Setting the stage: Previous scholarship and source material

The nature of court society in general and of its Hellenistic variant in particular has been defined in various ways, mainly in the disciplines of historical sociology and history.² Generally speaking, Hellenistic court society developed out of the

1 ‘Court society’ is a conventional concept in scholarship, firmly established by the fun-damental sociological study of Elias 1983, but occurring, for instance, in German his-toriography of Alexander already in Berve 1926, 1, 65f. For a definition of court see below p. 185. On the complexity of definition see Strootman 2014, 31f., 111-135, who defines it as the courtiers, the royal household in its social and economic aspects, and the spaces filled with this social configuration. Cf. also Weber 2007, 232f., who places greater emphasis on the oikos, and Nielsen 1994, esp. 18-26, who approaches the ques-tion by looking at the palatial space.

2 Fundamental for the study of court societies are Elias 1983 with the critical discussion by Duindam, Jeroen. Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court. Amsterdam 1994. On the ancient court in general see Winterling, Aloys. “‘Hof’. Versuch einer

variously qualified, but ultimately personal decisions of individuals to attach them-selves to the individuals whom Alexander’s demise left in prominent positions.³ It was thus at least initially divorced from the land and people it ruled over and was based on bilateral, personal bonds, cast in the traditional language of friend-ship. Its discursive representation centred on strong value-laden terms such as εὐνοία, φιλία, and πίστις (“good will, friendship, and trust”).⁴ It was thus charac-terised, at least in the early period that is of interest here, by a notable absence of hereditary and territorial factors, as well as of written rules and formal institu-tionalisation.⁵ As such, it is permissible to view the early Hellenistic court as a social network governed by a complex code of primarily social communication.⁶

idealtypischen Bestimmung anhand der mittelalterlichen und frühneuzeitlichen Ge-schichte”, in: idem. (ed.). Zwischen “Hof” und “Staat”. Antike Höfe im Vergleich. Munich 1997, 11-25; as well as the contributions in Anthony J.S. Spawforth (ed.) 2007. Habicht 1958 remains fundamental on the “ruling class” of the Hellenistic monarchies. Other pivotal studies on the Hellenistic court and the philoi in particular are Mooren 1975; Le Bohec 1985, 1987; Lund 1992, 178-182; Weber 1993, esp. 18-32, 1995, 1997; Herman 1980/1, 1997; Savalli-Lestrade 1998; Heckel, Waldemar. “King and ‘Companions:’

Observations on the Nature of Power in the Reign of Alexander”, in: Joseph Roisman (ed.). Brill’s Companion to Alexander the Great. Leiden 2003, 197-226; Paschidis 2008;

Dreyer 2011, as well as the recent comprehensive study by Strootman 2014, 31-38, who also provides a succinct summary of previous research (13-15). The outstanding work of Elizabeth Carney on the Argead court is now also available in a collected volume: eadem. King and Court in Ancient Macedonia: Rivalry, Treason and Conspiracy.

Swansea 2015.

3 Diod. 18.14.1; 18.28.6.

4 This obviously corresponds to the essentially personal nature of Hellenistic kingship that rests to a high degree on the agency of the king, expressed in concrete action, see Goodenough, Erwin R. “The Political Philosophy of Hellenistic Kingship”, in: Yale Classical Studies 1 (1928), 55-102; Walbank, Frank W. “Monarchies and monarchic Ideas”, in: CAH 7.1 (1984), 62-100, here 63-67; Billows, Richard A. Kings and Colonists.

Aspects of Macedonian Imperialism. Leiden 1995, 56f. On Hellenistic court society in general see e.g. Weber 1993, 18-32 (particularly for the early Hellenistic court); Weber 1997, 38-40; Herman 1997, 208, who explores the significance of xenia, and now Strootman 2014, 111-135, esp. 117f. on the transition from landed ἑταῖρος to personal φίλος, and 145-184.

5 Billows 1990, 243f., 250. For the development of such constraints in the high Hel-lenistic period see Strootman 2014, 165-184, highlighting the emergence of tiered court titles (165-172), a speaking order in the synhedrion (167), a finely tuned system of taste and behavioural evaluation (174f.), as well as a catalogue of personal qualities, including being able to converse in an elegantly learned and entertaining fashion (175). The basis of these developments is the de facto possession and inheritance of landed estates by the courtiers (176).

6 The absence of formal institutionalisation is crucial to Herman 1997, 222 and 224.

These abstract observations are borne out by the dominant emic views of the court for which we have evidence in this early, formative period, which seem to represent it as a permanent if relatively flexible institution centred upon the per-son of the king and bound by a certain habitus. The terminology in evidence in the sources variously highlights 1) the time spent with a specific individual, i.e. the king, (διατρίβειν); 2) the personal attendance and service (θεραπεία) devoted to this individual, prompted by the bonds of friendship (φιλία); 3) the spatial configu-ration arising from occupation of the same space (αὐλή → αὐλικοί) or, to put it more abstractly, from the enduring co-presence of the constituent elements of this centralised social construct (οἱπερὶτὸνδεῖνα), on occasion expressed in spatial rather than personal terms (οἱ περὶ τὴναὐλήν).⁷ Subtending these more specific

7 On emic conceptions of the Hellenistic court as visible in the language involved see Weber 2007, 232f.; Strootman 2014, 38-40; 118f., though it is necessary to distinguish insider and outsider perspectives, as well as take into account the varying degrees of affiliation to an essentially personal and thus situationally fluid social construct. Many of these designations are most commonly found in Polybius, the best source on the Hellenistic court, who is representative of a period of more developed conceptions.

See e.g. Plb. 5.26.9 (ἡ αὐλή); 4.42.2 (αὐλικοὶ); 5.36.1 (οἱ περὶ τὴν αὐλήν). ∆ιατρίβειν is commonly found in early honorary decrees for ‘courtiers’ (e.g. IG II² 495:11; IG XII.6 1:30:8; IG XII.9 198:1), and therefore represents the point of view of a sympathetic citizen outsider. In honorary decrees from Eretria (IG XII.9 210:5f.; 212:6), being around the king (εἶναι περὶ τὸν βασιλέα) is found as a qualification of early Antigonid

‘courtiers’. Unsurprisingly, φίλος is attested even as a self-description (CID 4.11:3; see further Billows 1990, 248f. with ns. 19-21 for further evidence of its usage already in the Diadoch period) and OGIS 9:2 (=I.Ephesos 5, 1452) attests the use of the related οἰκεῖος, which makes the close bond between friend and household explicit, also in an honorary decree. While Plutarch can distinguish between θεραπεία and φίλοι (Demetr.

5.3; 16.3), Diodorus has the option not to, even when both must be meant (19.11.3).

Strootman 2014, 39, rightly notes that these designations seem to overlap on occasion.

His caution regarding the exact significance of θεραπεία appears overstated, however.

It seems relatively clear that θεραπεία encompasses a larger group than the φίλοι and included slaves, hetairai, eunuchs, guards, and indeed personal effects of various kinds (for variations cf. e.g. Plut. Demetr. 5.3; Xen. Cyrop. 4.6.1; 7.5.65; for hetairai consider that the famous Lamia was initially captured by Demetrios Poliorketes at Salamis, who

‘took’ her from Ptolemy; see Plut. Demetr. 16.3 with Wheatley, Patrick. “Lamia and the Besieger: An Athenian hetaerae and a Macedonian king”, in: Olga Palagia and Stephen V. Tracy (eds.). The Macedonians at Athens 322~229 B.C. Oxford 2003, 30-36, here 30).

Θεραπεία is thus the Greek expression for the ‘trappings’ that play a large part in mak-ing a court a court and a kmak-ing a kmak-ing, i.e. for everythmak-ing that concerns the kmak-ing’s dis-tributed self. The φίλοι, on the other hand, are those within this self linked to the king’s person by friendship, not paid service or ownership. The terms thus appear func-tionally distinct, but encompass overlapping social groups in that the ‘friends’ could function as retinue and even servants might be called ‘friends’, displaying different situational identities in different contexts to different partners in interaction. The

formulations are basic conceptions of the ruler as a distributed individual that find linguistic expression in οἰκός, βασιλεία, and φίλοι/φιλία.⁸

The Hellenistic court, long ignored as a topic, has recently been discussed by Rolf Strootman in what may well become the standard work on the topic.⁹ Basing himself in part on a study of the early-modern absolutist court by Jürgen von Krüdener, Strootman analyses the court as an amalgam of various intertwined socio-political, economic, and symbolic functions. The result is the emergence of the court as 1) an arena of political negotiation, 2) an administrative centre, 3) a symbolic centre, 4) a stage for self-representation, and finally, 5) a redistributive centre.¹⁰ I find his analysis of these various functions extremely valuable, but use them here as a foil since his overall project is rather different from mine.

We differ in three main respects. The first is that his work does not dwell on the formative period of the Diadochi in great detail, mainly because Strootman has designed his book as a synthetic handbook.¹¹ This difference is significant as

phrases οἱ περὶ τὴν αὐλήν/τὸν δεῖνα, as well as αὐλικοί appear to include both φίλοι and θεραπεία, and hence function as an indiscriminate master category.

8 Strootman 2014, 38-40; 121 with n. 39. Rulers as individuals are fundamentally con-structed as more extensive, although of course every individual situationally encom-passed by them is also ‘distributed’. The ancient terminology used for court society, especially in the case of the φίλοι, thus makes the construction of a social network as the core of this social dynamic explicit, but the conception of this network as located within the οἰκός as a distributed individual immediately imposes centralisation upon this network.

9 Strootman 2014.

10 Strootman 2014, 34-38; cf. Billows 1990, 251-268, who emphasises the administrative dimension, and Weber 1997, who analyses the court as an amalgam of rule, repre-sentation, and interaction. Krüdener 1973, esp. 39f., 70-72, emphasises two things: 1) the generation of a social rather than political attractiveness of court society by virtue of the charismatisation of the ruler and his environment, as well as the refinement of fashion, resulting in a depoliticisation of the aristocracy, which is compensated for by increased social distinction; 2) the concomitant deindividualising effects of court so-ciety that impose upon courtiers a heteronomous definition of self in terms of function for someone else, i.e. the monarch. One should note that Diadoch kingship is not directly comparable to absolute monarchy in the form attributed to, e.g., Louis XIV as it lacked both an institutionalised aristocracy and extensive claims to divine legiti-mation founded on an institutionalised religion that hinged on metaphysical belief; see Habicht 1970², 230-242; Préaux 1978, 1, 183-271; Gehrke 1982, 254-257 and passim;

Lund 1992, 169-174; Weber 1993, 3-8, 22-26; more recently Müller, Sabine. “Deme-trios Poliorketes, Aphrodite und Athen”, in: Gymnasium 117:6 (2010), 559-573. Reli-gious responses hinged on the agency displayed, not on a belief in the king’s trans-cendental ‘godlikeness’ (see e.g. Chaniotis, Angelos “The Divinity of Hellenistic Ru-lers”, in: Erskine (ed.) 2003, 431-445, here 432f., 436).

11 Strootman 2014, 41; 112-117.

the court society of the early Hellenistic period is characterised by undeveloped structures embroiled in a period of transition. In other words, if the Diadoch period is characterised by the fact that there is paradoxically no ‘king’ and no

‘court’, and many ‘kings’ and many ‘courts’, is it valid to speak of ‘court society’?¹² This lack of formal distinctions makes the investigation more challenging and is traditionally responded to by studying the individual actors and their actions, as has been variously done. By contrast, the network perspective used here studies

‘court society’ in the Diadoch period by considering the processes of translation that emerge from the source material as being attached to these ‘kings’ and their

‘courts’. This in turn necessitates, at least to some degree, the inclusion of the army due to the structural importance of military activity for the development of the power discourse of the Hellenistic period and the identities of the actors in-volved.¹³ This has consequences for the definition of ‘court’ as a societal figura-tion of contingency control. In line with the concepfigura-tion adopted in the discussion of the Characters, the court is therefore understood as the distributed self of the ruler, which results from his translation of other entities into his construction of the world.¹⁴ This happens through communal story-telling, through narratives told within the social network thus formed.

As Tony Spawforth has further pointed out, it is important to respect that the court is not merely a social, but a socio-spatial figuration.¹⁵ Combined with the

12 Billows 1990, 242-250, and Lund 1992, 169-174, for instance, do use the term.

13 On the systemic omnipresence of war in the Hellenistic period see Préaux 1978, 1, 295-297; Chaniotis 2005, 1-12, 154-157. Schuffert 2005, 253-350 discusses the wars of the Diadoch period in detail. On the triad of king, friends, and forces see famously OGIS 219 (=I.Ilion 32):12-29; I.Magnesia 86:15f.; I.Priene 14:6f. (=Welles 1934, no.

6, with the obligatory comparandum of OGIS 11 (=I.Priene 14):10f., where the people of Priene had forgotten to include the friends in their good wishes). See further Habicht 1958, 3f.; Orth 1977, 44f., 67; Musti, Domenico. “Syria and the East”, in:

CAH 7.1 (1984), 175-220, here 179.

14 In the Diadoch period these individuals of course come to be called βασιλεύς. On this cf. Herman 1997, 203-207, 221f., who highlights that court societies are social for-mations, in which power is concentrated in the hands of a ruler and his immediate entourage, controlled by an unformalised system of agency constraints in the form of etiquette.

15 Cf. Spawforth, Tony. “Introduction”, in: Anthony J. S. Spawforth (ed.). Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies. Cambridge 2007, 1-16, here 1-4: “It is clear, though, that the ancient Greeks and Romans had conceptualised the court at least to some degree.

Thus the Greek word from which the modern neologism ‘aulic’ derives, αὐλή, along with the Latin equivalent aula, is used by ancient writers both of the ruler’s dwelling as a physical entity and in a more abstract sense of the people to be found there – ‘those περὶ τὴν αὐλήν’. This idea, that ‘the court’ is both the spatial framework of the ruler’s

above definition and put into network terms, this means that the distribution of the ruler’s self encompasses also the built and object ‘environment’, and that this mesh-like self is the locus of contingency-control through narrative. The interest is thus in court society as a broad, productive socio-spatial web that comes to function as the primary source of meaning and contingency control for the indi-viduals it encompasses, including the king. As a consequence of this distinct theo-retical approach, this study focuses on how such a narrative of contingency and control is produced.¹⁶

Another related difference accordingly concerns the underlying notion of power employed in analyses of the Hellenistic court. Strootman draws on Max Weber, Michael Mann, and Charles Tilly, and in doing so emphasises the sig-nificance of violence and coercion, or rather of legitimate authority in avoiding them. On my approach, violence and coercion already presuppose power, under-stood as sets of identities that produce collective agency. That is not to say that I necessarily disagree with his conclusions: the self-reinforcing feedback effects of power – violence produces subject territory, subject territory yields revenue, re-venue permits more violence – are real and vital; but these are surface effects.¹⁷ Power begins earlier and lies deeper, a point that Strootman summarily dismisses so as to keep things more manageable: “In a world accustomed to monarchic rule for many centuries there was no need to justify the existence of kingship as such.”¹⁸ Nevertheless, this justification needs to be constantly reproduced, espe-cially within the Greek world with its strong negative discourse on kingship. This reproduction depends on the actors involved being moved to provide their agency to pursue the value-constructs produced in story-telling.¹⁹

The fundamental question thus concerns the production of meaning, the stories that enable the social network of the court to persist through change, thus allowing for the continuous creation of collective agency and at the same time

existence and also the social configuration with which he shares that space, is fun-damental in modern attempts to define and analyse the court.” (p. 3f.).

16 Although Strootman regularly employs the term network as a metaphorical conceptual aid with regularity (2014, 36, 57, 96, 120, 145, 162 etc.), he does not use it as a heuristic tool.

17 Strootman 2014, 51f.

18 Strootman 2014, 53. Herman 1997, 206, similarly holds that court formation is a na-tural process.

19 Elias 1983, 8; Herman 1997, 200; Brosius, Maria. “New out of Old? Court and Court Ceremonies in Achaemenid Persia”, in: Anthony J.S. Spawforth (ed.). The Court and Court Society in Ancient Monarchies. Cambridge 2007, 17-57, here 53f.; Strootman 2014, 93-184.

naturalising the court as a social system.²⁰ Since the early Hellenistic court was barely formalised, the interest must be in the social interactions that make up the court and constitute it as a discursive space, as a hub in a network of story-tell-ing.²¹ Since the reality of such a complex network of interactions in the remote past is irrecoverable, I will shift the focus to the stories themselves and attempt, as in Chapter 3, to reconstruct the abstract ideal.²² In other words, I use the texts not to identify historical interactions and their interplay, but treat them as the products of stories told at court that transport a construction of the world.²³ In tracing this process, I will try to avoid presupposing the exceptionality of the king a priori, since it is here considered a contingency-controlling product of narrative rather than self-evident or traditional.²⁴

Previous research on the Hellenistic court as a social system has addressed such questions up to a point, but they have never constituted a core interest, because the focus has usually been on later Hellenistic developments. This is of course largely due to the sources available. In a pioneering discussion of Polybius, Gabriel Herman worked through the historian’s loathing of courtiers and his por-trayal of their society as a vipers’ nest full of intrigue, while pointing out patterns in the chaos. In his view, which owes a lot to Norbert Elias, Polybius sets up a paradox, an absolute king with limited power, circumscribed by tacit rules that

20 This question was explicitly posed by Herman 1997, 200: “How did any individual […]

assisted only by a small coterie of hangers-on, manage to impose his will for so long upon such vast territories and upon subjects who so overwhelmingly outnumbered his own followers?” On the significance of stories and signs cf. Geertz 1977, 152, who is, however, thinking along more conventional lines of the symbolics of power.

21 Cf. Weber 1995, 290. On contested imperial story-telling see Ma 1999, 226-242.

22 On texts as actors see Callon 1991, 140f.

23 Strootman 2014, 43f., based on Kertzer, David. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven and London 1988, 76, notes that ritual, or rather collective action, does not presuppose a value-consensus across all individuals involved, arguing that Durkheim showed the cohesive efficacy of ritual despite division. I would stress, however, that collective ac-tion generates a situaac-tional social network configuraac-tion that can be performed as consensual and thus, in constructivist terms, is consensual. This works by creating an identity set capable of “suspending” total consensus, obscuring difference. If this set of identities that associate communality and social order can be transferred, extended, and blended into other situations, this specific form of collective action unfolds a wider significance in the construction of a control regime.

24 Cf. Elias 1983, 66-69; Herman 1997. The focus on the kings is evident from the way in which scholarship on the Diadochi is most prominently organised, namely by individual actor. See e.g. Seibert 1983; Billows 1990; Grainger 1990; Lund 1992;

Schäfer 2002; Anson, Edward M. Eumenes of Cardia: A Greek among Macedonians. Leiden 2004.

demanded clever strategies, including the promotion of dependence, the mono-polisation of ties and resources, the creation of emotional, personal bonds that bypassed formal court hierarchy, and playing the courtiers off against one an-other.²⁵ Overall, however, the overwhelming impression is one of a society syste-mically riddled with faultlines and contingency.²⁶ Looking at the evidence much more broadly, Gregor Weber saw a more productive, informal, and honest system in place, especially in the case of the Diadochi, characterised less by endemic intrigue and violence, and more by communal agency and solidarity in repre-sentation and rule.²⁷ He also made a valuable distinction between the court as a sphere of interaction, an instrument of rule, and as a locus of representation. Léon Mooren took a similar line, rightly emphasising the high degree of smooth func-tionality the court achieved at the level of the synhedrion, the advisory council.²⁸

demanded clever strategies, including the promotion of dependence, the mono-polisation of ties and resources, the creation of emotional, personal bonds that bypassed formal court hierarchy, and playing the courtiers off against one an-other.²⁵ Overall, however, the overwhelming impression is one of a society syste-mically riddled with faultlines and contingency.²⁶ Looking at the evidence much more broadly, Gregor Weber saw a more productive, informal, and honest system in place, especially in the case of the Diadochi, characterised less by endemic intrigue and violence, and more by communal agency and solidarity in repre-sentation and rule.²⁷ He also made a valuable distinction between the court as a sphere of interaction, an instrument of rule, and as a locus of representation. Léon Mooren took a similar line, rightly emphasising the high degree of smooth func-tionality the court achieved at the level of the synhedrion, the advisory council.²⁸