Roman

Rome took Cyprus almost casually: in 58 BC the island was annexed by a vote of the assembly, and Cato the Younger was sent to organise the new territory. It becomes a province for good in 30 BC with the fall of Cleopatra’s kingdom, and from 22 BC is governed by a proconsul seated at Paphos.

For three centuries and more the island lives more quietly than ever before: no kings of its own, no wars on its soil, a crossroads of imperial trade.

Christianity arrives early

Around AD 45 the apostles Paul and Barnabas sail to Cyprus — Barnabas was a native of the island. The Acts of the Apostles describe how at Paphos they converted the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus. Cyprus thus became the first Roman province governed by a Christian, long before Christianity was anything like legal.

The memory is fixed at Agia Kyriaki Chrysopolitissa, where visitors are shown the column at which Paul is said to have been flogged.

Mosaics and earthquakes

What Rome chiefly left Cyprus is floors. At Kato Paphos town houses of the 2nd to 4th centuries have been excavated with mosaics on mythological themes: the House of Dionysos, the House of Theseus, the House of Aion. It is the finest collection of ancient mosaics in the eastern Mediterranean, and it was found by accident, by a farmer ploughing in 1962.

At Kourion the Roman age left the theatre, rebuilt from an earlier Greek one, and the House of Eustolios with its baths. The sanctuary of Apollo Hylates remains in use — nearly everything standing there today is Roman.

Twice in the period earthquakes wreck the island. The first, in AD 76–77, damages Salamis and Paphos. The second, in 365, is catastrophic: Kourion dies almost instantly, and excavators found people and animals caught under the collapse.

By then the empire had divided and Cyprus had fallen to its eastern half. The Early Christian age begins.