Classical Press of Wales (2017) h/b 442pp £90 (ISBN 9781910589625)
This collection of eighteen chapters, along with an introduction by the editors, was generated by, and extends with additional papers, a conference on the Hellenistic court held at Edinburgh University in 2011. One contributor (Janett Morgan, p. 31) sums up the phenomenon under study as the ruler’s ‘apparatus of support made up of people and rules’ along with ‘the setting in which these agents perform’. The book focuses on the courts of the three great dynasties based in Macedon, Egypt and the Fertile Crescent, along with Pergamum. Covering a wide spectrum of topics and types of evidence, papers are grouped under ‘Development’, ‘Life at Court’, ‘Marriage’, ‘Beyond the Palace’, ‘Crossing Cultures’ and ‘Disloyalty and Death’. As possible courtly models, Alexander and the Achaemenids are a recurrent presence.
This is a book aimed chiefly at specialists, for whom there is plenty to sit up and take notice of here. On the setting, Janett Morgan argues that our term ‘palace’ is anachronistic when applied to Hellenistic ‘royal buildings’ scattered (as at Alexandria) across a royal district. Anyone wanting an update on current thinking about the royal tombs at Vergina, and much else, should read Olga Palagia (ch. 18).
The Hellenistic courts snag our interest not least because, for a change in ancient society, they foregrounded women as well as men. Sheila Ager’s paper suggests that the weddings of the Hellenistic Laodices and Berenices inspired the same ‘avid interest’ as royal weddings today. Kostas Buraselis argues that the category of important females at court needs to include hetairai from the polis-world, Stephanie Wenders that royal women used poison less often than their counterparts in Roman imperial courts (Cleopatra’s spectacular suicide remains in a class of its own).
The thorny question of how far Hellenistic court personnel included indigenous ethnicities as well as Macedonian and Greek incomers, with its far-reaching implications for the nature of Greco-Macedonian imperialism, is discussed afresh, with the editors sounding an optimistic note (p. xxv) despite ‘the lack of identifiable native voices’.
Even for the generalist there is fascinating material here. The Hellenistic royal habit of ‘violently and publicly’ (p. xxiv) despatching rulers’ enemies at banquets shows how much the setting of the court mattered, as well as highlighting the absolutist ideology of this type of monarchy. Study of ancient courts, including those of Alexander’s successors as in this book, can be thought-provoking for our own times as well as historically fascinating and entertaining for their own sake. Divinising rulers, family hangers-on, opulent palaces, the fluctuations of royal favour, even the use of poison: perhaps the point does not need labouring.
Tony Spawforth