Roman

Since Galatia was incorporated into the Roman Empire in 25 B.C., Pessinous became not only the administrative capital of the Galatian tribe of the Tolistobogioi but was also quickly transformed into a Greek city of the polis type with its own era, coinage and a reduced territory. Then the temple and its priests lost much of their power under Augustus although the city remained a major commercial centre, famous for its textile industry.

Constructions were made with the marble from the quarries situated in Istiklalbağı, 5 km N of the centre. During the reign of Augustus and later, a unique marble-paved canalisation system, 11 to 13 m. wide and more than 500 m. long, was built to control the intermittent river Gallos, which still forms the main thoroughfare of the actual village today. It consists of a porticos (Augustan), twin colonnades (2nd century), staircases (before the 3rd century) and simple quays (1st century and the 1st quarter of the 3rd century) ending to the north in a monumental arch built under the Severan dynasty.

In late Roman times, a hydraulic system, which regulated the water level, replaced a destroyed section. A section of the simple quays was repaired with re-used materials at the end of the 6th or in the beginning of the 7th century.

The great theatre, of which only the emplacement of the cavea can still be seen, was constructed at an unknown moment but was repaired or embellished by Hadrian who probably also created mystikoi agones for an association of Dionysiac artists.

A Sebasteion for the Provincial Imperial cult, consisting of a hexastyle peripteral temple of the Corinthian order and, facing it along the same axis, a theatre-shaped structure, all of which form a single architectural unit inspired by late republican Italian models, was build and inaugurated about 31/32 as a part of a vast Tiberian programme in Galatia.

It was constructed in the south of the city on a hill overlooking the eastern bed of the river Gallos.

The temple was erected on a spot containing a late Phrygian construction (5th century B.C.), a monumental early Hellenistic predecessor (4th-3rd century B.C.) and a late Hellenistic building (2nd-lst century B.C.) which manifests 6 building phases.

The porticoed square below - excavated on three sides (north, east, south)- consisted of a three-stepped Ionic colonnade in plastered limestone, constructed in late Tiberian or Claudian times at the latest. Only the eastern colonnade seems to have had a second floor of the Doric order, which allows us to surmise that the whole complex might have been a Rhodian peristyle.

The whole area has known repairs and renovations, notably at the end of the 1st century (temple) and under the Severans (a new marble pavement on the stoa and a small building on the northern portico; a new marble stairway above the western extremity of the old orchestra after the filling up of the lower half of the theatre of the temple).

In 252-3 (or 258) Gothic tribes invaded Asia Minor destroying Pessinous along with other cities such as Ephesos. These invasions could have led to the renovation of the excavated (comfortable) city-houses, sometimes built on Hellenistic habitation strata and/or followed by early Byzantine dwellings.

At some 50 m. E of the temple a rich urban habitation dating from the 1st century A.D. was found. It was succeeded by a mid-Roman building.

The northern habitation area was located on the southern side of the Turkish cemetery in the street. The parts of two houses excavated, were constructed in five main building phases from at least the 1st century B.C. to the 7th century A.D.

They had an ingenious system of water pipelines in terracotta dating from the Early Empire, connected somewhere higher up with the kilometres-long Roman aqueduct, also made of terracotta pipes, the location line of which has been discovered along the known Amorion-Germakoloneia road within the territory of Pessinous.