Seleukid Study Days VIII:
The Afterlife of the Seleukids
Receptions and Reinterpretations from Antiquity to the Present
Utrecht, 12–15 November 2025

Context & Call For Papers

In recent decades, new studies on the Seleukids have reevaluated the empire’s significance for the longue durée of Ancient History (see e.g., Engels 2011; Strootman 2012; Strootman & Versluys 2017; Canepa 2018; Erickson 2018). No longer seen as a European-style state identified with Syria, recent publications have emphasized that the Seleukid ‘kingdom’ was a universalistic empire, pointing out the pivotal importance of Mesopotamia and Iran for Seleukid rule (Van der Spek 1987; Wiesehöfer 1994; Sherwin-White & Kuhrt 1993; Kosmin 2014; Engels 2017; Stevens 2019; Daryaee et al. 2024; Navas Moreno 2024). Located at the very heart of the Ancient World, the empire was neither simply ‘Eastern’ nor simply ‘Western’, and bridged the temporal and cultural divide between the Achaemenid empire and the Parthian and Roman empires (Engels 2011; Strootman 2014; Coşkun and Engels 2019). Merging Macedonian, Iranian, and Mesopotamian forms of kingship and imperialism (Anagnostou-Loutides and Pfeiffer 2022; Coşkun and Wenghofer 2023), Seleukid influence extended far beyond the empire’s collapse in the later second century BCE. The significance of the Seleukid court for the production of knowledge and literature is now also better understood (see e.g., Visscher 2020).

Already in Antiquity, civic communities and successor dynasties such as the Orontids of Kommagene and the Persian Sasanians actively engaged with the Seleukid legacy (Noreña 2016; Ogden 2017; Strootman 2021). The Seleukid role in the deuterocanonical tradition and the festival of Hanukkah engrained them in Jewish traditions, including still widely read folktales (Coşkun and Scolnic, in prep.). Seleukid coins have been collected and studied since the Renaissance. During the early modern period, the presence of Seleukid-related themes in European art, literature, and opera was ubiquitous, notably the story of Stratonice and Antiochus, which was retold many times on the theatrical stage and in paintings. In the twentieth century, Cavafy brought the Seleukid empire to life in his poems. More recently, the Seleukids made their mark on popular culture through modern media such as tabletop wargames, videogames, podcasts, YouTube, and comics.

Yet the impact and reception of Seleukid history and imperial culture have received very little attention in modern scholarship, and unlike the Achaemenids and Arsakids, the Seleukids still do not hold a place of their own in current reception studies. The aim of this conference is to change this and to open a new research field of Seleukid reception studies that does justice to the empire’s historical geopolitical significance.

For this two-day conference (with a reception the night before and a touristic field trip afterwards) we invite abstracts on the Seleukid afterlife in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern times. What can we say about the ongoing prestige of the dynasty in Antiquity, as expressed, e.g., by the Philopappos Monument in Athens, the Alexander Romances, or the writings of Late Roman authors, such as Libanios and Malalas? How was its place in history perceived in premodern and modern historiography in Asia and Europe? How were the Seleukids and their ‘world’ represented in art, literature, and the theatre? We especially welcome presentations that engage with the Seleukids in the context of ‘western’ or ‘eastern’ identity. What is the role of Orientalist tropes in representations of the Seleukids, and how did the simultaneously existing European appropriation of the Seleukid empire as a ‘Western’ state impact non-Western views? Last but not least, we want to acknowledge the youngest phase of Seleukid reception: that of active production of art & literature, and thus invite creative contributions also from these fields.

Paper proposals, including title, abstract (250 w.) and short CV (up to 200 w.), can be sent by Jan. 31, 2025, to Altay Coşkun, Pim Möhring and Rolf Strootman at SSD8Utrecht25@gmail.com.