Why Pergamon? Our story began with ten Roman commissioners, who in 188 BCE drew up a new map for cis-Tauric Asia after the defeat of Antiochos III at Magnesia-under-Sipylos. That map was an artifact of the Settlement of Apameia. A century-old Mediterranean interstate system had broken down at the end of the third century, and the Romans’ map proposed just two pieces of a new geopolitical order, the partition of the Anatolian peninsula between two allies, Rhodes and Pergamon. The failure of Rhodes to integrate or even retain control over its share along the south coast in Lycia and Caria is emblematic of the fact that enforcement of the settlement fell to the actors on the ground. The Romans withdrew and did not soon return, even as Pan-Anatolian wars between Pontos, Pergamon, Bithynia, and their respective allies embroiled the entire region for a decade. While a cunning and opportunistic diplomacy had helped put the Attalids in a position to win an empire, sovereignty over these vast new territories and peoples was never guaranteed. This was the basic assumption of an inquiry into the mechanics of imperial rule, rapid state formation, and the ideological tendencies of the Pergamene kings. My central argument was that the Attalids creatively employed noncoercive means to capture control of Greek cities and Anatolian rural communities, ultimately, making local civic culture depend on their tax revenues.
Other scholars have pointed up the historical contingencies of Pergamon’s meteoric rise. Most recently, Thonemann has argued that the atypicality of the Attalid state was a direct result of just such an “exogenous process of state-formation.”Footnote 1 In the last monographic treatment of the subject, Allen queried Attalid divergence by noting the similarity of the careers of Philetairos and the Phrygian Philomelid dynasts: both were semi-independent Seleukid vassals who sought to broaden their influence with gifts to cities and sanctuaries. He writes, “If we knew more about such dynasties in Asia Minor, we would probably find other features reminiscent of the policies of the early Attalids.”Footnote 2 In other words, any number of other local candidates might have emerged to dominate cis-Tauric Asia after systemic collapse. If not the Phrygian Philomelids, then why not the Pylaimenid dynasty of Gangra in Paphlagonia? Mitchell has gone so far as to describe the Attalids and the Pontic Mithridatids as peers living “parallel lives.”Footnote 3 So, why Pergamon? Bracketing the personalities – the daring of Eumenes II or the loyalty of his brother Attalos II – I have tried to illuminate the structures that propelled this particular dynasty toward an overnight empire. Three themes emerge.
The first is timing. This study has aimed to contribute to our understanding of the nature of a historical conjuncture, in which the Attalids were primed to become agents of structural change. Much has been made of the vitality of the polis under Hellenistic monarchy and indeed Roman rule, the strength of its institutions, and its endurance as a locus of identity. As was most apparent in Chapter 5’s discussion of the gymnasium, the diachronic development of the institutions of the Greek city-state must also be kept in mind. The polis not only survived the Battle of Chaironeia (338 BCE); it thenceforth developed in iterative ways with monarchy. In 188, when regime change took place at the top, these cities had accumulated half a millennium’s worth of experience in public finance. The combination of an intense buildup of social power over their citizenry and knowledge sharing about public administration made cities like this extremely effective tax collectors for a higher-order polity such as a federative koinon or a “composite” kingdom. To integrate subject cities into a state apparatus and appropriate their social power and administrative efficiencies, the task for royal bureaucrats was to access civic institutions without provoking resistance. No other Hellenistic state ever combined so much interleaving of royal and civic symbols – so many interlocking institutions. Apollonidas of Sikyon argued contemptuously in the presence of Eumenes II that monarchy and democracy were two forces of nature at war. The king proved him wrong.
What have been described as consensual ideologies were important, but the Attalids were not modern liberals; theirs was not a constitutional monarchy. On the contrary, as the Korragos Decree (D1) shows, Pergamene officials had already accessed city budgets by 188. They constantly interfered in the day-to-day operation of the polis, not as was once thought, by packing boards of stratêgoi, super-legislators with probouleutic powers yet beholden to kings. The appointment of a city governor (epi tês poleôs) seems to have been rare, and the role of such officials may have been mostly supervisory. True interference took the form of earmarking arrangements (Chapter 1). Mastery of the technique of earmarking was an essential tool for maximizing revenue while minimizing coercion, but it relied on civic institutions, public banks, budgeting, and accountability measures, all of which were centuries in the making. Cities had also become habituated to negotiating the terms of taxation with Hellenistic kings and even had experience in cooperating with royal authorities in the process of tax collection. One of the main conclusions of the overview of the Attalid fiscal system (Chapter 2) is that the established rules of the game did not change. On the other hand, Pergamon massively expanded the scale of cooperation in rolling out the cistophoric monetary system that helped integrate cis-Tauric Asia without closing it off to the outside (Chapter 3). The Attalids also took advantage of autonomous change taking place inside cities, for example, the concentration of elite youth in gymnasia that were surprisingly independent and financially complicated institutions (Chapter 5). I argued that the Attalids had an overlooked role in the transformation of the gymnasium into the so-called second agora. Finally, we saw that a coercion-light approach to settlement took advantage of an upsurge in civic consciousness in rural Lydia, Phrygia, and Mysia in order to render these populations legible.
A second theme is money. Countering a modern view that sees the Attalids as exceptionally rich, I began from the premise that this was in every measurable way a middling power by the standards of Hellenistic royalty. In quantitative terms, the imprecision of our numbers aside, this is plain to see. The 9,000 talents that Lysimachus entrusted to Philetairos was what a mid-sized kingdom collected in a year – a nest egg, but hardly enough money to purchase the prestige that Antiquity would eventually accord Pergamon. Further, the Attalids were frenetic gift-givers, but their donations were small. For example, their gifts of money make up just 9% of the total amount recorded for all dynasties combined. Nevertheless, even ancient observers associated money and wealth with Pergamene kings, the attalicae divitiae (Attalid riches) of the early Christian morality play. Modern observers have also marveled at the Attalids’ wealth. For the nineteenth century with its suspicion of new money, these princes were Mommsen’s “Medici of Antiquity,” and in line with an economistic turn in ancient history, a 2013 conference volume on Attalid Asia Minor made money a central line of investigation. Many scholars of Hellenistic art and literary culture produced under the dynasty’s auspices have puzzled: Where did the all the money come from? The truth is that the amount of money was not as important as the manner in which it was acquired and spent. This is a truth that the cognoscenti of the Hellenistic public seem to have known, people like Polybius, who noted the modest size of gifts made in expectation of great honors after the Rhodian earthquake. That Eumenes II was not “exceedingly rich” (οὐ λίαν εὐπορούμενος) is also the very irony of his success in capturing an Anatolian empire, according to the following story of Diodorus (31.14), from the context of the Third Macedonian War:
Ὅτι ὁ Εὐμένης ξενολογήσας τά τε ὀψώνια ἅπασιν ἀπέδωκε καὶ δωρεαῖς ἐτίμησε καὶ ἐπαγγελίαις ἐψυχαγώγει πάντας, ἐκκαλούμενος τὴν εὔνοιαν, οὐχ ὁμοίως τῷ Περσεῖ. ἐκεῖνος γὰρ δισμυρίων Γαλατῶν παραγενομένων εἰς τὸν πρὸς Ῥωμαίους πόλεμον ἀπετρίψατο τὴν τηλικαύτην συμμαχίαν, ἵνα φείσηται τῶν χρημάτων· ὁ δὲ Εὐμένης οὐ λίαν εὐπορούμενος ξενολογῶν δωρεαῖς ἐτίμα τοὺς δυναμένους μάλιστα χρείας παρέχεσθαι. τοιγαροῦν ἐκεῖνος μὲν οὐ βασιλικὴν μεγαλοφροσύνην ἀλλ᾿ ἰδιωτικὴν τοῦ τυχόντος ἀναλαβὼν μικροψυχίαν, ἅμα τῇ βασιλείᾳ πάσῃ καὶ τὸν τηρηθέντα πλοῦτον ἐπεῖδεν αἰχμάλωτον· οὗτος δὲ τῆς νίκης πάντα δεύτερα τιθέμενος οὐ μόνον ἐκ μεγάλων κινδύνων ἐρρύσατο τὴν βασιλείαν, ἀλλὰ καὶ πᾶν τὸ τῶν Γαλατῶν ἔθνος ὑποχείριον ἐποιήσατο.
Eumenes, having recruited a force of mercenary troops, not only gave all of them their pay, but honored some with gifts and beguiled them all with promises, evoking their goodwill. In this he did not at all resemble Perseus. For Perseus, when twenty thousand Gauls arrived to join him in the war against Rome, alienated this great body of allies in order to husband his wealth. Eumenes, however, though not exceedingly rich, when enlisting foreign troops honored with gifts all who were best able to render him service. Accordingly, the former, by adopting a policy, not of royal generosity, but of ignoble and plebeian meanness, saw the wealth he had guarded taken captive together with his whole kingdom, while the latter, by counting all things else second to victory, not only rescued his kingdom from great dangers but also subjugated the whole nation of the Gauls.
The juxtaposition of the two kings in a single war, the one who lost everything, the other whose greatest ambitions were now realized, is a rhetorical set piece. In Chapter 6, we examined evidence for the presence of the Attalid state in Galatia. The alleged subjugation of an entire ethnos is an imperial fantasy of cis-Tauric Asian supremacy. What matters is the moral of the story: Eumenes is the more royal of the two kings because he cleverly stretches less money into more kingship. This is evidently not Hellenistic kingship as raw luxury and opulence (tryphê), but rather a different paradigm.Footnote 4 Crucially, money and the redistribution of royal wealth allow Eumenes to succeed by a practicing a form of trickery, by actually leading the Galatian mercenaries astray (psychagôgeô). In effect, Diodorus presents a model for the method of this book. Overall, I have tried to see behind the financial trickery in order to recover the substantive goals and effects of what has always been seen as a distinctive Attalid relationship with money and an uncannily creative approach to public finance. This starts in Chapter 1 with the habit of earmarking, which was not the inevitable result of the expropriation of all civic revenues, nor the manipulation of honor-seeking kings by city elites. Rather, the Attalids negotiated the shape of earmarks, meaning that civic fiscal priorities were embedded in the royal tax code. Earmarking saved on the costs of redistribution if the revenues stayed put in the local economy. Even as it buffered risk and signaled providence, the technique involved an element of false transparency. Staring at an inscription on stone, a taxpayer was able to “follow the money,” from tax collection to spending on public goods. Meanwhile, the community became ever more dependent on royal largesse to meet its basic cultural needs. Chapter 3 examined the quintessential case of Attalid dissembling around money, the cistophoric coinage. These strange coins lack the typical image of the king’s face, instead displaying traditional badges of civic identity. This was a proxy coinage, a monetary system in disguise. Naturally, scholars have always disagreed on whether the coins belonged to the king or to a monetary union of cities.
As demonstrated, cities were partners in a radical monetary experiment, but the cistophoric coinage required Attalid coordination. As a lightweight coinage, it economized on silver. Profits skimmed off the top were shared, and therefore the coins contributed to both the ideological and economic integration of the kingdom. In Chapter 5, the logic of Pergamon’s obsession with the gymnasium was unraveled. The Attalids clearly outstripped their rivals in giving to civic gymnasia. This behavior either has been credited to the dynasty’s supposedly reflexive Panhellenism, or we have given the Attalids an unearned benefit of the doubt: they wanted to help the polis manufacture its own citizens and ensure the survival of civic culture. Why was money on the gymnasium well spent? I argued that the gymnasium was an easy mark for kings bent on posing as champions of the cities, but actually out to dominate them. The financial vulnerability of the gymnasium and its ambiguous position in the civic landscape made it the perfect target.
Money also made a difference in the overlooked history of the arrival of the Attalid state in the Anatolian countryside. Chapter 4 detected a certain parsimony around settlement, a reluctance to undertake large urbanization projects that involved coercing populations into cities. On the other hand, the Attalids gave lavishly to monumentalize what had been modest indigenous sanctuaries at Phrygian Aizanoi and Pessinous in Galatia. Archaeology suggests that the kings transformed these sanctuaries beyond recognition, in a sense, inventing Anatolian temple-states that became a focus of interaction with imperial power in the countryside. Especially noteworthy in this regard is the Pergamene officer’s peristyle house and archive adjacent to the Temple of Zeus at Aizanoi, as well as the Pessinous dossier of royal correspondence. The Attalids’ ability to triumph by displaying wealth in cunningly confusing ways is also on display in the anecdote from Polybius about the destructive sea battle off Chios (201), in which the Rhodian and Pergamene navies clashed with Philip V. Ultimately, Attalos abandoned his ship and fled by land to Erythrai. Polybius tells us that the exigencies of war forced the king to employ an artifice (technikon; 16.6.6): he ordered his sailors to leave all of his royal tableware and robes on deck of the abandoned ship. In hot pursuit, the Macedonians were mesmerized by the display of wealth, and the king escaped without his shirt.
A third theme sounded was that Pergamon combined into a single polity what historically have been two distinct halves of cis-Tauric Asia: the urbanized, Greek Aegean littoral and the rural, highland Anatolian interior. No ancient historian is ever sure where Asia Minor ends and Anatolia begins. As an eminent historian of the Greek East puts it so hesitantly, the second concept encompasses the first, doesn’t it?Footnote 5 For someone working within the scholarly framework of Classics, using Greek and Latin sources, and approaching the peninsula from the west, this book suggests, Anatolia is a lot closer than we think. Stand in one of the “bourgeois” Attalid palaces atop the vertiginous capital, and, on very clear day, you may just be able to glimpse the Aegean. The best sightlines are all inland and up the Kaikos river valley toward the Mysian heartland. I am wary of reifying a geographical trope by insisting on this divide. However, distinct differences in language, culture, and settlement pattern have often separated the two zones, and the tension continues to permeate modern Turkish society and politics. Consider these closing remarks of Bernard Lewis in his classic The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961):
Anatolia, the Turkish heartland, had always taken second place to Rumelia, the home of most of the cosmopolitan ruling class of the Empire – even the Young Turk Revolution, in its successive phases, had rested on Macedonia and Thrace, and Kemal himself was born in Salonika. But the shift in the centre of gravity and the cult of Anatolianism made Anatolia the real as well as the sentimental centre of the nation, and gave to the Anatolians an opportunity that they had not had before. The great Rumelian bureaucratic, religious, and military families are dwindling and losing their importance. The Anatolian country boys – Memleket çocukları – and still more the Anatolian country lords and gentry are inheriting their places, and making Turkey a Turkish state in fact as well as in name.Footnote 6
I have tried to make the case that Pergamon, like a second Troy, a resurrection of the Mysian satrapy of Orontes, or the flash empire of Achaios, spanned this divide. The Attalids brought the Anatolian gentry into a coalition with Greek coastal elites, which even the succession struggle of the War of Aristonikos failed to break asunder.Footnote 7 From this perspective, there is nothing strange about the story that Attalos I, playing the role of dragoman, led the Romans to the Magna Mater at Pessinous. The westerners’ Greek-speaking kin from the polis of Ilion simply lacked that access. We knew that the Attalids haunted the centers of Old Greece, but I have also emphasized and explained why they were at home in Anatolia. We saw again and again that Pergamon was not a bulwark of the Greek cities against steppe invaders. In fact, the Attalids themselves reached back up those river valleys. They mobilized the Mysians of the Abbaeitis. They connected the Mediterranean to the Aegean by investing heavily in Pisidia and the Milyas. The cistophoric coinage tied the two zones together, as did the reorganization of the Nikephoria festival in “Panhellenic” form, now bringing obscure Anatolian conurbations into the imagined community. We can compare Eumenes II to Midas, king of Phrygia in the Iron Age, whose name was known in Delphi. Eumenes went much farther in inhabiting both worlds: he was as comfortable on the Halys as he was in Delphi. The Attalids were cut in the mold of the fourth-century Hekatomnids of Caria, perfectly positioned to harness the social power of the Greek poleis with the manpower and natural resources of rural Anatolia. They were able to project authority by using both cultural idioms, Greek and Anatolian. And the result was actually quite similar to the impact of Mausolus, who also collected a dream team of Greek artists to work on his grandest project. The ripple effect on what we call the Classical or Hellenistic world was extremely durable. Yet unlike the theme of money, neither the literary nor epigraphic sources revealed the story here. Archaeology and the analysis of material culture became much more important, and disciplinary boundaries were broached to reveal the true shape of the object of study.
In conclusion, two further reflections on the historiographical contribution may be offered. First, while I think that it was the Attalids themselves who were so fixated on taxation, I willingly chose the fiscal perspective, whereas previous monographs took foreign relations and constitutional history as their focus.Footnote 8 My goal was to meet the challenge sounded by Purcell, who reflects in a programmatic essay on Mediterranean customs tax, “These matters may be studied from an administrative, institutional, fiscal perspective, or from the social and economic angle. Some scholars have chosen one route, usually the former. There is much to be gained from attempting to combine the two, difficult though the exercise may be.”Footnote 9 In the administrative and institutional details offered in this book, the description of the facts of taxation, a certain measure of the skeleton of an ancient state has been exposed. However, the skeleton is simply a guide to the living organism, a skeleton key that unlocks the state’s interior and allows us to see an ancient imperialism from the inside. The goal of the presentation was to provide a dynamic account of the Attalid state’s functioning, of the “workings of empire, practical and, especially, ideological.”Footnote 10 What was once called the “machinery of monarchical government”Footnote 11 was put back in motion; the Attalids were seen staking their claim to rule. Insofar as the distinctiveness of Attalid imperialism was emphasized, the specter of comparison with historically and geographically proximate empires was raised. Yet the results will not fit neatly into the typologies of historical sociology. For the claim of distinctiveness was also advanced for this historical moment, for the power scramble set off by the Settlement of Apameia, for the conjuncture of monarchy (basileia) and other forms of sociopolitical organization in the second century BCE.
As ancient historians, we have struggled mightily to disabuse ourselves of the notion that Rome’s extension of power in the eastern Mediterranean was inevitable before it was. On a comparatively miniature scale, we must be willing to do the same for the Attalids. This involves resisting the entire design of the dynasty’s self-representation, from its Great Altar to its posturing as savior of “all who inhabit Asia,” all of which is an attempt to render inevitable what was in fact a highly contingent outcome. The old question of whether the Attalids were “constitutional monarchs” or “financier tyrants” is really a question of whether we approve of their success. Shall we cry when we turn the page at Chaironeia or, like Apollo’s statue in Cumae, at the defeat of Aristonikos, the last of the Attalids?Footnote 12 The interesting question to ask is, How was success achieved? For over a century, at least since Giuseppe Cardinali’s essay, “L’amministrazione finanziaria del comune di Pergamo,”Footnote 13 scholarship has recognized the peculiarity of the Attalid approach to public finance. With the more recent turn toward the study of euergetism, the dynasty’s unusual pattern of giving has been noted. Yet perhaps because no study has taken the logic of Attalid fiscality as its singular focus, the crucial role played by this aspect of governance in the successful enforcement of the Settlement has escaped notice.
The earmarking arrangements, a monetary system dominated by the cistophori, and much of the fiscal apparatus of the Attalid state relied on civic institutions and promoted civic identities, preserving and elaborating the collective of polis or katoikia. The acme of the Attalids coincides with what coins and inscriptions show to have been a time of peak complexity in the social organization of these communities, a period in which civic bonds were renewed after the dislocation and even cosmopolitanism of the early Hellenistic period. Yet as we saw in the case of the gymnasium, as Attalid power spread across the new map, new collectivities were also produced. Indeed, a number of other important collectivities, such as the associations of the technitai (actors) of Dionysus and the associations of the Attalistai, fell outside the scope of this study. Attalid monarchy after Apameia – perhaps even simply late Hellenistic monarchy, taking Macedonia under Philip V and Perseus also into account – distinguishes itself by its capacity to both create and successfully incorporate these collectivities into a multiscalar state. One may protest that the presence of Rome on the horizon aided the process along, but we have reason to believe that the kings actively subscribed to a model of basileia different from the one our textbooks so often reproduce.
An entry from the Suda is often adduced in those textbooks. The foundation of basileia, we are told, rests on the king’s virtue in war and administrative competence. Thus in favor of the so-called personal monarchy founded on “spear-won land (doryktêtos chôra),” one quotes Suda s.v. βασιλεία (Β147): οὔτε φύσις οὔτε τὸ δίκαιον ἀποδιδοῦσι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις τὰς βασιλείας, ἀλλὰ τοῖς δυναµένοις ἡγεῖσθαι στρατοπέδου καὶ χειρίζειν πράγµατα νουνεχῶς. In Arthur Eckstein’s translation, “Kingship does not derive either from royal descent or from formal legitimacy, but rather from the ability to command armies and to govern effectively. (We see this with the Successors of Alexander.)”Footnote 14 Thus in fact the connection to early Hellenistic monarchy is explicit. In stark contrast, the legitimacy of monarchy in the Attalid kingdom, 188–133, depended on the king living up to the ideal of the lexicon’s next lemma, Suda s.v. βασιλεία (Β148):
ὅτι ἡ βασιλεία κτῆµα τῶν κοινῶν, ἀλλ’ οὐ τὰ δηµόσια τῆς βασιλείας κτήµατα. διὸ τὰς ἐξ ἀνάγκης καὶ µεθ’ ὕβρεως εἰσπράξεις ὥσπερ τυραννικὰς ἀκολασίας µισεῖν δεῖ, τὰς δὲ σὺν λόγῳ καὶ φιλανθρωπίᾳ τῶν εἰσφορῶν ἀπαιτήσεις ὥσπερ κηδεµονίαν τιµᾶν.
Since kingship entails the possession of ta koina [“the commons” or common funds], but the public’s property does not belong to the monarchy, it follows that one must detest as the excesses of a tyrant royal interventions made with force and arrogance, but one must honor like a solemn duty requests for contributions made persuasively and humanely.
The first and frequently cited definition of basileia is indeed appropriate to the Age of the Successors, for it explains the acquisition of monarchy. The second more fully defines its essence in the late Attalid context: as a specific set of possessions (ktêmata), rights, and obligations; as a relationship with rules, negotiable though they are. Common and public property coexist, and they appear distinct, if still contiguous. Resolving this paradox or, rather, understanding how the ancients themselves dealt with it, must be the goal of future research. Only in this way can we make sense of the distinction between early and late Hellenistic monarchy brought out by the contrasting definitions in the Suda. This will also involve a form of seeing double, as we have argued was the ancient way, and thus trading the traditional twin foci of Hellenistic history, city and king, for a unified vision.
Open access