CUP (2021) p/b 390pp £25.99 (ISBN 9781108749527)
Eighteen authors, including the two editors, jointly or singly contribute to the three parts of this book. Sub-divided into a total of ten chapters, these parts deal respectively with ‘Cities, Settlement and Integration,’ ‘Communication and Exchange,’ and ‘Collaboration, Crisis, and Resistance’. The editors justify the comparative approach by pointing to the broad resemblances between the two Successor states. They conclude that both do indeed qualify as ‘empires’ in the modern, theorised, sense, rather than merely, as some scholars prefer, as ‘kingdoms’.
In Part I, the topics covered are the foundation myths of the Ptolemaic and Seleucid capitals; settlement policies in the Seleucid Far East and in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Red Sea; the integration of indigenous elites and the development of poleis in the two empires; and the ethnic politeuma as a distinctive type of Ptolemaic settlement. The improbable arguments of a 20th-century Oxford professor of Chinese, Homer Dubs, in favour of Roman settlement in Han China receive further debunking in the course of a review of Greco-Macedonian settlement in Bactria. Here the usual view is reinforced that Alexander and the first Seleucids were above all concerned with creating military garrisons and communities of demobilised soldiers. As presented here, the Ptolemies turn out to be far more active than traditionally thought as creators of new settlements, both as founders of poleis in Asia Minor and of other types of non-polis settlement within Egypt. Perhaps by chance more than design, these last, without the legal status of citizen (in the Greek sense), were less likely to obstruct interaction between settler and pre-existing populations than the—juridically—more fully-realised polis foundations of the Seleucids. They included the type of military organisation which the Ptolemies called a politeuma, based on a particular ethnicity such as Jews, Cilicians, Cretans, or Boeotians. First appearing in the 2nd C BC, these politeumata are taken here to reflect the continuing efforts of the dynasty, weakened though it now was, to recruit and retain professional soldiers from abroad.
Part II deals with what its authors call ‘imperial and indigenous temporalities’; with visual representations of the kings of the two dynasties; and with monetary policy and currency supply. As for ‘temporalities,’ the dating system which scholars call the Seleucid Era, beginning in 312/11 BC with the return of Seleucus I to Babylon, is seen as part of the Seleucid court’s attempt to define ‘a fairly coherent boundary of relevance and recollection before which it did not reach’. This ‘new beginning’ is then reinforced by writings emanating from the indigenous elites, as with the Babylonian history written in Greek by the 3rd C BC Babylonian priest Berossus, which is viewed here as presenting the pre-Seleucid past of Babylonia as ‘closed’ and superseded by a present ‘owing little to it’. This conceptualisation is linked in turn to the ‘emergence of the periodization of time’ as a central concern in the historical thought of the Hellenistic era. The Ptolemies were less revolutionary, although the supplementing of the regnal year in Demotic documents (from 272/1 BC) with the name of the eponymous priest of Alexander and the Ptolemies is seen as placing a new emphasis ‘on the dynastic succession of a self-contained lineage’ different from others in Egypt’s past, and coinciding with Manetho’s use of dynasties ‘as a unit that structured past time’. Ralf von den Hoff’s analysis of royal portraiture sees an initial portrait concept emphasising the ‘energetic ruler’ giving way to the ‘idea of a more serene and distant ruler,’ with the Ptolemies from Ptolemy II on additionally introducing the concept of truphê, ‘of wealth and abundance’. This was conveyed by a ‘stout physiognomy’ best understood as a ‘programmatic ideal,’ not a real-life feature. The numismatists take the reader through the monetary ups and downs that can be inferred with more or less certainty from Seleucid and Ptolemaic coin-issues, with some broad conclusions such as the perennial problem for the Ptolemies of managing a limited stock of silver, the practice in both empires of withdrawing old coinage and recoining it, and the apparent aim in doing so, at least sometimes, of creating a currency system relying ‘more or less exclusively’ on coined bronze.
In Part III there is a fresh discussion of the collaboration between the Ptolemies and the Egyptian priesthood—within which a core group at Memphis is hypothesised—so as to ‘indigenize the foreign pharaoh’. Priestly decrees supported him when famine or indigenous revolts seemed to threaten his legitimacy by presenting him favourably and in the context of traditional Egyptian mythology—as Horus harpooning rebels, for instance. The early Seleucid rulers in their religious role as Babylonian kings are also seen as reliant on the Babylonian priesthood for legitimation, especially by taking part, as some Seleucids are known to have done, in traditional rituals ‘re-installing’ the monarch as Babylonian king. Approaching relations with indigenes from another angle, a discussion of the ‘deal-making politics’ of the kings includes a definition of ‘local elites’ that emphasises their ‘aim to regularly monopolize communication with the centre of power’. The over-weening influence of elites in the Ptolemaic court and the defection of Greek elites on the periphery during Ptolemaic struggles with Antiochus III are here presented as previously underplayed factors in ‘the collapse of the Ptolemaic imperial system’ under Ptolemy IV and Ptolemy V. The book’s last chapter compares the revolt of the Thebaid against the Ptolemies (206-180 BC) with that of Judaea against the Seleucids (from the 160s BC). Both these episodes are well known for the problems posed in different ways by inadequate ancient sources. The chapter gives up-to-date historical outlines of both episodes and discusses in each case the possible causes and the different outcomes—de facto autonomy for Judaea, tightening of Ptolemaic rule in Upper Egypt. The comparison is valid even so, it is argued, because there were basic similarities, including an ‘ideology of power’ in both regions and ‘common to the entire ancient Near East’ casting the king himself as ‘the supreme guardian of the cosmic order’.
The book ends abruptly with no conclusion, and the reader must rely on the editors’ introduction for a sense of what they think that this exercise in comparison has achieved. This is a book written for fellow-scholars. It deals with a period and with regions traditionally side-lined in histories of ‘ancient Greece’. The sources are notoriously poor and mastering them requires expertise across a range of historical sub-disciplines. Notwithstanding, the editors and their team have produced a work which highlights the liveliness of their field of study and offers insights and rewards for all those with the inclination to breath its rarefied air.
Tony Spawforth