Hellenistic Study Day
Fr., 15 Nov. 2024
Utrecht University, Ravesteijnzaal
Organized by Rolf Strootman & Altay Coskun
9 am to 1 pm: Panel 1: Borders of the Hellenistic Kingdoms
1 pm to 2 pm: Lunch
2-6:30 pm: Panel 2: New Trends in Seleukid Studies
7:00 pm: Dinner
Participation is free, but registration is required. If you wish to participate in person, please, contact r.strootman at uu dot nl. If you wish to join via zoom, please, contact acoskun at uwaterloo dot ca.
Preliminary Program of Panel 2 New Trends in Seleukid Studies
14:00-14:05 Opening remarks
14:05-14:50 Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides (via zoom)
14:55-15:40 Deirdre Klokow (via zoom)
15:45-16:30 Paul Johstono
16:30-16:50 Tea/Coffee break
16:50-17:35 Ben Scolnic (via zoom
17:40-18:25 Altay Coşkun
18:25-18:30 Closing remarks
7 pm: Dinner
Abstracts, Recordings & CVs
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides
Ruling the Centre of the Earth: Antiochos I, Babylon, and Marduk on the Omphalos
The myth of Apollo as the divine progenitor of the Seleukids was promoted under Antiochos I, who also approved the famous representation of Apollo-on-the-omphalos on the reverse of his tetradrachms. The motif was understood to be especially connected with the eastern provinces (Erickson, The Early Seleukids, Their Gods and Their Coins, 2018, 68–98; Iossif & Lorber, ‘Seleucid Campaign Beards’, AC 78, 2009, 87–115, 107). The success of this iconography has been explained previously as an allusion to the father-son relationship of Seleukos I and Antiochos, which reflected the relationship of Zeus and Apollo in the Greek and that of Marduk and Nabu in the Babylonian pantheon (Anagnostou-Laoutides, In the Garden of the Gods: Models of Kingship from the Sumerians to the Seleucids, 2017, 150–161). Marduk, the king of the gods and of Babylon, was responsible for approving the earthly king; thus, Antiochos’ claims to legitimacy and divine favour were successfully broadcast to both his Greek and non-Greek subjects.
However, more attention should be paid to the royal ideology of Babylon, according to which the city claims to be the ‘centre of the earth’, identified with Marduk’s temple, considered as the ‘counterpart of the heavenly sanctuary Ešarra’ (Beaulieu, ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon as World Capital’, Journal for the Canadian Society of Mesopotamian Studies 3, 2008, 5–12, 10). The idea was reiterated in the Enuma Elish (IV 143–146; VI 62–63), whereas Esarhaddon celebrated Marduk’s temple as ‘the palace of the gods, the mirror image of the Apsu, the counterpart of Ešarra, and the replica of the constellation of the Field’ (George, ‘E-sangil and E-temen-anki, the Archetypal Cult-Centre’, in Renger, ed., Babylon: Focus mesopotamischer Geschichte, Wiege früher Gelehrsamkeit, Mythos in der Moderne, Berlin, 2, 1999, 67–86, 67). The temple (and by extension Babylon) was understood as the meeting point of Heaven and Earth, hence the centre/navel of the world. This paper will explore a number of Seleukid coins engraved with the Apollo-on-the-omphalos motif in comparison with Near Eastern representations of Marduk’s temple to argue that Antiochos actively compared Marduk and his ziggurat with Apollo and his omphalos.
Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides is Associate Professor at the Department of History and Archaeology, Macquarie University, Sydney. She was a Future Fellow of the Australian Research Council (2017–2022), while she currently leads an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the Crises of Leadership in the Eastern Roman Empire (250-1000 CE). Her research focuses on the use of mythic and religious traditions in the Hellenistic and Augustan periods, as well as the reception of Greek philosophy in Christianity. She is the author of Eros and Ritual (Gorgias, 2005 and 2013) and In the Garden of the Gods (Routledge, 2017), and co-editor of several volumes, including Eastern Christianity and Late Antique Philosophy (2020) and Later Platonists and Their Heirs (2023). She just completed a monograph on The History of Inebriation from Plato to Landino and is working on another book on Sexuality in Greek Epigrams and Later European Literature.
Deirdre Klokow
Ideology and/in Praxis: Directions in the Study of Seleukid Ideology
How do ideology and praxis intersect in the material and socio-economic systems of the Seleukid state? Is it possible to understand one without the other? Drawing on examples and perspectives from two recent edited volumes on Seleukid ideology, this paper explores two core aspects of royal rule, considering how ideology was defined and sustained by the practical expressions of royal administration and institutions (and, perhaps, vice versa). It argues that the resilience and legibility of Seleukid institutions allowed the idea of the Seleukid state to endure extended periods of disruption and decay. The ideology of Seleukid rule must therefore be situated within the contradictions of the extractive, oppressive framework of the state by which it was articulated and disseminated, and with which it existed in an uneasy tension.
Deirdre Klokow is an Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Texas at Austin; she moved to Texas after completing her PhD in Classics at the University of Southern California in 2023. A Seleucid historian, her research interests include the intersections between institutional, economic, and environmental histories, with a particular focus on the intersection between local and state systems. She is currently at work on her first book project, titled The Seleucids and Their Land, which explores a ground-up approach to the administration of the Seleucid state. Her other research interests include the economic agency and political positions of Hellenistic royal women.
Paul A. Johstono
Recruiting Seleukid Infantry, Part II: Reconstitution and Reform after encountering Rome
Studies of the Seleukid military have tended to focus on field armies in the great campaigns. In considering how soldiers and formations came to be in those armies, scholars were inclined to assume explanations that either tie land allotments to military obligation, especially in the phalanx, or involve a standing army. In a study just published in The Seleukids at War (SP 2, 2024), I initiated the study of Seleukid military personnel, formations, and institutions from the local and regional level up, rather than from the field armies down, updating the standard evaluation of the Seleukid army. Local military institutions were likely larger and more complicated than sometimes thought, with diverse ways of generating forces into royal armies and more purposes than service in the royal field army alone. In this sequel to that study, I would like to examine Seleukid reconstitution and reform in the era from the battle of Magnesia (190 BCE) to the end of the Seleukid kingdom’s time as a major power player (129 BCE). This study has implications for Seleukid military studies, for change over time in Seleukid military institutions, for questions of design and state strategy behind those institutions, and for processes of Hellenization attached to service in the Seleukid military or membership in populations that comprised the military milieu.
Paul A. Johstono is Associate Professor of Military and Strategic Studies at the Air Command & Staff College, Maxwell Air Force Base, where he is the course director for Leadership and the Profession of Arms. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Furman University in Greenville, SC (2005) and his master’s degree (2008) and Ph.D. (2012) in history from Duke University. His research focuses on warfare, leadership, and military institutions in the Hellenistic era. He is the author of The Army of Ptolemaic Egypt, 323–204 B.C.: An Institutional and Operational History (2020) and various chapters and articles. He is currently developing book manuscripts on the later Ptolemaic army and on military ethos in antiquity.
Ben Scolnic
Chronology and Interpretation: The One Like a Son of Man in Dan 7.13
In Seleukid Perspectives 3: Jewish Responses to Seleukid Rule, we hope to explore, among other things, how chronology is essential in the analysis of the Jewish texts of the Seleukid era. The tumultuous events that occurred in Judaea in the 160’s BCE, including the Antiochene persecution and the Maccabaean revolution, are described in the Book of Daniel, 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees. Yet even with a timeline of dates that seem secure, the greatest difficulties in establishing the chronology rise from the texts themselves. Dan 7–12, 2 Macc 5 and 10-12 and perhaps 1 Macc 5 have been de-chronologized and arranged out of sequence.
Still, we have secure dates with which we can draw a line between the texts that know about the death of Antiochos IV and the restoration of the Temple, and those that do not. Based on Coşkun’s source-critical analysis (Historia 68, 2019) that re-chronologizes the Daniel texts in a new way, we can move on to an interpretation of the enigmatic figure of “the One Like a Son of Man.” We can now see this cryptic passage as a Jewish response to the Seleukid ruler cult at a particular moment in time when victory over the Seleukids seemed at hand.
Rabbi Benjamin Scolnic has been the spiritual leader of Temple Beth Sholom, Hamden, Connecticut since 1983 and as taught as an adjunct professor at Southern Connecticut State University since 2005. A graduate of Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, he also earned master’s degrees from both institutions before his rabbinic ordination in 1979. He received a Ph.D. from the Seminary, the first to earn this degree in Bible in the history of its Graduate School. His thesis was later published as Theme and Context in Biblical Lists. He is the author of eleven books, including seven works of scholarship on the Bible and Judaism in the Persian and Hellenistic periods, the most relevant of which here are: Alcimus, Enemy of the Maccabees; Chronology and Papponymy: A List of Judean High Priests of the Persian Period; Judaism Defined: Mattathias and the Destiny of His People; Thy Brother’s Blood: The Maccabees and Dynastic Morality in the Hellenistic World, two books of collected essays on the Bible and Conservative Judaism, and four collections of sermons. He has held academic positions at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Yale University, the University of Connecticut, and Southern Connecticut State University. Together with Altay Coşkun, he hosts the Seleukid Lecture Series (since 2021: http://www.altaycoskun.com/seleukid-lectures) and writes for the creative platform Unheard Voices of the Past (since 2022: http://www.altaycoskun.com/welcome-to-the-unheard-voices). The two of them are also co-editors of the book series Seleukid Perspectives in general and of its second volume, The Seleukids at War: Recruitment, Composition, and Organization (2024).
Altay Coşkun
Note: Due to security concerns at the University of Utrecht, this lecture could not be given at the workshop. It has been rescheduled into the Seleukid Lecture Series (IX.4) on 16 April 2025.
Revisiting Seleukid Foundation Stories within the Frameworks of Colonial Encounters and Ethnicity Constructs
Re-Imagining ‘Colonial’ Encounters of the Ancient Greeks (and Romans) is a collaborative project in its nascent stage. It seeks to build on a set of observations made especially in the contexts of Archaic Greek colonization and its (fluid) representation in the legendary tradition.
First, while the Greek literary tradition emphasizes Hellenocentric perspectives through which Greek explorers and settlers looked at foreign lands and waters, a diachronic analysis especially of the Argonautic myth reveals a more mutual development, with native elements gradually included in the ‘domestic’ Greek traditions. (E.g., ‘Trapezus in Kolchis. Part II: Mytho-Geography in the Tabula Peutingeriana’, Orbis Terrarum 21, 2023, 77–112).
Second, the legendary discourse is not just structured by opposing Greek and non-Greek positions as simple dichotomies, but often involves multiple ethnics on both the Greek and the native sides, with a wide range of possible affiliations or hostilities. (E.g., ‘Aia-Dioskurias-Sebastopolis-Sukhumi and the episcopus Sanastupolitanus inferioris Georgiae’, Phasis 26, 2023, 4-35.)
Third, underneath a layer of barbarophobic perspectives, there are some traces of close engagement between Greek settlers and foreign peoples, at least in the initial stages. Phokaian legends surrounding Massalia and Lampsakos start with friendly relations, turn to hostility later on, and then explain Greek dominance as a result of a righteous victory over treacherous native forces. One often gains the impression that Athenian 5th-century ideological discourse affected such traditions, not rarely disconnecting the situation on the ground from the virtual world of Hellenic literary production. (E.g., the recent workshop ‘Renegotiating Colonial Settlements’ held at Empuries in July 2024).
How do the foundation stories of the Seleukis fit into this context? They are remarkably Hellenocentric and seem to be filtering out systematically native elements from their accounts. Negotiation of ethnic identity seems to be focusing on the different groups and leaders among the Graeco-Macedonian founders. (E.g., ‘Ideological Layers in the Apameia Foundation Mosaics’, Seleukid Lecture Series, 16 March 2022). This ‘blindness’ appears to be conflicting with the growing scholarly awareness that the culture of the Seleukid kingdom tended to be inclusive and respectful of local traditions. A tentative answer will be sought in the practice of calling elite soldiers ‘Macedonians’, despite the growing inclusion of natives into these ranks (Cf. Coşkun & Scolnic, eds., The Seleukids at War: Recruitment, Composition, and Organization, 2024).
Altay Coşkun is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Waterloo, ON. His appointment in 2009 followed his PhD (1999) and Habilitation (2007), both at Trier University. He held various research positions at Oxford, Trier & Exeter. His interests range from Greek colonialism to the Hellenistic kingdoms, as well as from Roman diplomacy and citizenship studies to Late Roman legislation and poetry. His latest publications include Seleukid Royal Women (co-edited with Alex McAuley, 2016), Rome and the Seleukid East (co-edited with David Engels, 2019), Ethnic Constructs, Royal Dynasties and Historical Geography around the Black Sea Littoral (2021), Galatian Victories and Other Studies into the Agency and Identity of the Galatians in the Hellenistic and Early-Roman Periods (2022), and Seleukid Ideology: Creation, Reception and Response (co-edited with Richard Wenghofer, 2023). Together with Rabbi Ben Scolnic, he runs the Seleukid Lecture Series (since 2021: http://www.altaycoskun.com/seleukid-lectures) as well as Unheard Voices of the Past (since 2022: http://www.altaycoskun.com/welcome-to-the-unheard-voices). The two of them are also co-editors of the book series Seleukid Perspectives in general and of its second volume, The Seleukids at War: Recruitment, Composition, and Organization (2024).