INTRODUCTION

FROM CHAOS TO CLEOPATRA

Daniel Ogden

The hellenistic world, the Greek-dominated world between 323 and 30 BC, is less often regarded as a field of ancient history than as an absence within it. Publishers fear the very word ‘hellenistic’ for its supposed obscurity and go to extraordinary lengths to banish it from the main titles of their books. The conventional expedient is the ‘framing’ or ‘book-ends’ approach, that is, to define the period by its edges, or even in terms of individuals or events that are actually exterior to it in time or culture. The ancient-history publisher’s best boy, the ever-bankable Alexander, is repeatedly pressed into service to constitute the first book-end, for all that he falls outside the period by definition, since it is his death that marks its commencement. A host of conveniently A-alliterative terms contend to join him as the second book-end: Alexander to Actium; Athens from Alexander to Antony; From Alexander to Augustus.¹ Sometimes the best girl too can come to the rescue: From Alexander to Cleopatra.²

But the term ‘hellenistic’, which retains full popularity between covers, is itself problematic as a description of the period and civilization under discussion. It is a modern derivative of the ancient verb hellēnizō, ‘Greek-ize’, which is used in Maccabees to denote the acquisition of Greek language and lifestyle by Jews.³ Building, appropriately, on this, Jacques Bénigne Bossuet coined the term ‘hellénistique’, in his 1681 Discours sur l’histoire universelle, to describe the language of the Septuagint, the ‘Greek-ized’ version of the Old Testament.⁴ The term was first expanded, to describe Greek civilization as a whole between 323 and 30 bc, by Johann-Gustav Droysen in his 1836 Geschichte der Diadochen (‘History of the Successors’), on the basis that the adoption of Greek language and cultural forms by non-Greeks was the crucial and defining characteristic of the age. More particularly, Greek and Jewish culture and religion had come together in a Hegelian synthesis that had flowered in the birth of Christianity. It was in 1877, when Droysen’s book was republished in omnibus format with his works on Alexander and the so-called Epigoni as Geschichte des Hellenismus (‘History of hellenism’) that the term finally became the conventional one for the age.⁵ The term is unsatisfactory because, strictly speaking, it defines not the Greek world itself but its barbarian penumbra or periphery, its fringe and candidate members. The acquisition of Greek language and culture by non-Greeks may or may not have been the most notable phenomenon in and around the Greek world in the 323–30 BC period, but, by definition, the ‘hellenizing’ are not yet the ‘hellenized’. The ‘hellenistic’ world, in short, is the Greek world with the Greeks taken out. Here, then, we have a second gaping absence. It might further be objected that the 323–30 bc period was in any case not the only one in which a barbarian periphery found itself attracted towards or assimilated into Greek culture. Cartledge has other objections to the term ‘hellenistic’, an ‘unhappy title’ as he calls it. He notes that ‘in English at any rate the suffix “-istic” conjures up a notion of pale or failed imitation, Greek-ish, Greek-like, not the real pukka thing’.⁶

Introductions to general works and article-collections on the hellenistic period typically tell us that it has long languished in neglect, and here is our third absence. More specifically, they tell us that this period of neglect has recently come to an end, with work on the subject only now at last burgeoning. This is fortunate: heaven forfend that scholars should find themselves publishing in an unfashionable area. One could be forgiven for, in innocence, taking such claims in the recent literature at face value.⁷ But in fact Tarn and Griffith were already opening the preface to the third edition of their Hellenistic Civilization with precisely the same sentiments as long ago as 1952. Looking back at their second edition, published in 1930, they noted that the intervening years had witnessed ‘a vast outpouring, in many languages, of special studies and monographs concerned with this period’.⁸ It at once becomes apparent that such a claim does not describe any objective reality in the practice of ancient studies. Rather, it is revealed as a rhetorical decency, as a commonplace without which no preface to hellenistic material can be complete, and as, first and foremost, a myth. The study of the hellenistic world is forever, it seems, newly arriving, adventitious, like the god Dionysus.

In recent years a new variety of absence has been devised for the hellenistic world, as scholars have attempted to dismantle its boundaries in time and space. It is now customary to promote the elements of continuity the hellenistic world shared with the classical one that preceded it and the imperial one that succeeded it.⁹

The time has come, surely, to reassert an honest definition of the hellenistic world in plain language. The hellenistic world is very easy indeed to define in terms of its single most important constituent,¹⁰ namely the highly distinctive group of inter-marrying and warring dynasts that presided over it, both directly and indirectly. The first group of rulers, Perdiccas and his fellows, was created by the death of Alexander in 323 bc and the last ruler, Cleopatra the Great, was driven to her death in 30 bc. For all their dynastic and individual differences, the kings (and proto-kings) and queens bestow upon the period a coherence and a distinctiveness of superstructure that can be claimed for no other period in Greek history. What similar coherence can be claimed for any of the fragmented and chaotic Greek worlds of the archaic, classical, or imperial periods, from which the hellenistic world stands proud in this respect? It will, now, be objected that such an appeal to the dynasties depends upon an old-fashioned and elitist approach to ancient history. On the illusory nature of fashion in classical scholarship enough has been said. As to the question of elitism, we need only observe that scholars remain happy enough with the canonical periodization of Roman history in terms of the activities of its ‘elites’ and the shapes into which they formed themselves (Monarchy, Republic and Empire). I note, incidentally, that works on the hellenistic world that focus strongly on its dynasties feel much less need to be apologetic about the period with which they work.¹¹

Did the later ancients themselves perceive the hellenistic period as a coherent entity?¹² We can answer the question with a qualified affirmative. There was, on the one hand, even within the hellenistic period itself, a clear sense that the career of Alexander had transformed the Greek world and created a new epoch. Demetrius of Phaleron (whose words were recalled by Polybius) spoke of Fortune lending the blessings of the wealth of Persia to the Macedonians upon their overthrow of the empire. These blessings would one day pass on to others, and Polybius recognized that the process was already happening in his own day, as the blessings of the Macedonians passed to the Romans.¹³ At the end of the first century ad Plutarch was to see the world as having been transformed from a different point of view, namely by Alexander’s mission to bring Greek culture, agriculture, marriage, law and general civilization to the barbarians.¹⁴ Significantly, a series of histories – anticipating more recent works – was compiled on the Diadochic period under such titles as ‘the things after Alexander’. Works on this theme were written by Hieronymus of Cardia, Nymphis of Heraclea, Arrian of Nicomedia and Dexippus of Athens.¹⁵

30 BC was probably perceived as an even stronger and more decisive watershed. We can not be reminded too often of the last words Plutarch gave to Cleopatra’s handmaiden Charmion, after she had helped the queen kill herself, words which were so memorably reworked in the closing lines of Antony and Cleopatra:

Someone said in anger, ‘This is no fine thing, is it, Charmion?’ She replied, ‘Nay rather, it is the finest, and befits the scion of so many kings.’

Plutarch, Antony 85

FIRST GUARD: What work is here! Charmian, is this well done?
CHARMIAN: It is well done, and fitting for a princess descended of so many royal kings.

Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5, Scene 2

So many kings: how many? All the Ptolemies, of course, but the earlier Seleucids were also Cleopatra’s ascendants, and these are hardly excluded. Nor are the Argeads. Even if nothing was made of the possibly real, albeit indirect, connection to the Argead family through Ptolemy of Alorus, Ptolemy Soter, the dynasty’s founder, had put it about that he was the secret son of Philip II.¹⁶ Nor are the pharaohs excluded. Even if Cleopatra did not draw down the blood of Egyptian royalty through her (to us) mysterious mother and grandmother, the notion that Alexander himself had been secretly sired by the last pharaoh Nectanebo II had at any rate conferred upon Soter a pharaonic brother, of sorts. This concise and powerful epitaph, then, encapsulates in the noble death of a single woman not only the end of her immediate dynasty but also that of the history of the world, which the Greeks knew to have begun, long before their own, with the pharaohs. Such a view of the significance of Cleopatra’s death is expressed in more explicit and extreme terms by Lucian, who speaks of the duties of the pantomime-dancer,

His entire stock-in-trade is ancient history, the capacity to call episodes to mind readily and to represent them with appropriate dignity. For, beginning right from Chaos and the moment when the universe was created, he must know everything down to the tale of the Egyptian Cleopatra.

Lucian, On Dancing 37

Here the death of Cleopatra brings a close to everything that had ever happened before it. The death of Alexander was not the only lower time-limit canonized in the Second Sophistic.¹⁷

In the search for ancient periodizations we may be tempted to turn to the chronological frames constructed by ancient historiography. Admittedly, there do not seem to have been a great many ancient prototypes for the histories scholars now produce of the hellenistic period, that is to say, histories with a focus roughly commensurate with the 323–30 bc span and with the geographical spread of Greek culture during it. But then, according to comparable criteria, there were no ancient prototypes for our histories of the archaic or classical periods either. Antiquity’s histories tended to be either wider (‘universal’) in scope, or much narrower in their temporal and geographical purview. But one lost history, about which we are frustratingly under-informed, is indeed thought to have focused tightly on the hellenistic world, and in particular upon its four great dynasties. Timagenes of Alexandria’s On kings may well have been a Will’s Histoire politique for its time.¹⁸ The testimonia and fragments tell that Timagenes was taken captive and brought to Rome by Gabinius in 55 bc, where, after being freed, he taught rhetoric and associated, for as long as it was safe to do so, with the Antonian camp. His work almost certainly went down to the death of Cleopatra; one fragment mentions her father Auletes, and a testimony tells us that he eventually found it prudent to burn the latest part of his work, which dealt with Augustus.¹⁹ Of course any Ptolemaic history compiled after the dynasty’s end would have come close to fulfilling our temporal remit, and may also have come close to fulfilling the geographical one in indirect fashion, given that the Ptolemies were always closely involved with the other dynasties and major Greek states, in war or peace. Unfortunately the dynastic histories of the Ptolemies have almost completely disappeared from the record, as have those of the other hellenistic dynasties.²⁰ Pausanias tells that the personal historians of the hellenistic rulers had already come to be disregarded by his own (second-century ad) day, and he therefore feels the need to remind his readers of what they did. But in doing this, he does at any rate appear to have a notion of an age defined by the dynastic.²¹ Jacoby and Préaux attribute the loss of such histories to the fact that they were sycophantic and eulogistic, and lacked popular appeal.²²

One history does survive from antiquity that is close to being a ‘history of the (Macedonian and) hellenistic period’, namely Justin’s epitome of the Latin history of the Gallo-Roman Pompeius Trogus, which may actually have used Timagenes’ history as its principal source.²³ The original was composed under Augustus; the epitome was made at some point before Augustine, some centuries later. Books 1 to 6 cover the histories of Greece and Persia down to the eve of the rise of Philip II. Book 7 takes a retro-spective look at Macedonian history from the supposed founder Caranus, with Books 8 and 9 returning to the career of Philip II. After a resumé of intervening Persian history in Book 10, Books 11–13 cover the campaign of Alexander. Thence Books 14–40 are devoted to the Greek world in the hellenistic period with a heavy emphasis on its dynastic aspects. Books 41–2 continue the story of the Near East after the Seleucid decline with the history of the Parthians. Finally, Books 43 and 44 offer summary coverage of the states at the western end of the Mediterranean. The so-called ‘prologues’ of Trogus in particular show that the original text incorporated a great many digressions to explain the background of the individuals, states and peoples brought onto the stage. The focus of this supposedly universal history is very clearly what we would call the Macedonian and hellenistic worlds. The books prior to 7 can be seen to cover the background to them in the clashes between the Greeks and the Persians, whilst the first two books subsequent to 40 can be seen as a sort of epilogue to the hellenistic world. Only the curious final two books seem to fall decisively outside a ‘hellenistic’ scheme, but their subject matter at least allowed Trogus to speak of his own origins. In giving his work the title ‘Philippic’ Trogus was following in the footsteps of Theopompus of Chios and Anaximenes of Lampsacus, both of whom had used the title for their histories of Philip II himself.²⁴ Trogus’ reasons for expanding the scope of the term to allow it to connote, at some level, all the Macedonian dynasties of the hellenistic age have long been the subject of debate. Numerous suggestions have been made, not all of them convincing.²⁵ The most probable explanation is that Trogus was primarily using the term as a generic one for a variety of history with a dynastic focus, but which incorporated, like Theopompus’ work, a great many genealogical and ethnographic digressions.²⁶ But it will also have helped that Philip II remained the node of Trogus’ work.²⁷ He it was that transformed the Macedonian state and planned the invasion of the Persian empire; he it was that sired Alexander, who continued his remarkable trajectory, and who in turn created, through his death, the successor dynasties. Modern scholars of the hellenistic period could do worse than to take a hint from Trogus: the term Philippic, with its focus properly on the dynastic superstructure of the period, might be considered a preferable alternative to ‘hellenistic’, for all that Philip himself was even more exterior to the period than Alexander.

The first pair of papers address what might be called the structure of the hellenistic world from two very different perspectives, the social and the geographical. First John Davies assesses the extent to which the areas controlled by the hellenistic dynasties may be understood to have behaved as a system, that is, ‘as a set of interacting networks which shared structures, mechanisms, boundaries and vectors’. The hellenistic world, he contends, can be seen in terms of a series of ‘horizontal’ and ‘vertical’ relationships. At the top end ‘horizontal’ relationships obtained between the kings across the different dynasties, and, within the dynasties, between the king and his family, friends and army. At the bottom end also a network of horizontal links extended between the various Greek communities. These links were enhanced in the course of the period by the developing processes of synoecism, citizenship-fluidity in its various forms, the recognition of religious privileges and of claims to kinship between cities, and, not least, the formation of leagues. Ways were also found to incorporate some non-Greek states, such as Rome, within this network. Between these horizontal strata extended vertical relationships both of a ‘top-down’ and of a ‘bottom-up’ variety. Several of the former can be identified. The king could preside autocratically over his territory as a personal possession, as ‘spear-won’ land, and exploit the revenues from it for his own ends. He could exert indirect control over polities within his territory through the installation of garrisons and tyrants or the appointment of arbitrators, or even by appointing himself to a city’s magistracy. A still less direct form of control could be exercised through the promotion of ruler cult. As to the ‘bottom-up’ vertical relationships, the emergent leagues afforded their constituent micropolities a measure of bargaining power with the kings. Leading citizens could champion their states’ interests with the kings, whether as royal officers, polis-ambassadors or as cultural ‘gurus’, and it was these adaptable men above all that made the wider system work. The receptivity and elasticity of this system allowed it to embrace also the western Mediterranean during the third century bc, and so create what we know as the ‘classical world’.

The second paper turns to physical structure of the world in hellenistic thought. KLAUS ZIMMERMANN offers a persuasive new solution to an old problem in hellenistic science. What did the great geographer Eratosthenes mean when he described the ‘inhabited world’ as shaped like a chlamys- cloak (chlamydoēides)? Previous attempts to explain the imagery have tried to map the inhabited world’s land mass onto the shape of the outspread garment, but none of these is satisfactory, in whatever way the chlamys- pattern is oriented in relation to the land mass. It was not, though, simply to the two-dimensional shape of the outspread garment that Eratosthenes was referring, but also to its three-dimensional shape when worn, draped around the shoulders. The function of the image was, accordingly, to explain how one was to visualize the seemingly flat land mass of the inhabited world represented on a two-dimensional map as in reality arcing around its quadrant of the globe.

The following three papers look at that most focal and distinctive feature of the hellenistic world, the king and the court around him, and each paper makes much of the Argead background in this. SYLVIE LE BOHEC- BOUHET collates and reviews the evidence for the association of the kings of Macedon with the cult of Zeus, king of the gods. She demonstrates how one can combine passing allusions in literary sources with excavations, fragmentary inscriptions and coin issues to reconstruct what was evidently a major institution of the Macedonian monarchy. The Argeads, and through them the Antigonids, drew their descent from Zeus. Royal coinage was illustrated with Zeus or his son Heracles. The kings were associated with Zeus in sculpture, painting and poetry. They presided over at least three festivals of Zeus in the year and regularly sacrificed to him in the course of their campaigns. They embellished his great sanctuary at Dion, amongst others, with magnificent dedications, and displayed their official texts there. At once we learn much both about the ideology and projection of kingship in Macedon and about the fabric of the king’s life, a subject of great interest but one that is often strangely elusive.

ELIZABETH CARNEY examines the role of hunting in the lives and ideology of the king and the Macedonian elite. The Argead kings used their touted successes in it to establish a legitimating valour, and from Alexander I onwards they celebrated the hunt with a range of motifs on their coins, including Heracles’ Nemean lionskin. For the king and his Companions alike, hunting offered a locus for competitive display, including that of the erotic variety, and a forum in which they could negotiate the complexities and contradictions of their ill-defined relationship. Successes – in love or the kill – inevitably created failures, and the rivalries and tensions generated in the hunt often erupted into violence between its participants. A Companion’s decision to strike an animal that threatened the king himself needed fine judgement: would one be forever in his debt for delivering him, or incur his wrath by denying him the kill and compromising his valour? In their search for legitimacy the Successors were particularly anxious to promote anecdotes of their erstwhile demonstrations of hunting prowess in association with Alexander the Great. Later, the Antigonids, whose rule was more defined and absolute than that of the Argeads had been, projected a concomitant image of the king as a more solitary hunter.

The sources for the Diadochic period strikingly reflect in their language the distrust that obtained between Alexander’s Successors. Waldemar Heckel investigates the origins and manifestations of this distrust, and its role in the ultimate failure of the Successors. Alexander himself first created an atmosphere of distrust among his marshals through his attempts to limit individual power. One method was ‘collegiality’, the splitting and balancing of commands between two or more rivals. A variant technique was to appoint ‘watch-dog’ lieutenants to keep the higher officials in check. Another method again was to integrate outsiders, native potentates or Greek civilians, into the Macedonian hierarchy. This fragmentation of power across the hierarchy meant that, once Alexander himself was gone, it collapsed for the want of a clear chain of command. The Babylon and Triparadeisos settlements effectively replicated and institutionalized Alexander’s culture of debilitating checks and balances among the new order, and prevented any individual from taking control of the empire as a whole, and this led, disastrously, to its ultimate destabilization.

The next trio of papers turn to matters of family and kinship, real or imagined. Andrew Erskine discusses claims to kinship between the peoples of different states in hellenistic diplomacy. Such claims, which exploited a range of special terms, drew in various ways upon the full resources of myth, local tradition and history to construct ties. A remarkable 208 bc inscription from Xanthus lays out the minute and detailed arguments for kinship made to that city by the ambassadors of Cytinium, who sought aid in rebuilding their own city. Two years later an epigraphic archive from Magnesia on Meander documents that city’s simultaneous claims to kinship with wide swathes of peoples across the Near East, to establish recognition for their new festival. Ambassadors, it seems, may often have travelled with bundles of histories, poems and oracles – and sometimes even with performing bards – to support their arguments. Artificial though they were, claims to kinship could serve to establish a framework for a continuing relationship between states where none had previously obtained, and a context against which pleas for help might properly be made.

ALAN LLOYD examines Egyptian-language sources for the engagement of the old Egyptian aristocratic families with the Ptolemaic monarchy, to argue that they curried favour with it and drew prestige from it. In this new context the Egyptian elite continued to cherish its old hierarchical relationships, relationships of dependence upon the king combined with those of paternalistic benevolence towards their underlings. Egyptians took up high office at the court, as is exemplified from an important reinterpretation of the Arsinoe inscription from Coptos. This brings Senenshepsu into the heart of the Ptolemaic government. Contrary to the common supposition, Egyptian soldiers participated in significant numbers in the Ptolemaic army from the first, while the Egyptian army continued to exist in its own right, even if initially under-utilized. In short, the Egyptian elite saw themselves as operating in the same universe in which they always had done, and the established view that it confined itself to priestly activities under the Ptolemies until Ptolemy IV must be abandoned. It is to be concluded that Egyptians are seriously under-represented in our Greek sources for the Ptolemaic court.

DOROTHY THOMPSON continues the Egyptian focus. She investigates the statistics of family structure in the Egypt of the early Ptolemies. Her study draws upon a database of 427 households compiled in conjunction with her major new edition and analysis (with W. Clarysse) of extant Greek and demotic census and salt-tax documents from the Ptolemaic age. A distinction is drawn between ‘families’ and ‘households’, the former denoting the core kindred group within a house, the latter including the resident servants. It emerges that the average sizes of both ‘families’ and ‘households’ in the earlier Ptolemaic period were somewhat larger among the ethnically Greek than the ethnically Egyptian. This is indicative of the predominant position of the colonial group. Indeed, the larger among the Greek households are presided over by military men, and slaveholding is shown to be a primarily Greek phenomenon. Women appear to be significantly under-represented among the Greek families, and it is suggested that the Greeks’ tendency to select girl babies for exposure is the cause of this. Pomeroy’s view that child-exposure only took off in Egypt during the Roman period should perhaps now be revised. The shortfall in Greek girls meant that many Greek men could only find wives among the Egyptian population, and we do indeed see Greek men marrying Egyptian women, while there is no trace of traffic in the other direction.

The next group of papers, three again, address a field of growing interest in hellenistic studies, that of the organization of the land and its inhabitants. CHRISTIAN MILETA discusses the nature of the ‘royal area’ (basilikē chōra) in the hellenistic kingdoms, with special reference to Anatolia. As Alexander had taken control of Asia Minor, he had instituted in its interior a special variety of tax-paying area directly subject to himself, primarily so as to fund the prosecution of his campaign from its revenues. This area was originally constructed from sections of the Anatolian hinterland, typically the vast private estates of the Achaemenid kings and their officers, and from non-urbanised but highly productive parts of the choras of the Greek cities, expropriated from them upon their liberation from the Persians. Under the Attalids the ‘royal area’ can be seen to have been a thing now quite distinct from the territories of the established cities (Greek, Macedonian or indigenous ones), the non-urbanised indigenous tribes and the great sanctuaries. The lack of a uniform terminology for the royal area means that references to it in epigraphic sources can be difficult to identify, but it does emerge that it typically consisted of discontinuous tracts of land. The direct control of the royal area by the kings originally encouraged them to develop it and exploit it more than any other parts of their empires, and also to establish a very personal relationship with it, as they supervised its colonization and the improvement of its agriculture. But the process of ‘state-formation’ within the kingdoms meant that in due course this relationship tended to become a more distanced and constitutional one.

GRAHAM SHIPLEY explores social and economic change in rural Greece in the later hellenistic period using the data produced by the ‘archaeological field survey’ of a number of regions. The results of this systematic surface-investigation of land-use across time are used to test Polybius’ famous assertions that the Greece of his day was depopulated. The data, so far as it goes, vindicates him. The overall number of rural farmstead sites collapses in the course of the period. Population decline is indeed one of the obvious explanations for this, although others are available. While the farmsteads are fewer, they tend to be bigger; the increase in size, however, does not seem to compensate fully for the fall in numbers. There may also have been a general migration from the country into the towns. Rural depopulation, combined with rising farmstead size, may well have been a function of land-accumulation by the elite, at the expense of the independent, free, citizen small-holder. Laconia, subject of a special case study, bucks the general trend, and actually witnesses a sharp rise in farmsteads during the period. But this region can be seen as a special case, for it had already suffered a most dramatic collapse in occupation during the classical period (a collapse again easy to correlate with the literary sources).

DAVID BRAUND sheds light upon life in an extensive part of the hellenistic world, the Black Sea region, which in the period itself was rather neglected by all but the great trading power of Rhodes, and today too is rather neglected as an object of study outside Russian-language scholarship. He distinguishes between the Greeks’ experiences on land, notably on the southern Ukrainian steppe, and their experiences by sea. On land the Greeks had a complex range of relationships with their non-Greek and their semi-hellenized neighbours (the common characterization of these many different peoples as ‘Scythians’ all alike is unhelpful). Often the individual Greek cities were compelled to preserve themselves and their crops by paying tribute to local kings, and would have to call upon the euergetism of their richer citizens to help them in this, as Olbia’s remarkable Protogenes inscription illustrates. The Bosporan kingdom, however, under its Greek or at any rate hellenized Spartocid dynasty, found it somewhat easier to deal with such neighbours by virtue of its organization, manpower and wealth. By sea, the Greeks could generally be more confident. They were able to exploit well the opportunities it offered for communication, trade and taxation, even despite the ever-present dangers of piracy and the Black Sea’s notorious storms. Polybius illuminatingly explains Byzantium’s dependence upon the taxes it imposed on shipping to alleviate the demands made of it by its Thracian neighbours.

In the fourth and final section we turn to the art that the hellenistic world produced and the responses of more modern ages to it. Ruth Westgate investigates the hellenistic world’s most important and distinctive contribution to the arts, the invention of the tessellated mosaic technique that was to grace so many of the better private houses of the age. The earliest hellenistic mosaics, those of the great houses of Pella, exploit a refined version of the natural-pebble technique that had been developed in the classical period, but already admit some artificial materials. By the mid-second century bc the tessellated technique had come to predominate. It must have been invented by at least the early second century, but we can not be more precise. The courts of Alexandria or Pergamum may have been its place of origin; fine early examples of it, imitative of paintings, have been found there. The tessellated technique afforded a wider and subtler palette than the pebble mosaics, but, in simplified form, it could also be cheaper, and this may have been the determining factor in its popular take-up. The insertion of prefabricated panels offered further economies. Initially confined to dining rooms, by the end of the period mosaics had spread more widely through their houses. Accordingly, they permit us to chart the opening up of private houses to public display through the course of the hellenistic age.

SHELLEY HALES compares the reception of female-nude sculptures in the hellenistic world and in nineteenth-century Europe. When Aphrodite first went nude on the eve of the hellenistic age, in the form of Praxiteles’ Aphrodite of Cnidus, she began her journey from controlling cult-statue and goddess to controlled domestic collectable object and fleshly woman. It was with the perspective of the ancient Greek and Roman collectors that the Victorians most strongly identified. Their Academic painters portray nude Venus-statues gracing not temples but private houses and even art markets, and they further assimilated these statues to flesh in mimicking their poses with their decorative female figures. The Victorians accepted the verdict of antiquity itself that true art ended with the classical period, yet, paradoxically, the art of antiquity to which they paid the greatest homage in their own work was hellenistic. The nudity of the Cnidian Aphrodite could be excused by appeal to her date: this was classical – just about – even if her style was not. But the mid-hellenistic Venus de Milo had to be forcibly reclassified as late classical to justify the similar exploitation of her image.

In the final essay LLOYD LLEWELLYN-JONES takes up the theme of the reception of hellenism in the modern west. He investigates Hollywood’s developing responses to Cleopatra’s Graeco-Macedonian ethnicity in the face of the presumed audience expectation that she was purely and simply Egyptian. In general, film-makers have been more ready to concede Greekness to the queen in the script than in design. The 1917 Edwards script seems to have recognized the non-Egyptian origin of the Ptolemaic dynasty by introducing a fictitious Pharaonic rival claimant to the throne. The 1963 Mankiewicz script aligns itself closely with ancient sources, doggedly lays out the queen’s Ptolemaic background and Greekness, and even makes play with them. But Hollywood has been reluctant to challenge its audience’s visual expectations. Cleopatra’s dress is always symbolic of Egypt alone. There is nothing Greek to be seen in the palace-set of the 1934 DeMille film. The Mankiewicz palace blends the Greek with the Egyptian on the outside but is almost purely Egyptian on the inside. And while the marketing for the films touted the supposed historical fidelity of their design, the sets and costumes have in fact been rather more faithful to the fantasies of the Victorian Academic painters and the tastes of contemporary architects and fashion houses.

In this last respect, we may perhaps consider Hollywood to be paradoxically truer to the hellenistic spirit even than it aspires to be. As the waters of Alexandria’s harbour have recently revealed to us, Cleopatra’s historical palace was a Greek-style edifice into which elements of indigenous Egyptian design were incorporated and recontextualized. The modern west, cultural heir to the Greeks, likewise builds its Cleopatra film-sets to suit its own architectural taste whilst similarly incorporating and recontextualizing into them elements of indigenous Egyptian design. And if, as Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones contends, indigenous Egyptian costume was ‘fancy dress’ for the original Cleopatra, we may be tempted to think that the first actress to play the ‘Egyptian’ Cleopatra the modern audiences love was none other than the queen herself, in her very own prototype of a Hollywood set.

Notes

¹ Green 1990; University of Illinois 1983; Habicht 1997. One might plead, in mitigation, that this technique is an ancient one: cf. the titles listed in n. 15. Havelock 1971 brings ‘hellenistic’ to the fore, but mitigates its impact not only by saluting ‘Alexander’ and ‘Actium’ in the subtitle but also by assimilating it to the term ‘classical’: Hellenistic art: the art of the classical world from the death of Alexander to the battle of Actium. London.

² Grant 1982 and cf. Pomeroy 1984.

³ 2 Maccabees 4.13. At Acts of the Apostles 6.1 the term hellēnistēs is applied to a Jew who has adopted the language and education of the Greeks.

⁴ Bossuet 1691, i.8.

⁵ Cf. Préaux 1978, i.5–8; Walbank 1981, 14; Davies 1984, 263; Will 1985, 274–5 (developing the idea that the hellenistic world was a ‘colonial’ one); Green 1993, 6; Schmitt and Vogt 1993, 1–9; Cartledge 1997, 2; and Shipley 2000, 1. Tarn and Griffith 1952, 1, grumble that ‘hellenism’ is improperly used as the substantive of ‘hellenistic’; ‘hellenisticism’ (‘impossible in any language’) would have been the proper term.

⁶ Cartledge at Cartledge et al. 1997, 2.

⁷ Thus Green 1993, 5 (‘Why, during the past decade or two, has the hellenistic world come to enjoy such extraordinary vogue as an area of study?’); Cartledge at Cartledge et al. 1997, 1 (‘Hellenistic studies are burgeoning today as never before’); Shipley 2000, xiii (‘Since.. .the early 1990s.. .there has been an upsurge in accessible writings.’). Austin 1981, vii, gives three reasons for the perceived neglect: (1) the hellenistic world was diverse and unstable and lacks a single point of reference; (2) it is regarded as a ‘failure’ for not having been able to withstand Rome; (3) it has no extant literary source of transcendent brilliance to champion it, no Thucydides or Tacitus. Cf. also Shelley Hales’ paper in this volume, ad init.

⁸ Tarn and Griffith1952, v.

⁹ e.g. Davies 1984, 263 (on the difficulty of defining the physical edges of the hellenistic world, external and internal); Smith 1988, 2; Green 1993, 8; Cartledge at Cartledge et al. 1997, 3 (‘It can, indeed, be questioned whether it is correct to speak of a self-contained hellenistic age, epoch or period.’); Shipley 2000, xiii (‘the element of continuity from classical times may be at least as significant as the element of change’) and 2 (‘There is particular difficulty in assigning a terminal date, and no attempt to do so can be completely convincing’); cf. also Shipley’s contribution in this volume.

¹⁰ This fact is occasionally recognized, e.g. by Bilde et al. 1996, 9 (‘Kingship was perhaps the single most important institution in the hellenistic period’).

¹¹ Most notably Will 1979–82; so too, e.g., Allen 1983, Grainger 1997 and Hölbl 2001. Other forms of coherence could also be argued for, as by Cook et al. 1928, vi: ‘the final achievement of the hellenistic movement was the conception of the world, that is the world of ancient civilization, as in a sense a single community the oecumene, with the Greek koine as almost a universal language’.

¹² Green 1990, xv, doubts that any ancient writer did.

¹³ Demetrius of Phaleron F81 Wehrli at Polybius 29.21; cf. Walbank 1957–79 ad loc.

¹⁴ Plutarch DeAlexandri Magni Fortuna aut virtute 328–9; cf. Préaux 1978, i.6; Shipley 2000, 1.

¹⁵ Hieronymus of Cardia FGH 154, τά έπϊ Άλεξανδρω πραχθεντα Nymphis of Heraclea FGH 432, περί Άλεξάνδρου καί των διαδóχων καί επιγονων; Arrian of Nicomedia FGH 156, τά μετά Άλɛξανδρον; Dexippus of Athens FGH 100, τά μετά Άλεξανδρον.

¹⁶ Pausanias 1.6.2.

¹⁷ For which see Bowie 1970. It is commonly held that the group of second-century ad Greek writers preserved for us in copious quantities and now classed as participating in the ‘Second Sophistic’, Plutarch and Lucian among them, idealized the Greek world before Alexander and took little interest in events after his death.

¹⁸ Timagenes of Alexandria FGH 88, περί βασιλεων; Will 1979-82.

¹⁹ T3 (Seneca De Ira 3.23.4-8) – the burning of the Augustan part of the work; F1 – the prehistory of the Milyae, the erstwhile Solymi; F2 – the background of the Greeks; F3 - Ptolemy under Alexander; F4 - Antiochus IV Epiphanes; F5 Aristoboulos son of Hyrcanos; F6 – Alexander son of Hyrcanos; F9 – Ptolemy XII Auletes.

²⁰ The only Ptolemaic histories known are the ‘Bulletin from the Third Syrian War’, FGH 160, and Ptolemy of Megalopolis FGH 161, περί τòν Φιλοπατορα ιστορίαι (late third century bc). Seleucid histories: Demetrius of Phaleron FGH 162 (early third century BC); Simonides of Magnesia FGH 163; Phylarchus of Athens FGH 81, τά κατά Άντίοχον καί τον Пεργαμηνον Eυμενη; Mnesiptolemus of Cyme FGH 164 (an associate of Antiochus III); Timochares FGH 165, περί Άντιοχου (mid-second century BC); Athenaeus of Naucratis FGH 166, περί των εν Συραα βασιλευσάντων; Hegesianax of Alexandria FGH 45, ίστορίαι. Macedonian histories: Heraclitus of Lesbos FGH 167, ιστορία Mακεδονικη (later third century bc); Straton FGH 168, Φιλίππου καί Περσεως πραξεις (mid-third century bc); Posidonius FGH 169, περί περσεως (early second century bc), Attalid histories: Lysimachus FGH 171, περί της Άτταλου παιδειας (third century bc?); Neanthes of Cyzicus FGH 171, περί Άτταλου ίστορίαι (late third century bc); Musaeus of Ephesus FGH 455, είς Eυμενη καί Άτταλον; Arrian FGH 156, είς ?τταλον τον Άεργαμηνον (second century ad); Leschides FGH 172 (second century bc, associate of Eumenes).

²¹ Pausanias 1.6.1.

²² Jacoby 1923–58, IIb Kommentar pp. 543–4; Préaux 1978, i.83, 85–6, 88.

²³ Cf. Gutschmid 1882; Préaux 1978, i.78 and Yardley and Heckel 1997, 30–4.

²⁴ On Theopompus FGH 115 see Shrimpton 1991. Anaximenes’ history is to be found at FGH 72 F4–14 (Αί περί Φίλιππον ίστορίαι). Cf. Bramble 1982, 491; Shrimpton 1991, 121.

²⁵ It seems unlikely that the work was so named because of a similar ‘caustic moralizing’ attitude towards the Macedonian dynasts as that shown by Theopompus towards Philip (thus Develin 1985 and especially at Yardley and Develin 1994, 6; Yardley and Heckel 1997, 24–5; cf. Walbank at Walbank et al. 1984, 7). The curious suggestion has been made that the name derives from the fact that mention was made of a great many Philips in the course of the history (thus Urban 1982a and 1982b; eleven individuals named Philip survived into Justin’s epitome, according to the index entries at Yardley and Develin 1994, 323–4). The suggestions have also been made that it owes its title to the Philippic speeches of Cicero (Seel 1972, 268–9), and that the title salutes the battle of Philippi as the effective starting point of the Roman empire (Yardley and Heckel 1997, 25).

²⁶ I thank Byron Harries for this point. The amount of extraneous material Theopompus had managed to integrate into his history of Philip II may be judged from Photius’ discussion of his work (Photius no. 176). Philip V had ordered the preparation of an edited version of the history which included only those bits focusing specifically on Philip II. The result was a reduction from 53 books to 16! Cf. also Alonso-Núnez 1987, 58.

²⁷ Cf. Will 1966–7, ii.493: ‘Comme le titre de l’ouvrage l’indique, c’était l’essor de la Macédoine sous Philippe II et tout ce qui s’en était suivi qui apparaissait essential à ce Gaulois.’ (The review of sources from which this statement is drawn was printed only in Will’s first edition.) Cf. also Alonso-Núnez 1987, 58–9.

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