The Hellenistic World

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Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_a4a42bb4-c403-58b7-9b52-c4aa7b52a224)

No justification is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.

The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for the period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.

Oswyn Murray

Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,

Balliol College, Oxford

General Editor

Preface (#ulink_a2418f14-7139-5b8d-8aa6-b9b9da9b25a6)

When writing about the hellenistic world it is not easy to strike a balance between a chronological treatment of the political events, and the discussion of special problems – whether those peculiar to particular regions or those relevant to all areas. In this respect the present book is not alone in being something of a compromise. Furthermore its emphasis is largely on the third and early-second centuries, since the main lines were laid down then and the greatest achievements of the hellenistic world belong to that period. I have also borne in mind the fact that the later period, from the middle of the second century onwards, during which the power of Rome became increasingly dominant throughout the eastern Mediterranean, has already been treated from the Roman aspect in another volume in the series.

The manuscript and proofs have been read by Dorothy Crawford, to whose vigilance I owe many corrections; I have also profited from many valuable suggestions which she made, especially in the parts concerned with Ptolemaic Egypt. Oswyn Murray also read the manuscript and suggested several improvements, for which I am grateful. I should also like to express my debt to the published works of Anthony Long and Geoffrey Lloyd, which have been reliable guides in areas where I was less at home. Other debts are to the Coin Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for the photographs of coins and to the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, for the rest of the photographs; in particular I wish to thank Professor Snodgrass, Mr T. Volk and Mr E. E. Jones. The photograph of the inscription from Ai Khanum is reproduced by permission of Professor A. Dupont-Sommer, given on behalf of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris; I should like to thank him warmly too. Finally I am grateful to Miss Helen Fraser and the staff of Fontana Paperbacks and in particular to Miss Lynn Blowers for their help in getting the book out.

For any readers who wish to look at the original evidence quoted in the text I have provided a list at the end of the book indicating where the various items are to be found, together with further reading arranged under chapters and concentrating on books and articles in English. I have ventured to include a few titles in other languages, mainly French, where there was no satisfactory English equivalent. Unless otherwise indicated all dates are BC.

Cambridge

January 1980

1. Introduction: The Sources (#ulink_f2b903ac-4a38-58f3-91f5-76c153d5c65c)

I

For rather more than a century – from 480 to 360 BC – the city-states of Greece pursued their rivalries and feuds without serious challenge from outside. But from 359 onwards the growing power of Philip II of Macedonia threw a shadow over the Greek peninsula. In 338, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip decisively defeated the armies of Thebes and Athens and through a newly constituted Council at Corinth imposed peace and his own policy on most of the cities. Already Philip had his eyes on Persia, the great continental power beyond the Aegean, whose weakness had been dramatically revealed sixty years earlier, when a body of Greek mercenaries in the pay of an unsuccessful rebel prince and led by the Athenian Xenophon had marched all the way from Mesopotamia to the sea at Trebizond (400/399). Polybius writes later:

It is easy for anyone to see the real causes and origin of the war against Persia. The first was the retreat of the Greeks under Xenophon from the upper satrapies in which, though they traversed the whole of Asia, a hostile country, none of the barbarians ventured to face them (iii, 6, 10).

Encouraged by this and by the campaign of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor shortly afterwards, Philip planned to invade the ramshackle Persian dominions of Asia Minor in search of money and new lands – though as a pretext he alleged the wrongs done to Greece during the Persian invasions of the early-fifth century. Philip did not live to carry out his plan. In 336 he was assassinated and the projected invasion of Persia was left as part of the inheritance of his son Alexander.

Alexander reigned for only thirteen years, but during that time he completely changed the face of the Greek world. In the great colonizing age from the eighth to the sixth centuries the shores of Spain, the Adriatic lands, southern Italy and Sicily, northern Africa and the Black Sea shores had been settled with Greek maritime colonies. The new expansion was of a different order. Advancing overland with his army – a mere 50, 000 at the outset – Alexander marched through Asia Minor and Palestine to Egypt, from there to Mesopotamia and eastward through Persia and central Asia to where Samarkand, Balkh and Kabul now lie; thence he penetrated the Punjab and after defeating the Indian king Porus brought his forces partly by land and partly by sea back to Babylon, where he died.

The vast land empire which he left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. It was in fact the old Persian empire under Greek and Macedonian management and it formed the theatre within which the events of Greek history were to be enacted during the next 300 years. The Greeks who during the seventy or so years following Alexander’s death flocked southwards and eastwards to join new settlements or enlist in mercenary armies, hoping to make their fortunes, found themselves no longer insulated within the traditions of a city-state but living in any one of a variety of environments alongside native peoples of every race and nationality. The term ‘hellenistic’ – derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to speak Greek’ – is commonly used to describe this new world in which Greek was in fact the lingua franca. It carries a connotation, not so much of a diluted hellenism, but rather of a hellenism extended to non-Greeks, with the clash of cultures which that inevitably implies. There were of course still city-states in Greece and the Aegean – often powerful like Rhodes – and the relations between the cities of Greece proper and Macedonia, though often strained, were not seriously complicated by cultural differences. But within the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia, whether we look at the armies or at the bureaucracies, Greeks and Macedonians occupied positions of dominance over Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians and the diverse peoples of Anatolia. The relationships thus established were uneasy and far from static. From the outset there were tensions, and as the flow of Greeks dried up the relative position of Greeks and barbarians changed gradually in many ways. The pattern of this development varied from kingdom to kingdom. Greeks influenced barbarians, and barbarians Greeks. It is indeed in this clash and coming together of cultures that one of the main interests of the period lies.

From the late-third century onwards a new power appears in the hellenistic world, the Roman republic. The taking-over of one after another of the hellenistic kingdoms by Rome has already been recounted and discussed in another volume of this series (Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic) and will not be repeated here, though the cumulative effect of the first half-century of the process is discussed below in Chapter 13. The main emphasis in this book will be rather on the hellenistic kingdoms themselves and on their relations with each other and with the Greek cities in Europe and Asia. We shall be concerned with economic and social trends, with the cultural developments in the new centres set up at Alexandria and Pergamum, with the expanding (and contracting) frontiers of this new world, with its scientific achievements and with the religious experience of its peoples.

II

The evidence for the period is uneven. The career of Alexander himself presents a particular source problem. The most important surviving account of his expedition is that of Arrian, a Greek-speaking Roman senator from Bithynia in Asia Minor, who was active in the second century AD. Arrian opens his Anabasis of Alexander – the title echoes that of Xenophon’s Anabasis – with these words:

Wherever Ptolemy son of Lagus and Aristobulus son of Aristobulus are in agreement in their accounts of Alexander son of Philip, I record their statements as entirely true; where they disagree I have selected the version that seems to me more likely and at the same time more worth relating (Arrian, Anabasis, i, praef. I).

(We may note that ‘more likely’ and ‘more worth relating’ are concepts that do not necessarily coincide.) Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, was later king of Egypt; his History, probably written many years later in Egypt, drew on Alexander’s official Journal, and Arrian was right to regard it as generally reliable. Aristobulus also accompanied the expedition, probably as a military engineer. Unlike Ptolemy he was a Greek, not a Macedonian, and wrote at least two decades after Alexander’s death. There were others who gave eyewitness accounts of the expedition. One was the official historian, Callisthenes, the nephew of Alexander’s tutor, the famous philosopher Aristotle, but his account broke off early for the sufficient reason that he was executed for treason in 327. Another was the Cretan Nearchus, who sailed the royal fleet back to Susa from the Indus, and composed a description of India and a record (which Arrian uses) of his voyage; he later fought in the wars of Alexander’s successors. Nearchus’ lieutenant Onesicritus, who was the helmsman of Alexander’s own ship on the voyage down the Jhelum (Arrian, Indica, 18, 1), also left an account but the surviving fragments do not make it easy to assess its character and it was not very influential. Finally mention should be made of the Alexandrian Cleitarchus, who though probably not a member of the expedition wrote a history of Alexander in at least twelve books. There is a vast literature on these lost sources. It is likely, but not certain, that Cleitarchus, Ptolemy and Aristobulus published their works in that order. Of the three Cleitarchus became the most popular, especially under the early Roman empire, though a discriminating writer like Arrian criticizes him (without actually naming him) for his many inaccuracies (Arrian, Anabasis, vi, 11, 8). Indirectly Cleitarchus’ history provided one element in the Romance of Alexander, which was developed in successive versions from the second century AD until the middle ages, eventually in more than thirty languages – a striking testimony to the impression made on both his immediate successors and subsequent generations by Alexander’s career and personality.

All these primary accounts are lost and our knowledge of them depends on later writers who used them and so indirectly caused them to be superseded. Apart from Arrian, the more important of these are Diodorus Siculus, a Greek who wrote a world history in the late-first century BC which, for Alexander, followed Aristobulus and Cleitarchus, Quintus Curtius (whose date and sources are both uncertain), Justinus, whose work epitomizes that of a lost Augustan historian from Gaul called Trogus Pompeius and in the second century AD Plutarch of Chaeronea, the popular philosopher and biographer, whose Life of Alexander (twinned with that of Caesar) mentions no less than twenty-four authorities – though how many of these he knew at first hand we cannot be sure. By Plutarch’s time a vast amount of material concerning Alexander was available in the writings of rhetoricians, antiquaries and gossip writers, many of whom are but names today. The value of much of this is slight.

Thus for Alexander’s career there is no lack of literary sources. The problem is to determine where they got their information from and to assess their merits and allow for their prejudices for or against the hero. For the period after Alexander’s death – the hellenistic age proper – the historian faces a very different situation. Until we can begin to use Polybius from 264 onwards, we are still, to be sure, dependent on secondary sources but they differ from those concerned with Alexander in that after Alexander’s death his empire was divided among his. generals, and writers now attached themselves to one court or another. For the history of the first fifty years of the new regimes our best tradition goes back to a great historian, Hieronymus of Cardia, who served first his fellow-citizen Eumenes, Alexander’s secretary, who fought loyally for the king’s legitimate heirs, and then, after Eumenes’ death in 316, Antigonus I, his son Demetrius I and his grandson Antigonus Gonatas (see pp. 50–9). Hieronymus’ lost account of the Wars of the Successors went at least as far as the death of Pyrrhus of Epirus in 272, and was used by Arrian for his work on Events after Alexander and, indirectly by Diodorus (books 18–20), as well as by Plutarch in several Lives (those of Eumenes, Pyrrhus and Demetrius). Unfortunately, from book 21 onwards Diodorus’ work survives only in fragments, of which the most important are from a collection of excerpts made on the orders of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the tenth century.

Other lost writers were Phylarchus, who covered the years 272–219 in twenty-eight books and, according to Polybius (who was prejudiced against him for his support of Cleomenes of Sparta, the enemy of Achaea, ) wrote in a sensational and emotional manner. Polybius has a virulent attack on his account of the Achaean sack of Mantinea in 223:

In his eagerness to arouse the pity and attention of his readers, Phylarchus treats us to a picture of women clinging with their hair dishevelled and their breasts bare, or again of crowds of both sexes together with their children and aged parents weeping and lamenting as they are led away to slavery (ii, 56, 7).

Phylarchus’ methods were not peculiar to him, but represent a type of writing well represented in hellenistic historiography. One noted forerunner was Duris of Samos, a pupil of Theophrastus, who wrote a History in the early part of the third century dealing with Macedonian and Greek events down to 280 (as well as a history of Agathocles of Syracuse). Other third-century writers were Megasthenes, who visited Pataliputra as the ambassador of Antiochus I, and wrote a book about his journey which later writers used, and the Sicilian historian Timaeus from Tauromenium (mod. Taormina), who spent some fifty years in exile in Athens and is savagely criticized by Polybius as an armchair historian who never took the trouble to visit the places he was writing about or to acquire essential political experience. It is probably to Timaeus that we owe an innovation which brought an immeasurable gain to the historian’s craft, the adoption of ‘Olympiad years’, numbered from the institution of the Olympic festival in 776 to provide an era into which events all over the Greek world (and the Roman world later) could be fitted. Thus Polybius himself announces (i, 3, 1) that ‘the date from which I propose to begin is the 140th Olympiad’ (220–216) and after telling his readers (i, 5, 1) that he will begin his introductory books from ‘the first occasion on which the Romans crossed the sea from Italy’ (264) he goes on to explain that this follows on immediately from the close of Timaeus’ history and took place in the 129th Olympiad (264–260). It was a popular practice among Greek historians to begin their history where a predecessor left off.

Polybius himself is the most important source for the years 264 to 146. His special concern was with Rome and his object was to explain ‘by what means and under what kind of constitution the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government’ (i, 1, 5). But Polybius was himself an Arcadian from Megalopolis, which was a member of the Achaean Confederation (see pp. 154 ff.) and he describes the growth of that confederation and also many other Greek events not directly relevant to Rome, such as the war between Antiochus III of Syria and Ptolemy IV of Egypt, which ended in the former’s defeat at Raphia in 217. Unfortunately only the first five books survive intact; of the remaining thirty-five we have only fragments. Polybius is a sane and balanced writer (though not entirely free from prejudice). Without his work we should be infinitely poorer. ‘His books’, wrote the German historian Mommsen, ‘are like the sun shining on the field of Roman history; where they open, the mists . . . are lifted and where they end a perhaps even more vexatious twilight descends.’ They are no less valuable to the student of the hellenistic world generally. Poseidonius of Apamea, who lived for many years at Rhodes (whence he visited Rome), and was a philosopher as well as a historian, began his Histories (of which only fragments remain) at the point where Polybius left off. His work covered the Greek east and the western Mediterranean from 146 to the time of Sulla (d. 78) and was later drawn on by the Roman historians Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus and by Plutarch. Poseidonius gave a wealth of information especially about the west, and in some ways he became a spokesman for Roman imperialism.

For a consecutive account of events – something not available for all areas nor all periods of the hellenistic age – the historian must, however, turn to secondary authors, who include (as for Alexander) Diodorus, Arrian and Plutarch, and also Appian, an Alexandrian Greek, who in the second century AD composed a history of Rome tracing separately the histories of various peoples during the time when they were being absorbed into the Roman empire. Like Diodorus, Appian made great use of Polybius, though by no means exclusively nor always at first hand. Among Latin authors we have Justinus’ epitome of the so-called Philippic Histories of the Gaul Trogus Pompeius (the title of this ‘universal’ history indicates his approach, independent of the Roman patriotic tradition) and, more importantly, Livy, who fortunately used Polybius as his primary source for eastern affairs. But Livy’s history, written under Augustus, is itself fragmentary, for only books 1 to 10 and 21 to 45 survive, taking us to 168 and the end of the Third Macedonian War (172–168). Both the geographer Strabo, also writing under Augustus, and Pausanias, who composed his periegesis of Greece in the middle of the second century AD, furnish valuable historical and topographical information, while for Jewish history several books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (especially the Maccabees) are of relevance, as is Josephus, who wrote his Jewish Antiquities under the Flavian emperors (AD 69–96) at Rome (see further pp. 222 ff.). Later Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340), composed a chronicle of universal history which is important for chronology. It was translated into Latin and expanded by St Jerome.

This rapid review of fragmentary sources, all of which present many problems of accuracy and reliability, must also include Memnon of Heraclea Pontica, who wrote an important history of his native city, probably in the first century AD, and Polyaenus, whose book on military stratagems was composed a century later. With the help of these, along with other, minor sources, uneven in scope and often quoting incidents out of context, it is possible to write some kind of history of some parts of the three hundred years which constitute the hellenistic age. Fortunately this can be supplemented from other sorts of historical evidence which, it is true, generate problems of their own, but allow us to check the statements of literary historians against more immediate and normally non-literary documents. It is thanks to the regular growth in the amount of such evidence that the history of this period (and of others in antiquity) is constantly being reshaped in detail as the availability of new information leads to the revision of current hypotheses.

III

This new material falls mainly into three categories. The first consists of inscriptions on stone or marble. The classical world was addicted to inscribing information on durable material of this kind. For the period with which we are concerned, including the reign of Alexander, the majority of these inscriptions are in Greek but from Egypt we have also Egyptian inscriptions in both the hieroglyphic and the demotic forms. The famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, is a piece of black basalt containing a decree passed by the Council of Priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 and enumerating the good deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and the honours which they proposed to pay to him (OGIS, 90). The Greek version was followed by a translation into Egyptian, which was recorded in hieroglyphic and demotic, and it was this that enabled the French scholar Champollion, from 1820 onwards, to begin the long process of unravelling the Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are also a few Latin inscriptions but most of the documents which concern Roman relations with Greece come from Greece and are in Greek. They have been conveniently assembled in R. S. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. There are also several cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia of relevance to the history of the Seleucids.

Inscriptions were set up for a variety of reasons. A few are directly concerned with recording historical facts, such as the so-called Parian marble, of which two fragments survive and which gave an account by an unknown author of

the dates from the beginning, derived from all kinds of records and general histories, starting from Cecrops, the first king of Athens, down to the archonship of [Ast]yanax at Paros and Diognetus at Athens (264/3) (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 239).

But the majority are preserved for other reasons. Many register official matters such as a treaty or law or agreement to exchange citizenship (sympoliteia) or the findings of an arbitration; here the purpose is to set up a public record, available to all and sundry, of decisions taken publicly by sovereign and other bodies. For the hellenistic period a special group of inscriptions records relations between Greek cities and the kings; often a letter from a king is inscribed in full followed by decisions taken in accordance with its instructions. Some examples of these will be considered below in Chapter 8. Others record decrees passed by city assemblies honouring eminent citizens of the same or some other city for services rendered – financial, political and, especially, for serving on important embassies. There are also building inscriptions recording expenditure, details of loans incurred by cities, requests for grants of immunity from reprisals (see pp. 145 ff.) by temples, cities and other bodies, and records of their concession by kings and cities, details of embassies sent to solicit collaboration in the setting-up of new religious festivals or the up-grading of established ones, or of the manumission of slaves (in which temples like that of Apollo at Delphi were regularly concerned), and a score of other categories, all having one thing in common, someone’s need to keep a permanent record.

The historian requires a special technique and experience to extract the fullest information from this epigraphic material. The exact provenance of many inscriptions is uncertain and they are usually fragmentary or partially illegible. Happily they tend to be couched in somewhat stereotyped language and the study of the vocabulary and phraseology used in various contexts at various dates enables the skilled epigraphist to suggest plausible restorations to fill lacunae on the stone. It is however vitally important to distinguish clearly between what actually stands on the stone and what is someone’s more or less convincing restoration. To make such restorations it is of course essential to be able to date an inscription at least approximately and this can be done by taking note of the letter forms and the context and character of the inscription, including in some cases the names of the persons mentioned in it. But letter forms can persist over several decades and it is by no means always possible to identify an individual mentioned in an inscription with certainty, since many Greek names are quite common and boys were often named after their grandfather. For example, a series of eighteen Megarian decrees which mention a king Demetrius were for a long time habitually referred to Demetrius I Poliorcetes, who captured Megara towards the end of the fourth century, until in 1942 a French scholar argued that the Demetrius in question was Demetrius II, who ruled in Macedonia from 239 to 229. This hypothesis substantially modified our picture of the reign of Demetrius II and his activity in Greece. Quite recently, however, it has again been argued that the attribution to Demetrius I is correct and the history of the two reigns has thus once more been thrown into, the melting-pot.

If inscriptions require special care and knowledge for their effective use, they are nevertheless among the most important sources of new information. Moreover, because of their stereotyped form it is not only possible to use one to restore gaps in another, but inscriptions falling into certain categories – building inscriptions, manumissions, decrees in honour of doctors, funerary inscriptions, records of private associations, etc. – can be used together to furnish information on such diverse subjects as price levels, the status of occupations, the incidence of slavery or the structure of royal bureaucracies and, as we have just seen, the publication of new inscriptions (or the more accurate republication of old ones) often leads to the revision or abandoning of established theories and assumptions.

IV

A second category of document important for the study of this period consists of papyri, mainly from middle Egypt and especially the Fayum, where the dry soil and climate have preserved through the centuries scraps of paper consigned to rubbish tips or reused, for example in stuffing the mummy-cases of sacred ibises, cats or crocodiles. The information contained in these papyri is in many ways different from that furnished by inscriptions. The latter have survived because they were intended to be preserved, the former because they were discarded. Papyri, too, furnish information which is usually more local in its relevance. If we ignore the fragments containing extracts from literary works, which range from the discovery nearly a century ago of Aristotle’s lost Constitution of Athens to that, more recently, of long sections of lost plays by Menander, we are dealing in the main with the waste-paper baskets of minor civil servants – correspondence, petitions and drafts of replies, summonses, depositions, records of judgements, administrative details concerning the billeting of troops, the passing on of edicts and orders, the auctioning of leases, the making of contracts and submission of tenders, the uneasy relations with the temples and public announcements like that offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of a runaway slave. The papyri already discovered include several major finds, such as the archive of Zenon of Caunus, the agent of Apollonius, the dioiketes or head of the civil administration under Ptolemy II, which gives a detailed picture of the working of a great estate, a gift from the king, on which much took place that was not perhaps typical of life generally among the Greeks in Egypt (on this see further p. 106), or the so-called Revenue Laws of Ptolemy II (cf. Select Papyri, 203) introduced by Apollonius, which contain regulations for the control of the royal oil monopoly. We have also several royal ordinances and indulgences (concessions to the populace in the form of amnesties, tax remissions and the like). An example is that of 118, in which

King Ptolemy (Euergetes II) and Queen Cleopatra (II) the sister and Queen Cleopatra (III) the wife proclaim an amnesty to all their subjects for errors, crimes, accusations, condemnations and offences of all kinds up to the 9 Pharmouthi of year 52 except to persons guilty of wilful murder or sacrilege (Select Papyri, 210).

These concessions are then elaborated for another 260 lines. Another papyrus from Tebtunis (P. Tebt., 703) contains instructions sent by the dioiketes to a newly appointed subordinate in the Egyptian countryside (see pp. 106‘7).

The papyri thus throw light on everyday life as well as on official policy and activity. But they have to be used with circumspection. Since there are some 30, 000 Greek papyri available compared with only 2000 demotic, it is clear that the conclusions they lead to are likely to be heavily weighted towards the Greek minority, a situation which can be rectified only as more work is done on the still unpublished documents in Egyptian. Furthermore, the papyrological evidence concerns administration at the local end rather than the centre of government in Alexandria, where soil conditions have prevented the survival of papyri. What we have can only be used safely for the place and time to which it belongs, since we have reason to believe that conditions changed considerably from place to place and from decade to decade. Nevertheless, here, as on the stones, there is a growing mass of evidence invaluable for the study of Ptolemaic Egypt. Elsewhere this sort of material is not usually available, though in the Dead Sea scrolls and other similar documents the caves of the Jordan valley have supplemented the written authorities, usually for a period rather later than that with which we are concerned.

Coins also provide valuable evidence for the historian. In the classical world coins were more often minted to satisfy the needs of government than to facilitate trade (though of course they incidentally did this too). Hoards of coins hidden in a crisis and never recovered afford useful means of dating, and, where dates can be attached to particular issues, it is sometimes possible to correlate minting with general policy. The location of coin finds furnishes information on currents of trade, and the relative absence of Ptolemaic coins abroad illustrates the strict monopoly enforced by the Ptolemies upon those trading with Egypt (see p. 105). The coin-types minted also throw light on policy and attitudes. Thus Alexander’s decision to strike Persian-type darics after Darius’ death clearly indicates his claim to the Persian throne whereas the opening of mints at Sicyon and Corinth had the more practical aim of financing the recruitment of mercenaries. For some time after Alexander’s death his successors issued coins on the same standard in the name of the kings, that is Philip Arrhidaeus and later Alexander IV. But towards the end of the third century they began one by one to issue coins with their own heads on the obverse, thereby signifying their rejection of a united empire and claim to independent kingship. Thus coins provide evidence for political pretensions, military ambitions and of course economic policy but they require a certain expertise on the part of the historian to master the technical problems surrounding dies and mints, weight standards and, especially, dating.

Of less importance, but by no means negligible, are the documents that have turned up in other materials or tongues. As examples I will mention two. In 1954 A. J. Sachs and D. J. Wiseman published a cuneiform tablet from Babylon containing a list of kings reigning in the Seleucid dominions from Alexander the Great to the accession of Arsacid (Parthian) rule in Mesopotamia and providing new or confirming old dates for Seleucid reigns down to about 179 (Iraq (1954), pp. 202–12). Secondly, in 1976 J. D. Ray published an archive of documents on potsherds (ostraca) consisting of drafts of letters written by a certain Hor, an Egyptian from Sebennytus, who in support of his claims in a feud quoted his own prophecy that Antiochus IV, who was invading Egypt, would leave that country by sea before ‘Year 2, Payni, final day’ (30 July 168) and, on a separate ostracon, asserted that Antiochus had fulfilled his prophecy by leaving before that date. Thus from an obscure document in a curious context we obtain a firm date for an important event not only in Seleucid and Ptolemaic relations but in Mediterranean history generally.

The use of this non-literary evidence, which is essential to our growing knowledge of the period, depends upon its availability to the historian. Some of the main publications in which inscriptions, coins and papyri are assembled can be found listed in the bibliography but these quickly become out of date and have to be supplemented from articles in journals and such annual surveys of recent publications as the learned and comprehensive Bulletin épigraphique published annually by J. and L. Robert in the French quarterly Revue des Etudes Grecques.

Evidence of this kind supplements, but does not replace, the work of the ancient writers, even when these are mediocre, for only they can give us a narrative of events and they are usually essential for a chronological framework. But inscriptions and papyri provide a new perspective and often information which prompts the historian to ask a new type of question. They give a glimpse into the working of governments and sometimes enable us to attach names to the bureaucrats themselves. Occasionally they allow families to be traced from generation to generation; they provide evidence for social mobility in a particular community and by their help we can sometimes discover details of land tenure, social hierarchies, and the economic conditions of different groups and classes. Provided we exercise caution and remain aware of the vast gaps in our knowledge, it is still possible to attempt an answer, with far more nuances than in the past, to such questions as where, in this or the other monarchy, power really lay. But, as has already been indicated, answers to these questions are valid only for the time and place to which the evidence refers. The hellenistic world was a dynamic society, one which in some ways never achieved stability but carried on in a state of tension created on the one hand by the fact that the existing balance of power was only accepted faute de mieux and not as a recognized way of organizing international relations, and on the other by a shifting and uneasy relationship between the Greco-Macedonian ruling class and the native populations. Starting from the original impact of Alexander’s career the hellenistic world gradually ran down until eventually, shorn of everything east of the Euphrates, it was incorporated into the Roman empire. When in the fourth century AD the Roman empire itself split into two halves, the hellenistic world still enjoyed a ghostly existence in Byzantium.