κολωνία

From the study of Acts 16:12

Range of meaning

Borrowed from the Latin colonia. In the Roman period it meant a city legally founded or refounded by Rome and settled with Roman citizens, often discharged soldiers. Such a city had a charter modelled on Rome's own: elected officials (duoviri), Latin as the official language, Roman law, and often the privilege called ius Italicum, which treated its land as if it were Italian soil and exempted it from some taxes.

Against the English

Every major English version says "colony" (BSB, NIV and ESV say "Roman colony"). That is correct, but the modern English word tends to call up overseas empires and settlers ruling over native peoples. Luke means a legal rank of city that carried prestige.

How it drifted

In modern English "colony" came to be shaped by the European overseas empires of the 16th to 20th centuries. The Roman meaning was civic and legal: a 'little Rome' whose citizens shared Rome's status.

Used elsewhere in the period

Greek writers usually translated the idea as apoikia. Luke instead transliterates the Latin word itself, and it occurs only here in the New Testament. Pliny the Elder (Natural History 4.42) lists Philippi as a colonia. Coins and inscriptions give its full title as Colonia Iulia Augusta Philippensis. Philippi was refounded as a colony after Antony and Octavian defeated Brutus and Cassius there in 42 BC, and again after Octavian's victory at Actium in 31 BC, when veterans and Italians displaced from their land were settled there.