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Rhodes represents a case of a “back-ripple effect” of Mediterranean networks, when overseas experiences and colonizing activities condensed the distinct poleis of the island into “Rhodian” ones long before the official synoikismos (unification and foundation of the new city of Rhodos). It indicates the role of (island) regionalism in shaping collective identity. This finds its expression in Rhodian myths (Tlepolemos) that stress overseas, common action; in the short-lived commercial port of Vroulia; and especially in overseas trade and colonization in Sicily and across the Mediterranean in the early sixth century. The more comprehensive nature of Rhodian identity overseas (Olympia, colonization in Sicily at Gela and Akragas) reflected on the home island. Finally, at Egyptian Naukratis, “Rhodes,” acting as a single polis (not so at home, where Lindos Kameiros and Ialysos kept their identity), shared in the most articulate expression of Hellenic identity (again, “overseas”) at the common Greek temple of the Hellenion.

The inscriptions of the Ptolemaic period from the three ‘Greek cities’ of Naukratis and Alexandria in the Delta and Ptolemais in Upper Egypt illustrate the distinctive character of these foundations which contrasts with the indigenous towns of the Delta and the Nile Valley. They show some of the major instruments of Hellenization being introduced quite deliberately and explicitly in the form of civic administrative and governmental institutions. In particular, there is the opportunity in the epigraphic record to juxtapose these civic institutions with the progress of Hellenization and urbanization in the other Egyptian towns. There is also a significant number of important papyri which substantively complement the picture to be drawn from the epigraphic sources. This chapter discusses the evidence for the institutions of each of the three cities separately; the existence of citizen assemblies, councils, magistrates, and religious cults of Greek deities illuminates the broader picture of institutional Hellenization in the Ptolemaic period.

In 333 BC Alexander III, king of Macedon, whose claims to Greekness were treated with some scepticism down in Athens, wreaked vengeance on the Persian kings who had posed such a threat to Greece in past centuries, by defeating a massive Persian army at the battle of the Issos, beyond the Cilician Gates. Yet he did not pursue the Persian king, Darius III, into the Persian heartlands. He well understood the need to neutralize Persian power along the shores of the Mediterranean, and marched south through Syria and Palestine, where he ruthlessly took charge of the Phoenician cities that had in the past provided Persia with its fleets; Tyre resisted him for seven months, much to his fury, even after he built the great mole that for ever after joined the island city to the mainland. Once he had captured Tyre, most of its inhabitants were slaughtered, enslaved or crucified. He bypassed Jerusalem, choosing the road through Gaza, since his real target at this stage was Egypt, ruled by a Persian satrap for nearly 200 years, since the days of Cambyses, and his conquest of this land transformed not just Egypt but the entire eastern Mediterranean. The result of his victory was that Egypt was turned around, looking outwards to the Mediterranean rather than inwards to the Nile valley. In 331 BC he decided to found a city on the northernmost edge of Egypt, on a limestone spur separated from the alluvial lands of the interior by a freshwater lake – a city next to rather than actually in Egypt, as its designation in later Latin documents as Alexandria ad Aegyptum, ‘Alexandria on the way to [or ‘next to’] Egypt’, affirms. This sense that Alexandria was more a city of the Mediterranean than of Egypt would persist for over two millennia, until the expulsion of its foreign communities in the twentieth century. For much of that period it was the greatest city in the Mediterranean. Alexander’s motives certainly included his own glorification.