At the core of K.'s thorough and thought-provoking thesis on the Attalid state is the premise that the rapid success of Attalid state formation can be understood through an examination of the fiscal policies and cultural bent of the Pergamene kings. Certainly, as K. notes, the initial granting of hegemony over what had once been Seleucid western Asia Minor to the Attalid dynasts in 188 bce did not carry with it a guarantee of stable imperial rule; Attalid policies drew order and cohesion from the loose territorial control gifted by Roman fiat. This work ably demonstrates how Attalid deployment of their storied wealth in ways often distinct from those of their royal peers contributed to the embedding of Pergamene power within and among civic administrations under their rule, strengthening both Anatolian identity and Attalid authority. K.'s argument that the Attalids deployed fiscal policies as a means of enmeshing their subjects more deeply in the affairs of the state, marrying cultural output with financial predation, suggests a new interpretation of what has traditionally been understood as the bourgeois face of Attalid power. To decide whether the policies of the Pergamene dynasts can indeed be considered a ‘creatively employed noncoercive means’ (p. 354) of dominating the Anatolian plateau would likely necessitate a wider comparative study beyond the scope of this work.
The use of the Attalids' proverbial wealth is the subject of the strong first half of the monograph. The first chapter focuses on ‘earmarking’, the designation of revenue for specific future public uses, a process that the epigraphic record demonstrates was used with much greater frequency by the Attalids than other Hellenistic dynasties (pp. 36–9). K. argues that the practice functioned both as a tool for imperial consolidation by necessitating royal penetration into the details of specific local circumstances and involving subject communities in a dependent relationship with Attalid futurity, and as a negotiated process that strengthened the political agency of those same subject communities. The focus on earmarks as drawing from funds collected within the communities themselves, rather than royal monies, highlights the extent to which the Attalids positioned themselves uniquely as actors on the local level, operating within civic institutions and entangled with them.
The second chapter, on Attalid fiscal institutions, furthers this emphasis on the extension of the Attalid state into the local, civic level. Here K. centres the argument around the importance of indirect taxation to the Attalid fiscal regime, demonstrating that Attalid penetration into civic fiscality through routine patterns of negotiation regarding rates and terms created a mutually dependent relationship between king and city in which revenue extraction depended largely on the exercise of civic administration. K. makes a convincing case for Attalid development of infrastructure as intended to exploit the fragmented nature of their territory to increase the collection of taxes on mobility and exchange rather than risk implementing new levels of taxation. At issue in this chapter are two points; first, that the Attalids depended on local entities for tax collection rather than tax-farming (pp. 95–101), despite the evidence K. collects for Attalid intensification of interregional fiscal networks and entrepôts. Likewise, the notion that Attalid success in this arena depended on their ability to present themselves as interested in the reciprocity of taxation rather than the extractive nature of tribute (pp. 75–7, 114) suggests an assumption of naivety on the part of the Anatolian cities redolent of a slightly paternalistic perspective towards imperial rule.
K.'s third chapter works to reframe discussion of Attalid cistophoric coinage by situating it within the model of ‘cooperative coinages’ postulated by E. Mackil and P. van Alfen (‘Cooperative Coinage’, in: P. van Alfen [ed.], Agoranomia [2006]). Rightly critical of views of the cistophoroi as either fully royal or fully civic issues, K. dubs them instead a ‘coordinated coinage’, an example of imposed regional cooperation (p. 130). The cistophoroi, on this model, mark a deliberate devolution of minting authority onto the cities and thus represent a closely negotiated relationship between kings and cities. Situating the discussion of the cistophoroi within the context of other similar coinages, such as the so-called quasi-municipal coinages minted under Antiochus IV or the Macedonian coinages issued in the name of the merides, strengthens K.'s argument that the Attalids were intensifying already extant means for the expression of civic identity under royal rule. On this model, the cistophoric coinages allowed the Pergamene dynasts to integrate their disparate regions by means of fiscal cooperation and, presumably, shared benefits. K.'s discussion of the decentralised nature of Attalid bronze currencies adds welcome and often overlooked evidence to support his argument concerning Attalid ability to divest control of local fiscality without ceding overall hegemony (pp. 173–4).
With the fourth chapter K.'s emphasis shifts from the fiscal to the cultural, particularly the issue of regional integration. Rather than replicating the usual polis-centric model, K. undertakes an analysis of the full hierarchy of settlements emphasising the katoikioi (‘settlements’) as a central tool of Attalid integration and organisation. This focus on non-urban settlements allows for a more detailed analysis of the settlement landscape that Pergamon needed to involve in their ruling apparatus and the tools required to engage with both the urban and the rural landscape. The emphasis in this chapter on the Anatolian interior demonstrates again Attalid ability to engage with local minutiae, granting rights of private property to villages (p. 198) as well as the great poleis and penetrating the social power contained in rural sanctuaries (p. 204). The assessment of the Attalids as privileging integration over urbanisation, achieving sovereignty in rural spaces while preserving pre-existing settlement patterns, demonstrates a deliberately adaptive model for enforcing territorial integration.
The emphasis in Chapter 5 returns to the polis to consider the relationship between the Pergamene kings and civic gymnasia, patronage and support, which K. demonstrates as a peculiarly Attalid behaviour. As with his discussion of earmarking, K. argues that Attalid support for gymnasia resulted in strengthened polis identities while also providing a direct link between the kings and civic institutions. Analysis of Attalid involvement is integrated with careful analysis of the development of the institution of the gymnasia itself, a trajectory that K. shows Attalid power exploited and impacted as they anonymised the passing of money to a specific class of loyal polis elites. Discussion of the case of Eirenias of Miletus clearly demonstrates the reciprocal links between the gymnasium and its royal benefactor (pp. 262–5).
The sixth and final chapter turns explicitly to the Attalid cultural programme, the focus on the role of Anatolian identity and heritage in their creation of an intellectual and artistic climate providing a welcome change in perspective. Although denying that the Attalids manipulated local socio-cultural needs and expectations as ‘chameleon kings’ in the guise of the Achaemenids and Seleucids, K. presents the Attalids as ‘culturally bilingual’ (p. 285) rulers of both Greece and Asia and fluent in Hellenic, Galatian and Phrygian rhetoric. The evidence brought to bear is illuminating and detailed, but it remains difficult to parse the nuances K. finds between these two forms of kingship. It is not clear how distinctly Attalid such cultural bilingualism was; these were not the only kings to balance an arriviste identity with kingship within the deep cultural heritage of the Anatolian plateau and the Near East more generally.
K.'s conclusion successfully ties together the disparate threads of his argument for the success of the Attalid state. Drawing on a less well-known quotation from the Suda (s.v. βασιλεία Β148), K. articulates Attalid kingship as a clearly defined if negotiable set of rules delineating the relationship between king and subject; a matter of ownership, rights and obligations (p. 363). Situating the Attalids within the political and cultural development of Anatolia, focusing not on the extent of their wealth but on its acquisition and dispersal and, most significantly, on the drive to integrate the urban, Hellenised coastal population with the mountainous, rural Anatolian interior, K. presents a broadly encompassing model of ancient state formation relevant not just to the Attalids but to the broader socio-economic history of Asia Minor.
