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The peculiarity of Hellenistic ethics is explored to understand its special significance. The issue is approached as a question concerning the intellectual history of Hellenistic philosophy in its formative years. A comprehensive answer would have to include subsequent developments of the Hellenistic schools, their reception at Rome, and their entry into the Renaissance. The focus of this chapter is the investigation of what it was about the ethical projects of the innovative Hellenistic philosophers that prepared the way for this curious legacy.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the pre-Hasmonean Hellenistic period and then proceeds to a survey of four types of texts most obviously datable to this period and consideration of their profile. These include apocalyptic texts, Second Temple wisdom, diaspora texts and priestly materials [e.g. Chronicles] along with post-P harmonizations/coordinations. The chapter concludes with a survey of other texts in the Hebrew Bible that may reflect each of these four profiles.

This chapter discusses how demographic factors affected economic concerns in Attica in the early Hellenistic period. Topics covered include demography and economics, labour and manpower, the population of 4th-century Attica, movements of people, settlement and demes in early Hellenistic Attica, and change in the archeology of Attica. It is shown that there was an overall fall in the population of Attica from the 4th to the 3rd century in most categories: citizens and slaves, and possibly also foreigners. The changes in population distribution may have contributed to a weakened rural economy. If settlement decline also saw diminished cultivation of the land, productivity may have also declined.

This chapter examines the history of the establishment of cities in Bactria. It explains that the creation of cities in Bactria is represented by Ai Khanum for the Hellenistic period and Termez for the Great Kushans. These two exceptional cities were deliberately created to integrate an ancient centre and they assumed the role of capital for a new age. The chapter suggests that their establishment was significantly influenced by political power and that they negatively affected other towns.

This is the fifth of six chapters on the Old Testament and its authors. It gives an account of a later period of Israelite history than does the preceding chapter, and discusses the Persian and Hellenistic periods—the ‘post‐exilic’ period. The author notes that the sources for the Second Temple period give a series of vignettes into what was happening in the Palestinian region but the complete picture has to be inferred from fragmentary data, and there are major questions about the value of some of the traditional sources. The chapter is arranged in four main sections, which cover the Persian period, the Greek conquest, the Ptolemaic period, and Seleucid rule.

This chapter presents a summary of the preceding chapters. The book has covered these topics: grain supply; warfare, in particular its impact on the countryside; institutions (army, magistracies, politicians); and demography, and has tried to offer a contextual approach. It has drawn together these themes and considered how the economies of the post-classical polis of Athens had to adapt to the new conditions of the early Hellenistic era. Thus, this book is a case study of how some economic structures worked in the post-Classical polis.

This chapter examines the changes in Egypt in the Graeco-Roman world during the Hellenistic and Roman periods following the death of Alexander the Great. It explains that these periods highlight episodes of military aggression, conquest, and annexation during the struggles of the Successors of Alexander and the Roman takeover of the Hellenistic kingdoms. The analysis of the changes in the role of the elites, the exploitation of the material resources, and the character of the military presence reveal that they are all expressions of the ways in which the coming of Roman rule brought change to Egypt and their effect was cumulative and which had begun before Egypt was annexed and made into a Roman province.

The command structure and infrastructure of the fortified garrisons reveals how the defence of rural Attica was a central focus for the Athenian polis in the early Hellenistic period, particularly given the absence of state control over the harbours of Piraeus. The deployment of manpower, evolving in the late Classical and early Hellenistic period, complements these two areas. Epigraphical evidence from the fortress demes and from the city of Athens reveals a great deal about how the polis organized and deployed soldiers, particularly its own citizens. This chapter argues that the polis depended considerably on those citizens in both major military operations and garrison duties in Attica.

The Hellenistic period could be said to have arrived in a big bang. In 306 BC, four years after the sordid death of the last Argead king, Antigonus the One-Eyed declared himself and his son Demetrius kings, and assumed the diadem as the regalia of royalty. His example was followed almost immediately by Ptolemy, Seleucus, Lysimachus, and Cassander, not to mention Agathocles in Sicily. There was now a plethora of Macedonian kings who (with the exception of Cassander) held sway outside Macedon. Traditional scholarship has concentrated on the supposed contrast between Antigonus and the other kings; Antigonus was attempting to recreate the universal monarchy of Alexander, while the other dynasts had strictly regional bases of power. This chapter examines the nature of Hellenistic monarchy and the mutual expectations of ruler and subject.

From the Hellenistic period on, various Greek civic festivals in honour of traditional deities have been coordinated or even combined with similar expressions of the ruler cult. The usual results were festivals under a joint name, such as ‘Dionysia and Demetrieia’. These latter ‘appended’ festivals meant — practically and/or ideologically — a supplementary but no less important part of the whole festivity in the cities that instituted them. They helped them ensure the monarchs’ goodwill without swelling the relevant cult costs, especially when they shared an organisational framework with the old festivals of the cities. Such examples concerning Alexander and members of the dynasties of the Antigonids, the Seleucids and the Attalids are collected here and examined in detail. The continuation of this cult practice into the Roman period of the Greek East, both during the Republic and the Empire, is also sketched.

This chapter presents a ‘grammar of space’ by focusing on various sites where communities of the Hellenistic period set up honorific portraits. It begins with an overview of space before turning to a discussion of how honorific statues were involved — and involved their viewers — in the construction of civic space. In this sense, ‘space’ can be public space, sacred space, or private space, in any Hellenistic city. The chapter considers how space affects social meaning, and how the meaning is read and interpreted by those who live it. More precisely, it explores how exactly the meaning is produced by the location where an honorific statue was set up. To illustrate the ‘grammar’ and to understand the placement of statues as a dynamic, interrelated set of meaningful possibilities, several test cases — Priene, Pergamon, Athens, and the Asklepieion near Epidauros — are described.

Some scholars have assumed that Samaria and Judah were substantially unlike one another in the Persian period. Until recently, there was little hard evidence to go by, but it is now possible to make progress on this front. Site surveys and excavation reports show that Samaria had a substantially larger and more well-to-do population than Judah during the Neo-Babylonian and Persian periods; the province of Samaria was not an insignificant backdrop to Judah during this period. Analysis of scripts; personal names on Samaria papyri, bullae, coins, and seals; cultic figurines (or the absence thereof); and bilingualism shows many common features, such asYahwistic names, as well as some differences, between Samaria and Judah during the Persian and Hellenistic periods. This chapter also engages the recent archaeological discovery of a monumental Samarian temple at Mt. Gerizim dating to Hellenistic times, as well as a smaller sanctuary predating it, dating to Persian times. The new finds are extremely significant, because they indicate that the Jerusalem temple had a Yahwistic rival to the North significantly earlier than most scholars had assumed.

This chapter discusses royal correspondence of the Hellenistic period of two Graeco-Macedonian kingdoms as they emerged after the conquests and death of Alexander the Great (r. 336–323 BC): the Seleukid Empire and the Attalid state. Letters survive only in the form of copies, presently 147 inscriptions carved into stone monuments or the facades of public buildings in order to commemorate the king’s words for the benefit of the community. The analysis of the communication strategies employed in the transmitting of the king’s wishes focuses on the Seleukid kingdom which, given its vast dimensions, needed effective means to communicate information.

This chapter seeks to illuminate Hellenistic poems by pursuing what they did with some aspects of Homer and with some ideas that were connected with Homer in the Hellenistic period. Accordingly, the inquiry will not consider the abundant and important evidence for poems that have been more or less lost; it will concentrate on one surviving epic, the Argonautica, and one partially surviving epic, the Hecale.

This chapter evaluates the use of epigraphic evidence in Hellenistic biographies of philosophers. There are different types of epigraphic evidence cited in Hellenistic biographies of philosophers, but epitaphs or psephismata are the most common. The chapter concentrates on psephismata. Four passages are analysed in detail: an honorary decree moved by Menedemus of Eretria to praise the Macedonian king Antigonus Gonatas after his victory against the Celts in the battle of Lysimachia; two Athenian honorary decrees for Aristotle and Zeno of Citium, respectively; and an Athenian decree making it possible for every Athenian man two have two wives at once in order to increase the population at a time of lack of men and general population shortage. This last decree plays an important role in the context of the alleged bigamy of Socrates widely discussed by Hellenistic authors. An evaluation of this material shows that there are three kinds of epigraphic evidence used by ancient authors in biographical texts on philosophers: original inscriptional texts, revised inscriptional texts, and invented inscriptional texts. Against this background, the following question is addressed here: What is the function of evidence of epigraphic nature in Hellenistic biographies of philosophers? Finally, the results of this investigation are shortly set and discussed in their wider cultural context.

This chapter presents the editio princeps of six honorific inscriptions from Siphnos. All of them were probably issued by the political authorities, i.e., the Council (Boule) and the Assembly of the People, of the small Cycladic island. They offer, welcome new evidence on the political life of Siphnos in the late Hellenistic/early Roman Imperial period. Interestingly, the honour and in one case is a woman. Other points of interest include the first attestation of the month Lenaion in the Siphnian calendar; some rare names that seem to confirm the conservative, quasi-aristocratic outlook of Siphnian society; and the presence of a board of generals (στρατηγοί). The chapter concludes with an overview of the culture of honours in post-classical Siphnos.

This chapter analyzes the impact of mobility on poleis and individuals in the Hellenistic period. It addresses two main issues: the reasons why people moved and how communities rendered themselves more (or less) attractive to potential mobile peoples. It focuses on the mobility of the elite and the interaction between their mobility and the communities.

This chapter focuses on Martin Hengel's first major work, “Judaism and Hellenism,” a study of Jewish and Hellenistic history. In this work, Hengel describes some aspects of the structure and nature of the Jewish community in the early Hellenistic period. He also describes Greek influence on Jewish literature and philosophy, the Hellenistic re-interpretation of Judaism and the reform movement of 175–164, and the cult or cults in the Temple between 167 and 164 bc. The chapter presents a critical analysis of Hengel's portrayal of Hellenism in Judaea and highlights the fundamental weakness of the book's main thesis.