As pointed out in Section 2.8, Hippias could have calculated a date for the first Olympiad in one of five ways. He may have assembled the most complete possible list of Olympic victors and ended up with a register that began in 776. He may have worked backward from the earliest written records to 776 using oral traditions or numerology. He may have used written records, synchronizations, or generational reckoning to place a major reform of the Olympics in the years corresponding to 576 or 476 and worked backward from there to 776 using oral traditions or numerology. He may have synchronized the first Olympiad with the outbreak of the First Messenian War and provided a date for that war, and hence the first Olympiad, using the Spartan king list. Or he may have linked what he believed to be the first of the series of continuous Olympiads to a specific individual and then established a date for that individual by means of a king list with regnal years or by generational reckoning.

The most likely possibility is that when Hippias calculated the date of 776, he linked the first Olympiad to Lycurgus and then made use of Lycurgus' connection to the kings of Sparta, of the Spartan king list, and of generational reckoning. This possibility is treated in detail in Section 2.8. The discussion here centers on the other four scenarios, which are less likely but which cannot be ruled out.

W. K. Pritchett has recently argued that officials in Argos memorized the list of priestesses of Hera at Argos, and it is worth considering whether officials at Olympia might have memorized the names of Olympic victors (and then transmitted those names to Hippias). The two key pieces of evidence that are typically highlighted in regard to the memorization of information in Archaic Greece are the Homeric rhapsodes, who were clearly capable of considerable feats of memory, and the existence of officially appointed mnemones in many Greek communities. The parallels with the Olympic victor list, however, are inexact in both cases. The accurate transmission of substantial amounts of memorized information over the course of multiple generations was a time-consuming undertaking and only the most important information could receive this treatment. As Astrid Möller and Nino Luraghi point out, “a society as such does not remember for the sake of remembering: the image of the past plays a role in the legitimation, justification, reconciliation and transformation of persons, groups or social structures.”

The Homeric rhapsodes memorized great literary works that reflected and expressed many of the fundamental values that defined Greek culture. Mnemones were magistrates who carried out a number of functions, including the preservation, either in memory or in writing, of laws and judicial decisions. The operation of the legal system was a critical part of the functioning of Greek communities, particularly after the formation of more centralized political units in the eighth century, and it is easy to see why communities would have invested time and energy in maintaining a record of the basic structuring principles on which that system operated—laws and precedents.

It has in the past been argued that the close match between the patterning of Messenian and Spartan victors in the early parts of the Olympic victor list on one hand and traditions about the First Messenian War on the other prove the accuracy of the Olympic victor list. This, of course, presumes that that list was not shaped in accordance with the traditions in question. The most detailed arguments brought forward to justify such a presumption are found in the work of Franz Kiechle. Kiechle claims (1) that when Hippias wrote his Olympionikai, Tyrtaeus F5 (which mentions two separate Messenian Wars) had not yet been used to reconstruct the Messenian Wars and (2) that Hippias believed in only a single Messenian War that dated to the seventh century and thus would not have used the traditions about the Messenian Wars in compiling the portions of the Olympic victor list pertaining to the eighth century. In regard to the number of Messenian Wars, Kiechle points to the account of the founding of Taras given by Antiochus of Syracuse (active in the fifth century, FGrH 555 F13 apud Strabo 6.3.2), in which Antiochus states that the city was settled after the outbreak of the Messenian War. Both Herodotus and Thucydides apparently believed in only a single Messenian War, so it is entirely possible that the same was true of Antiochus (though the views of all three authors on the subject of the Messenian Wars are difficult to discern clearly).

Introduction

The need for a systematic study of the courts of ancient Near Eastern monarchies, including the court of the Achaemenid empire, is only now becoming clear. Amélie Kuhrt identified these courts as elements of Near Eastern kingship and the expression of power (Kuhrt 1995). Briant (1996, 2002) offered a descriptive account of the Achaemenid court, although he fell short of providing a historical context or adopting a theoretical approach to the court as a political institution in the sense first defined by Norbert Elias. Most recently Wiesehöfer (in press (c)) has discussed the Achaemenid palace and its importance for the king.

Elias’ analysis asked how the social position of monarch was perpetuated over numerous generations and dynasties and over considerable time periods. He identified the court as a grouping of people who played a key part in this phenomenon and had an immediate interest in preserving the monarch. King and court existed in a relation of interdependence, in which each used the other constantly to reaffirm their position within a strict hierarchical order. Both the king and the court used court ceremonies and court etiquette as vehicles for expressing this interdependence. While the king used them to emphasise his unique position and his social distance from his courtiers, the courtiers used them to display their own position within the hierarchical order of the court. This system led to the creation of a self-perpetuating ‘court society’.

Introduction

A book on the imperial court of ancient China's Han dynasty has yet to be written. Most specialists working in the early China field see the court as one specific part of central administration and descriptions subsume it under this category. Thus, the court is seen as the central institution which some offices belonged to, whereas the heads and senior members of other offices and ministries went there from time to time in order to discuss matters which were important for the empire. As well as being constituted by the imperial household, the Han court was also the place where high officials were convened from time to time, especially when court audiences took place at which, at least in theory, people could speak up freely. Although Michael Loewe has described the Han concept of sovereignty, he did not stress the importance of the court as an institution. Of course, there are historiographical descriptions of political intrigues going on at specific times. Hans Bielenstein has characterised the history of the Later Han period in terms of power struggles between two or three large factions, each consisting of a clan, which in turn represented several families interrelated by marriage. These factions alternately dominated the court, making it work for the interests of the clan, which had its power-base far away from the capital.

Introduction

In a book on ancient courts, this chapter arguably is an oddity, since alone of the contributions its focus is a single ancient ruler, who himself was scarcely typical, given not only the freakish scale of his conquests, but also his plans, novel in a Greek context, for stabilising his dominion over them. But Alexander is simply too important a figure to leave out. Partly this is a matter of the ancient evidence. Given the ancient preoccupation with Alexander's military achievements, it can come as a surprise to find that he is the only Macedonian or Hellenistic ruler about whose ‘court’ ceremonies we have some detailed knowledge (Weber 1997: 43). This evidence leaves us in no doubt that Alexander attached real political significance to ‘holding court’. It is clear too that, like his father, Philip II, or Augustus in a later age, Alexander was a consummate ‘master of self-representation’. Here a reappraisal is offered of the evolving role which Alexander assigned to his ‘court’ and its ceremonies in the period after his invasion of the Persian empire (334 BC), with particular emphasis on a neglected topic, namely, the physical space constituted by the royal quarters, including his feasting- and audience-tent (tente d'apparat). The underlying assumption throughout is that Alexander from the outset was intent on retaining his conquests in Asia. This is shown by his maintenance of Persian structures of control and exploitation as soon as Persian territory began to fall into his hands (Arr.1.17.1)

Introduction

The end of the first century BC witnessed a profound transformation of the Roman res publica from a political system in which power was diffused across a range of democratic and aristocratic institutions to one where power was seen to reside primarily in the hands of one man. This period of change and experiment provides a unique opportunity to see a court and court society coming into being, a process of interest not just to Roman historians but also to all those who seek to understand the nature of court societies.

The first impetus for the creation of any court society is the recognition of the ruler as the monopoly, or near-monopoly, possessor of power. I would argue that all societies in which power becomes the monopoly of the ruler create the conditions for the emergence of some form of ‘court society’; in other words this is a truly sociological, or even anthropological, phenomenon. Norbert Elias’ famous study of court society (Elias 1983) starts by claiming a specifically sociological approach as opposed to a historical one; however, he ends up by representing his chosen court society, that of Louis XIV in France, as a stage in the formation of the modern state, which is in essence a historical argument. In claiming that the court is a sociological phenomenon I am not suggesting that all court societies develop in the same way or in accordance with some law of nature.