The troubles which afflicted Egypt from the time of Raphia in 217 and culminated in the secession of Upper Egypt under native (or Nubian) kings from 205 to 186 have been the object of much recent discussion. In particular the end of the secession recorded in the second Philae decree, which Sethe published in 1916 and commented on in an article in the Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache in 1917, has received considerable attention. This decree, passed by the synod of priests meeting in the temple of Isis in Alexandria on 6 September 186, recorded the defeat of Chaonnophris by 3mnws (who, as Peremans and van't Dack have shown, is probably Comanus, well known from other evidence and perhaps shortly after this date epistrategos of the chora); at the synod the news of the victory was announced by the eunuch Aristonicus. But this success, though celebrated by the king's declaration of an amnesty and remission of taxes incurred up to his nineteenth year, did not bring an end to the troubles. From a passage in || Book XXII of Polybius we learn of a further incident, when several rebels from the Delta area – he gives their names – were persuaded to surrender to Polycrates at Sais, whereupon Ptolemy incurred some odium by torturing and executing them.

An anecdote recorded by Phylarchus relates how Patroclus, who is known from other sources as the admiral of Ptolemy II at the time of the Chremonidean War, once sent a present of large fish and green figs to Antigonus Gonatas ‘as a hint at what would happen to him, just as the Scythians did to Darius when he was invading their country. For the Scythians, Herodotus tells us, sent a bird, an arrow || and a frog.’ Antigonus was quick to solve the riddle: ‘either we must be masters of the sea (θαλασσοκρατει̃ν) or else we must eat figs’, that is, go short of food. But was the choice a real one? The answer to that question depends on whether Patroclus' point was a general one – that Macedon must be a sea-power or starve – or a particular one, in the sense that at the time of the incident Antigonus had for instance got himself caught in an awkward situation without access to supplies of food. Oddly enough, some sixty years later his grandson Philip V was to find himself in that very plight. Confined within the Gulf of Bargylia in Caria and unable for several months to make an easy getaway through the Rhodian and Pergamene fleets, he was compelled to furnish an illustration of Patroclus' riddle by feeding his troops throughout the winter of 201/200 largely on figs provided by the Seleucid general Zeuxis and by Greek cities like Magnesia which were short of corn.

Polybius is, of course, our main guide to the seventy or so years during which Rome achieved domination over the eastern Mediterranean – a domination that consisted in every people henceforth being obliged to do what the Romans told them to do. Like Thucydides before him, Polybius was active as a statesman and general and was personally involved in many of the events of the early second century. His own career had many ups and downs – first as a politician in Achaea, then as a detainee at Rome, and finally as a protégé of the influential Scipionic family, playing an active rôle in decisive wars and their aftermath. It would indeed be odd if his own career and changes of personal fortune had had no impact upon his work; and one of the objects of the present chapter will be to try to analyse the nature of that impact.

Polybius frequently emphasises the importance of truth and impartiality in writing history. But in fact his work contains || several examples of plain bias, arising out of his own particular background. The hated rival Aetolian League was of course a bête noire to the Achaean historian; and he is not very fond of Athens either, for she had consistently refused to join the Achaean Confederation. Achaea itself and especially his home town of Megalopolis usually get favoured treatment. But there are other states and individuals about whom he is less than impartial.

Retirement is well known to be a time for making excursions. And though indeed we all know that Wilhelmina Jashemski has not retired in any real sense of the word (nor is likely to do so), nevertheless, as my contribution to her Festschrift I invite her to tear herself away from Pompeii (and from the Garden Library at Dumbarton Oaks) and to accompany me on a brief voyage of exploration into late seventeenth-century England, where I shall try to expose the connections between Polybius' fortunes, the career of Mr John Dryden, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Already by the fifteenth century Polybius was known in England, where a Latin translation of his work is mentioned among the books in John Shirwood's library in 1471–2. But until well into the eighteenth century only three English translations of the historian had appeared. In the first two of these Polybius was not well served. In 1568, under Elizabeth I, Christopher Watson of St John's College, Cambridge, produced a self-indulgent volume in which, after inveighing against ‘tearing time and blinde ignorance, capital foes to vertue and good literature’, he printed an indifferent rendering of Book I and, for no very good reason, filled out the rest of the volume with an account of ‘the Victorious Actes of King Henry Fift’.

A recent trend in Hellenistic studies has been to emphasise the importance of the indigenous peoples within the successor kingdoms to Alexander at the expense of the Greco-Macedonian element. Within limits this is to be welcomed, for there can be no doubt that in the past, for a combination of reasons, native influence on the life and culture of those states has been underestimated. With the exception of Macedonia itself, all these Hellenistic kingdoms contained ancient, alien structures, which the new Macedonian rulers in Persia, Babylonia and Egypt could not afford to ignore. Relations with their more numerous non-Greek subjects were always a central problem and one which changed over the years. In Egypt, for instance, Egyptian influence in the army and administration, as well as in everyday life, grew steadily from the end of the third century onwards. How indeed these Macedonian kings – and their subject populations – saw themselves in this multicultural world must form a matter of central interest.

Despite this, however, it remains true that the cultural roots of the rulers and ruling castes, at any rate within the more important of the successor states, lay in a Hellenised Macedonia and that many of their institutions derived from Macedonia and the Greek polis. Ptolemy, Seleucus, Cassander, Antigonus, Lysimachus were all Macedonians.

The way the book of Acts ends is surprising. This enigmatic conclusion has resisted centuries of enquiry. At the end of his work, Luke presents the activity of Paul, a prisoner, in the capital of the Empire. After the troubled voyage from Caesarea, Paul settles in, accompanied by a guard (28. 16). After this there is the theological debate with the delegation of Roman Jews (28. 17–28), and the book ends with the apostle evangelizing in the imperial city (28. 30–1). Considering the importance of the end of a literary work, and the effect the last image may have on the reader or hearer before leaving the narrative world, Luke's choice is perplexing.

The first difficulty is not what the narrative conclusion affirms, but what it does not. Why does Luke remain silent about the appeal to Caesar, which represents the avowed motive for Paul's transfer to Rome (28. 19)? The ending of Acts comes after the interminable wait for the apostle's trial, which is announced continually throughout the book (23. 11; 25. 11–12; 26. 32; 27. 24), but never occurs; it disappoints the expectation of the reader. One can understand why this expectation has intrigued exegetes, from the early Fathers onwards. Why did Luke remain silent about the outcome of the trial, whether favourable (the release of the apostle) or not (the death of Paul)? Has Luke kept silent intentionally, or was he not able to say more?

Was the first historian of Christianity a proper historian?

There is no doubt that Luke – for this is what we name the anonymous author of the third gospel and the book of Acts – intended to tell a story about the birth of Christianity. He was the first to have written a biography of Jesus followed by what was later given the title of ‘Acts of Apostles’ (Πράξεις ἀποστολω̂ν). In antiquity, this would never be repeated. The two volumes of this grand work were divided at the time of the constitution of the canon of the New Testament, before the year AD 200; the first volume was grouped with Matthew, Mark and John to form the fourfold Gospel; the second work was placed at the head of the epistles, to establish the narrative framework of the Pauline writings.

It is here, at the moment when the corpus of Christian literature begins to emerge, that Luke's writing, dedicated to the ‘most excellent Theophilus’ (Luke 1. 3; Acts 1. 1), was broken in two. The length of the whole is impressive. These fifty-two chapters represent a quarter of the New Testament. Modern exegesis refers to this text as Luke–Acts in order to remind readers that Acts cannot be read without remembering the gospel as Luke has written it.

Luke, then, wanted to create a history, but was he a good historian? Exegetes continue to disagree on the answer.

I have given this chapter, which deals mainly with Hellenes and Achaeans, the sub-title of ‘Greek Nationality’ revisited. The Greek nationality I am revisiting (though only briefly) is the subject of a paper I wrote long ago in 1951, entitled ‘The Problem of Greek Nationality’. I gave it at the general meeting of the Classical Association held that year in Liverpool and in it I discussed and criticised a view prevalent at that time, that Greek history could be usefully interpreted in terms of ‘a struggle for Greek unity’ and the failure of Greeks to set up a Greek nation. This seemed to me rather an absurd theory for several reasons. One was that to apply the modern idea of a nation to ancient Greece was patently anachronistic. The ‘panhellenic’ note which can be detected in, for instance, the Lysistrata, the Olympian speeches of Gorgias and Lysias or the writings of Isocrates had nothing to do with such a concept. Nor did it seem reasonable to assess people in terms of what they failed to accomplish.

Today, indeed, such an approach to Greek history must seem strangely out-of-date. Although it was adopted at that time by such distinguished historians as Gaetano De Sanctis in Italy and Max Cary in England, its real origins lay in the drive to create a united Germany in the nineteenth century and the nationalism of Bismarck's Reich.

The question I should like to try to answer in this paper is whether by the Hellenistic period there existed something that we could call a west Greek view of the past. There is no simple answer to this since, until one gets down as far as Diodorus, who was writing at the time of Julius Caesar, all the western Greek historians exist only in fragments; and indeed, after looking at the fragments, I fairly soon reached the conclusion that any discussion of their views about the past would have to centre on Timaeus. For that there is a good reason. Apart from Timaeus, the attested fragments of authors such as Antiochus and Philistus, not to mention lesser figures like Athanis of Syracuse, Timonides of Leucas, Callias and Antander, the brothers of Agathocles, and Alcimus, are so meagre – indeed in some cases we have little more than their names – that they emerge as wholly shadowy personalities. Nor is it simply that the fragments are few in number. In addition there is a strong likelihood that often these writers are being quoted at second hand via Timaeus. Consequently, if the fragments seem to suggest that their authors were interested predominantly in the same kind of things as Timaeus, that may well be because he quoted material from them which happened to fall in with his own interests.

For Timaeus himself the situation is a little better, though by no means wholly satisfactory.

In writing his ‘Acts of Apostles’, Luke offers his readers a narrative of beginnings. This narrative of the birth of Christianity is part of a double work, which begins with the biography of Jesus. Henry Joel Cadbury was the first, in 1927, to call this ‘Luke–Acts’.

While it is true that this label had to wait for redaction criticism (Redaktionsgeschichte) to be more widely accepted in research, after Conzelmann it has become (almost) compulsory. If the unity of the authorship of the gospel of Luke and Acts, affirmed by the early Church, has never been seriously the subject of doubt, research is indebted to Henry Cadbury and subsequently to Martin Dibelius, for the impulse to explore the unity of the Lucan diptych on the literary and theological level.

‘Luke–Acts’ represents, therefore, a very recent concept in the bimillennial history of the reading of the New Testament. This concept imposed itself so rapidly in research that it can be considered today as a fait acquis. Since the 1960s a recognition that the gospel of Luke and the book of Acts were the work of the same author and a crystallization of the same theology has been the postulate of all research on Luke's text. In doing this, exegetes have made an important methodological decision, maintaining that a correct reading of Luke's work requires the uniting of what the canon of the New Testament has divided.

The story of the judgement of God on Ananias and Sapphira (Acts 5. 1–11) is the most tragic episode in the book of Acts. The Lucan art of dramatization reaches the height of pathos: the tragic end of Ananias struck down by Peter's accusing word, his rapid burial, then the arrival of Sapphira ignorant of the dramatic event, her open lie followed by her death, announced with a tone of black humour (5. 9b). The pragmatic effect sought by the narrator is apparent in the text itself: ‘great fear seized all who heard of it’ (5. 5, 11). This is a story that is meant to provoke fear.

It must be said that the story, situated in the idyllic picture of the first Christian community which unfolds in chapters 2 to 5, strikes the reader with a narrative shock. What is the intention of the author of Acts? The violence to the reader is also theological: how can one justify the tragic disproportion between Ananias and Sapphira's crime and the sanction that strikes them? How can the absence of the typically Lucan offer of conversion (μετάνοια) be explained? Can Lucan ecclesiology endure this dualist vision of a pure community from which the sinner is excluded by death?

Furthermore, from an author with a reputation of aiming to soften the internal conflicts of the Church (6. 1–6; 15. 7–35), the brutal emergence of this crisis comes as a surprise.

In 217 bc a conference was held at Naupactus on the Corinthian Gulf to try to bring to an end the war between the Macedonian Confederacy, led by Philip V, and the Aetolian League. It became famous for a remarkable speech by Agelaus of Naupactus, who, if we can believe Polybius' account, urged all Greeks to bury their differences and to turn their eyes to the ‘cloud in the west’, that is to the struggle between Carthage and Rome, since the winner in that conflict was likely to go on to destroy Greek freedom. Almost exactly fifty years later, in 168, at the battle of Pydna, that prophecy was fulfilled: for in that year the Macedonian monarchy under Perseus was abolished and the Seleucid king Antiochus IV was humiliated by a Roman envoy at Eleusis in Egypt. Henceforth Rome was the undisputed superpower. The Roman victory was followed by a purge throughout Greece, as a result of which most men of influence found themselves detained in Italy. Among them was the Achaean statesman and future historian, Polybius, who was to spend the next sixteen years in Italy, where he planned and began his great history of Rome. In this he set out to show ‘how and thanks to what kind of constitution’ (πω̃ς καί τίνι γένει πολιτείας) Rome had become mistress of the inhabited world, the oecumene, in not quite fifty-three years.

In its original form this history was designed to cover the years 220 to 167 in thirty books.

For rather more than 150 years Macedonia dominated the history of the Mediterranean world; and for rather longer – in fact from the reign of Philip II to that of Perseus – the relations between Macedonia and the states of Greece proper gave rise to quite bitter and violent political controversy. The issues debated by Aeschines and Demosthenes during Philip II's rise to power are central in this conflict; but far from being resolved by Philip's victory, they continued to attract attention throughout the third century and well into the second, when the historian Polybius is a witness to the importance which the Macedonian question still held in the new context of the Roman advance to world domination. Confronted by the fall of Macedonia, Greeks inevitably pondered upon her rise to power; and commenting upon the final disaster at Pydna in 168, Polybius quotes with wonder the prophetic remarks uttered by Demetrius of Phalerum after the overthrow of the Persian empire by Alexander.

‘Can you imagine’, Demetrius had written in his Περὶ Τύχης ‘that if some god had warned the Persians or their king, or the Macedonians or their king, that in fifty years the very name of the Persians, who once were masters of the world, would have been lost, and that the Macedonians whose name was before scarcely known, would become masters of it, they would have believed it? Nevertheless, it is true that Fortune, whose influence on our life is incalculable, who displays her power by surprises, is even now, I think, showing all mankind, by her elevation of the Macedonians into the high prosperity once enjoyed by the Persians, that she has merely lent them these advantages until she may otherwise determine concerning them.’

In 217, Polybius (v.101–2) informs us, Philip V, who had received private information about the Roman disaster at Lake Trasimene, revealed this to Demetrius of Pharos, who thereupon encouraged him to end the war with Aetolia and plan an invasion of Italy as a first step to world conquest, ἀρχὴν τη̃ς ὑπὲρ τω̃ν ὅλων ἐπιβολη̃ς. This suggestion appealed to Philip, who was young, bold and successful and came from a house which had always been inclined more than any other to covet universal dominion, ἐξ οἰκίας ὁρμώμενον τοιαύτης ἣ μάλιστα τη̃ς τω̃ν ὃλων ἐλπίδoς ἐφίεται. At the subsequent peace conference at Naupactus the Aetolian Agelaus is said (Polyb. v.104.7) to have taken up the same theme and urged Philip to compete at the appropriate moment, σὺν καιρῷ, for world sovereignty, τη̃ς τω̃ν ὃλων δυναστείας; and from now on Philip dreamt of nothing else (Polyb. v.108.5).

Are we to believe all this? Was the oikia from which Philip sprang so aggressive and ambitious? Or has Polybius got it all wrong? He certainly believed it to be true, for in a later passage, dealing with the year 201 (xv.24.6) and probably referring to Philip's treacherous seizure of Thasos in that year (xv.24.1), he upbraids Philip for his irrational behaviour in cherishing ideas of world dominion (περιλαμβάνοντα ται̃ς ἐλπίσι τὴν οἰκουμένην), yet at the very outset of his campaign proclaiming his duplicity and so losing all credibility: for by so doing he sacrificed both honour (τὸ καλόν) and advantage (τὸ συμϕέρον).

Since the Achaean meetings recorded in xxix.23–5 are among the most important evidence for the character of the Achaean assemblies in the second century, this is an appropriate place to review recent work on this much-discussed problem. The basic studies are now Aymard (1938a) and Larsen (1955) 165–88. Larsen challenged Aymard's view that the synodos was a primary assembly, arguing that, from a date towards the end of the third century, the Achaean assembly ceased to have regular meetings and only came together when, according to carefully defined rules, a special meeting of the primary assembly was called; the four annual synodoi were meetings of the council (boule) together with the magistrates. Larsen reaffirmed this view in Larsen (1972), replying to A. Giovannini, who had argued || that the synodoi continued to be meetings of the primary assembly (along with the Council and magistrates) down to the dissolution of the Confederacy. In a reply to Giovannini I raised some objections and stated that Larsen's theory ‘still seems to me the most convincing’, though ‘no theory yet put forward solves every difficulty to everyone's satisfaction’. Further concern with the problem, encouraged by discussion with G. T. Griffith, has since led me to a different conclusion, and one nearer to Giovannini's, though his account is, in my opinion, partly vitiated by his unwillingness to distinguish adequately between synodoi and syncletoi.

Larsen's theory accounts for much of the evidence, but leaves some serious difficulties.

Paul's critique of belly-worship in an ancient setting

At the beginning of our study we noted the uncertainty among New Testament scholars as to the precise meaning of ‘belly’ in Phil. 3:19 and Rom. 16:18. Owing to the brevity of the two dicta, I claimed that an adequate understanding was accessible only through uncovering the cultural competence of Paul's readers. This has taken us down the path of ancient moral philosophy as well as to the agenda of banquets. It has led us to abandon the common view that Paul had in mind Christians who continued to observe Jewish dietary laws. This view fails to account for the analogies with Paul's expression of ‘having the belly as god’, whether these analogies are Graeco-Roman or Jewish. A closer look at the Patristic evidence demonstrated that to many writers of the Early Church, Jews were seen as gluttonous, as preoccupied with food. This allegation looked beyond dietary laws, and belonged to a polemic of ascetics.

Plato's anthropology was the basis for the thinking of most moral philosophers. Reason and mind represented a divine element or kinship in human beings, while desires were located in the stomach and the organs below it, i.e. the genitals. These parts of the human body were marks of an earthly identity. The desires of the unruly belly had therefore to be mastered. Mastery of desires became a philosophical commonplace in antiquity, designed to keep the desires of the belly, such as eating, drinking and copulating, under control.

Introduction

The aim of this chapter is to see how the belly-topos works in this passage, and, of course, within Philippians as well. Although our purpose is to elucidate what it means to ‘have the belly as god’, this dictum cannot be separated from ‘being enemies of Christ's cross’, ‘glorifying in their shame’, and ‘having the mind set on earthly things’. We will approach the topos from a pars pro toto perspective; i.e. as encapsulating the other complaints as well. Actually, the pattern which we have uncovered as related to the belly-topos in ancient sources strongly recommends us to keep these things together (see Chap. 3.10).

In other words, we will see how Phil. 3:17–21, with special emphasis on vv. 18–19, is embedded in the structure, argument and purpose of the entire letter. Any reading of this passage is linked to major controversial issues in recent scholarship, namely the hiatus in 3:1 and the questions of unity, opponents and genre. These questions have generated an enormous literature over the past few years. The exegesis of vv. 18–19 has, in my view, suffered from an exaggerated interest in identifying ‘opponents’ lurking behind Paul's words. The text has not, therefore, been sufficiently seen in its rhetorical function within Paul's argument. From this also follows that belly-worship in Phil. 3 has not been related to what Paul says about the body elsewhere in this letter.