4 - Cities and Other Civic Organisms

Summary

An overview of the settlements of the Attalid kingdom is presented, and the impact of the Attalid state on rural Anatolia is assessed. In a countryside dominated by small-scale communities, villages, and towns, Pergamene officials interfaced with a wide variety of civic organizations. Unlike the other Hellenistic dynasties, the Attalids rarely undertook coercion-intensive urbanization projects or forced synoicism. Rather, the Attalids tended to leave communities in place and culturally autonomous, instead focusing their efforts on shaping the body politic and improving fiscal legibility by opportunistically fostering civic institutions of any type. As a result, soldier-settler towns with the status of katoikia ascended to polis-like prominence. Their representatives gained access to royal interlocuters without trading an indigenous Anatolian identity for the trappings of the Greek city, while the Attalids gained a host of new subjects in the countryside, including the emergent Mysians. Surgical interventions in the countryside after 188 BCE shored up select towns like Toriaion and Olbasa with polis institutions and territories.