled east along the main routes. Maintaining transport and security was therefore a continuing concern.

Late antique invasions, imperial recoveries, local fortification, and the expansion of new populations altered control differently across the coast and interior. Dyrrachium retained exceptional importance as an imperial gateway, while other towns declined, shifted, or survived on a more local scale. The Epirote provinces show how administrative subdivision could give separate institutional expression to two different communications systems within the same western Balkan world.

Settlement geography