The fourth chapter starts with exploring the extent to which an awareness of the potential cultural capital of calendrical systems can be detected in the cities of Roman Ionia, both in regard to cyclical (calendars, months) and linear (eponymous dating, eras) constructions of time. The Ionian cities appear as highly conservative in maintaining their traditional calendars and month names, the latter being clearly distinguishable from month names of cities in other parts of the Greek world through their characteristic morphology. Similarly, the Ionian cities never replaced their traditional eponymous year dating with an era-based dating as many other communities in Asia Minor are attested to have done. An onomastic study forms the second part of the chapter. Based on all the personal names attested in the cities of Roman Ionia it can be shown that names of specific Ionian flavour continue to be attested in the Roman Imperial period.

One of the most prominent and seemingly most straightforward criteria used to distinguish different ethno-cultural groups or subdivide them further was the existence of a distinct dialect, to which the fifth chapter is dedicated. Because of the unrepresentative picture we get from the nature of the surviving epigraphic evidence, we cannot be sure whether some form of the Ionic dialect or accent continued to be spoken in the Roman period. Yet, the continued creative engagement with the Ionic dialect in the fields of historiography and medical writing by authors from all over the Greek world – and not only as imitations of individual canonical authors, but with a clear awareness that they were writing in Ionic Greek – shows that it maintained its very prestigious position as a traditional literary language and that it could still be considered as a meaningful cultural resource.

The Introduction anchors the main sujet of the book within a longue durée perspective from Archaic Ionia, and the dominant scholarly interest in this period, to the role of Ionia in 20th c. political and identity discourses. Stereotypes associated with Ionians by their ancient contemporaries are analysed here as one important aspect of the Ionians’ collective perception. The Introduction also provides an overview of the concepts of identity, ethnicity, and cultural identity as applied in the field of Ancient History, as well as brief summaries of the individual chapters’ contents.

Contemporary scholarship on fandom explores how communities are created through affinities of taste. Drawing on that work, this chapter argues that Cicero’s account in De Finibus and Pro Archia of his and his fellow Romans’ investment in and debt to Athenian literature experiments with the effects of passionately identifying with another culture – thus opening up ways of thinking and feeling about citizenship as an aesthetic property that transcends the limits of ethnic or linguistic identity. Hellenistic literature, organiSed in part around the trope of Athens as a universalist model of human excellence – a trope used first by Athenian writers and appropriated by writers in both Greek and Latin in the first century BCE – helps make the concept of universal citizenship thinkable, not only for Romans like Cicero but for readers over centuries (including scholars and students of 'classics' today) who shared and sustained his investment in the Athenian Greek past. This fantasy of cultural belonging obscures the violence of Roman imperial reality and helps explain the persistent appeal of 'classical' Greek literature.