By approaching the Hellenistic kingdoms from the angle of the court I have attempted to shed a different light on the ideology and nature of Hellenistic monarchy and imperialism. Crucial to the approach has been the understanding of the monarchies of the Antigonids, Seleukids and Ptolemies as empires. Empire was defined as essentially both a supranational (military) organisation, characterised by a universalistic ideology and an expansionist policy, and a negotiated enterprise – although the enterprise was, of course, ultimately founded on the use of force. But like the European monarchs of the age of absolutism, the Hellenistic (and, for that matter, Achaemenid) emperors were in reality not as powerful as official propaganda claimed they were, and imperial control was constantly (re)negotiated or fought over.

As an analytical category, the paradigm of empire allows us to accommodate within the hegemonic spheres of the Macedonian monarchies not only multifarious cultures, languages and religions, but also a variety of sub-imperial polities, many of which were quite autonomous. It also allows us to distinguish between on the one hand the monarchies’ diversified adaptation to, and manipulation of, varying local cultures (e.g. Egyptian, Babylonian, Greek), and on the other hand an overarching imperial culture emanating from the imperial centre and connecting the various local elites affiliated with that centre.

After the fall of the Achaemenids in 330 BCE the eastern Mediterranean, Iran and Central Asia were ruled by Macedonian empires, successor states of Alexander the Great's empire. Ending two centuries of relative unity, the former Achaemenid world now became divided between three competing imperial dynasties: the Seleukids, Ptolemies and Antigonids. How far these dynasties (and especially the Seleukids, who controlled territories stretching from the Aegean to present-day Afghanistan) willingly or unwillingly ‘Hellenised’ the Middle East is difficult to ascertain due to a relative dearth of archaeological evidence from the third and second centuries BCE. What we do know from both literary sources and the archaeological record is that in the course of time, the Seleukids increasingly cooperated and intermarried with noble families with an Iranian and mixed Macedonian-Iranian identity, which resulted in the creation of various small kingdoms and the re-emergence of Iranian culture, particularly in Anatolia, Armenia and Iran – often in the form of a deliberate invention of tradition that may be called ‘Persianism’. Still, the Macedonian and Greek element played a pivotal role too, and probably more so than recent scholarship has suggested. Greeks and Macedonians after all did constitute the central elites in the Hellenistic empires. The post-Achaemenid centuries were a time of vigorous cultural encounters in the Middle East and Central Asia.

In this chapter the significance of philia (ritualised friendship) and xenia (‘guest-friendship’) for court society will be examined. It will be argued that gift-exchange was the principal mechanism underlying social relations at court. It will furthermore be argued that the bestowment of honorific titles and aulic offices on philoi was part of this same complex of conspicuous gift-exchange. The main thrust of the argument is that kings never had absolute power over their courts at their disposal, and that their control in the course of time even decreased; kings therefore constantly needed to develop new instruments of power to control their courts and thereby their kingdoms.

GUEST-FRIENDSHIP (XENIA) AND THE COURT

As we have seen, royal philoi had their origins in a wide range of Greek cities. They often came even from beyond the empires’ boundaries. An explanation of this perhaps remarkable fact has been offered by Gabriel Herman by expounding the interrelation of philia and xenia. According to Herman, the Greek tradition of xenia (or philoxenia) – a form of ritualised personal relationships with traits of fictive kinship, usually translated as ‘guest-friendship’ – constituted supranational, ‘horizontal’ elite networks linking men of approximately equal social status but of separate social units, i.e. poleis, thus uniting the Greek world at its highest level.

This is the first of two chapters discussing the pomp and pageantry of courtly ritual. We will first take a closer look at the ceremonial entries of kings into cities. The context will be kings visiting subjects. Chapter 12 will deal with centralised royal ritual; here the focus will be on subjects visiting the king. The main premise underlying the present discussion is that in entering particular cities Hellenistic kings played a variety of cultural roles – Egyptian, Greek, Judaean, Phoenician – but these roles were not necessarily ‘traditional’: tradition was constantly renegotiated, and manipulation by both parties of the formal aspects of the rituals ordering the royal entry was part of the bargaining process that determined the relationship of city and empire. The two forms of rituals, both involving a procession, overlapped: the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphos in Alexandria Chapter 12) was both a central event emanating from the palace and a ritual of entry, in which the king was equated with Dionysos victoriously returning from the east.

RITUALS OF ENTRY

Macedonian supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean was largely founded on the support of cities. A city was the key to routine access to the military resources of its hinterland. The ritual of entry into a city was therefore of prime importance, since it strengthened the bond between monarchy and town.

It is difficult to say what exactly a court is. One runs the risk of either excluding too many facets, or defining it too loosely. Most definitions consider the court to be a social space. Thus Elton wrote that ‘[t]he only definition of the court which makes sense … is that it comprised all those who at any given time were within “his grace's house”’. Starkey worked from an even narrower definition, excluding from the courtly milieu servants, guards, stablehands and other household personnel. However, such people could in practice be extremely influential since they, too, were part of the ‘inner court’ which surrounded the king on a regular basis, and thus relatively close to him. The problem, of course, is that in no two periods or states is a court similar. Medieval European courts were often peripatetic. Renaissance and Ancien Régime courts, on the other hand, could usually be localised in one or more fixed residences, and consequently modern definitions for this period more often include references to palaces. An interesting alternative definition is provided by Rodríquez-Salgado, who defines the court as the place where the ‘sovereign power’ of the monarchy resides; this leaves open the possibility that the monarch's ‘sovereign authority’ can be present even when the monarch himself is absent: ‘the monarch's residual authority, not his presence, was the prerequisite of a court’.

A remarkable group of people at the royal household, attested for the courts of all the Macedonian kingdoms, are the royal pages (basilikoi paides). They formed an age group consisting of youths between about their fourteenth and eighteenth years, recruited among the sons of nobles, including the king's own sons. The common Greek term is βασιλικοì (δὲ) παι̃δεϛ or simply παίδεϛ; or simply Curtius and Livy translate literally as regii pueri. Because it was their duty to guard the king, Alexander's pages are sometimes referred to as ‘bodyguards’.

The royal pages were educated and trained at court, where they had the task of waiting on the king and guarding him. It was originally an Argead institution, continued in the kingdoms of the Antigonids, Seleukids and Ptolemies. Berve, with characteristic disdain for the ‘oriental’ nature of the Hellenistic kingdoms, disputes the continuation of the institution because ‘es scheint [nicht] glaublich, dass diese eng makedonische, durchaus philippische Institution unverändert, gleichsam als Fremdkörper, in die neue Herrschaft übernommen ward’; but the distinct Macedonian character, I would argue, makes this all the more plausible. There is some evidence that a similar institution existed for girls at the Ptolemaic court – Polybios mentions ‘some young girls who had been the (i.e. who had grown up together) of Arsinoë’, and the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphos included 500 (‘young girls’) dressed in purple chitons with gold girdles.

Viewed from the outside, the royal household presented an image of unity and harmony. Courtiers found it advantageous to keep up a façade of mutual agreement and of their compliance with the king's absolute power. In practice, however, the unity of the court was often disarrayed as a result of polygamous marriage and competition among the courtiers. At the Argead court, the core of the household was divided into sub-families centred on the respective queens and their children, all with their own followers and personal attendants. The Ptolemaic court was often broken into segments centred on various candidates for the throne, both male and female. As a result, conflict over the succession frequently broke out, often with disastrous effects. In the Seleukid empire, there could be two or three courts at the same time in various places within the gigantic realm: always one around the king, often one around his heir and co-ruler (who also carried the title of basileus), and sometimes one around the principal queen and mother of the heir. Relations between the philoi and the king, and among philoi, were not always harmonious. The reigning king was not automatically the most powerful individual. Conflicts among courtiers were common. In order to remain masters of their own houses, kings often employed ‘favourites’ to counterbalance the power of the philoi.

Whenever a Seleukid or Ptolemaic king appeared in public he appeared both as man and as the incarnation of royalty, with all the appropriate signs of power and authority. Clothing, weapons, objects and iconography represented aspects of kingship. Kings were furthermore permanently accompanied by a retinue of philoi, guardsmen and other members of the royal entourage. Plutarch describes, as a negative mirror image of the sober Roman rulership he favoured, how in the Hellenistic kingdoms it was quintessentially royal to be surrounded ‘by a profusion of purple robes and mantles, [and] a throng of messengers and door-keepers’. When the Athenians welcomed Demetrios Poliorketes, they sang how ‘his friends surround him like stars around the sun’ (see below). The number of philoi gathering around the king, each with his own status and reputation, was a sign of how much a ruler was held in esteem by great men; conversely, the prestige of the king reflected on those who stood by his side.

The presence of a large crowd surrounding the ruler to strike awe into visitors is a typical facet of the monarchical rituals at many courts in history. Grand viziers of the Ottoman sultans received foreign ambassadors on Fridays, when the palace personnel received their salary and the central court of Topkapı Palace was crowded with people. In 1526 an ambassador of the Habsburg emperor wrote of the court of Vassili III: ‘The presence of so many people on such a day arises from two causes: so that foreigners may note the size of the crowd and the mightiness of its lord and also that vassals may note the respect in which their master is held.’

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the genesis of Hellenistic courts in the reigns of Philip and Alexander. Thereafter, the philoi tou basileōs, ‘the friends of the king’, will be discussed. Who were these courtiers? What were their (ethnic) origins, how were they attracted to court and what was their relationship with the royal family? After a general introduction of the philoi as a sociopolitical group, special attention will be given to them as a political factor in the Hellenistic empires. It will argued that in the Hellenistic world the court hardly served as the ‘golden cage’ hypothesised by Norbert Elias, that is, an instrument of power to suppress aristocratic resistance to absolutism and centralisation. When employed as an instrument of power to the king's own benefit, the Hellenistic court could in rare circumstances facilitate the creation of a new elite connected with the court – e.g. the creation of the first philoi societies in the decades after Alexander's death, or the transformation of the Seleukid empire from a centralised system of direct rule to a decentralised system of indirect rule through local vassal dynasties in the reign of Antiochos III – rather than a means to pacify unruly existing noble households with strong provincial power bases by forcing them to stay at the centre.

In the Seleukid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, the ranking of philoi in the court hierarchy was regulated and explicated by means of court titles and offices. In this chapter it will be argued that the distribution of titles was part of the complex of gift-exchange at court. Titles were presented by the king as gifts, comparable to, and presumably coming with, material gifts (clothing, crowns, horse trappings) so that the recipient would be able to show his rank to others and derive status from that. The institution of a more intricate system of court titulature after c. 200 BCE – first at the Seleukid and then at the Ptolemaic court – may have been an attempt to regain control of court society against the opposition of an established nobility of rich, land-holding philoi with hereditary prerogatives at court. Court titles potentially regulated access and relative status at court. Of the highest importance for kings was regulating access to the circle of royal advisors, the sunedrion. Another instrument to regulate access, discussed at the end of this chapter, was the promotion of a favourite: a loyal outsider who had direct access to the king and served as a protective shield between king and court society.

So we have come to the end of our walk through ancient Israel’s library. The books of this library, collected as they are in the OT, constitute one of the most important documents of all time. The OT is an essential resource for our understanding of ancient history. It provides rich insight into human civilization before the Greco-Roman period (i.e., before Classical antiquity), and of course, the OT is especially important for a study of the history of religious thought and expression.

In addition to the OT’s fifteen books of prophecy covered in Chapters 19–21, Israel’s library also includes a distinct type of literature called “apocalyptic.” As we will see, this literature is not altogether different from prophecy. In fact, many readers believe that they are related, one (apocalypticism) as emerging from the other (prophecy). Nevertheless, apocalyptic literature is different enough to require a chapter devoted entirely to it. And the OT includes one book in its repertoire that contains in its chapters a fully developed apocalypse – the book of Daniel. This chapter will introduce the topic of ancient apocalyptic literature and will explore the OT’s examples of such literature, giving special attention to the book of Daniel.

Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 586 BCE. In one moment, the Judeans lost their city, their king, and their temple and priesthood. Their leadership was taken away into exile. This was obviously a turning point in Israelite history. Beyond the crisis itself, the exile lasted until 539 BCE, when the Persians captured Babylon and released the Judeans shortly thereafter. The period of the exile was likewise an important moment in history.