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Angelos Chaniotis, "Age of Conquests: The Greek World from Alexander to Hadrian" (Harvard UP, 2018)
01:11:35
The world that Alexander remade in his lifetime was transformed once more by his death in 323 BCE...
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Ryan Tripp
This is Ryan Tripp. I'm here on behalf of the New Books Network on the Archaeology Channel. We're here today with Angelos Haniotis, author of Age of the Greek World From Alexander to Hadrian, published earlier in 2018 by Harvard University Press. So, Professor Haniotis is Professor of Ancient History and Classics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Before we get get into the prompts, can you tell us a little bit about the covers for the various editions of the book?
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Angelos Haniotis
Yes, of course. I had a lot of thoughts about how to find something, an image that somehow accumulates all the various aspects of a very long period that I discuss in this book. It's a period of 500 years and I decided to go for the Harvard University Press edition for an engraving of the 6th 16th century by the Dutch engraver Martin Heemskerk, which depicts his view of how the Pharos, the lighthouse of Alexandria, might have looked like. The reason that I selected this image is first of all because the Pharos of Alexandria is one of the seven wonders of the world that were created during this long period. The second wonder of the world is the Colossus of Rhodes. The second reason is that the lighthouse of Alexandria represents advancement in technology and technology and progress in technology is something that characterizes this period. And the third reason is that I wanted to find something that alludes to travel, to mobility, to the movement of people in this period. And of course, the Pharos of Alexandria is something that is a work of architecture and art and technology that was outside of the narrow Greek world. It was in Egypt. And this also gives an impression of the spread of the Greeks and of Greek culture outside of the geographical border of Greece in this long period between Alexander and Hadrian. For the English edition that was published by Profile Books in London, I have selected again an image that represents that shows a ceremony in Ptolemaic Alexandria, again in Egypt, where one can see at the same time Greek soldiers in the company of Egyptian priests. And I found that image very characteristic for the coming together of entirely different traditions of Greeks and non Greeks in this period.
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Ryan Tripp
So what period does the title Age of Conquests refer to? And what prompted you to study Hellenism of the geographically inclusive ecumene? And how did you approach Hellenization in this study?
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Angelos Haniotis
Yeah, well, this is a very good question. Actually, almost all of my work, especially two books, one in German and another in English, that were dedicated to the Hellenistic period. The Hellenistic period in a more narrow sense, that is between Alexander and Cleopatra. This is the political history between the conquest of Alexander and the destruction of the last independent Hellenistic kingdom with the death of Cleopatra. However, when I started discussing social, cultural and religious phenomena, I observed that it is actually impossible to stop the discussion with the death of Cleopatra and with beginning of the reign of Augustus, because a lot of them continue well into the imperial period. Actually, we may observe them, and we may observe them in a better way in the 2nd century AD than we do because of the lack of sources that we do in earlier periods. So for a book that is not simply a narrative of wars and political events and important developments in political history, but it is also a reconstruction of life, society, of religion, of culture, I thought that it would be a misrepresentation of the development if I would stop around 30 BC and would only cover only 300 years. Because the death of Cleopatra is not a turning point in the history of culture. It is a turning point in the history of political institutions. It is a turning point in the history of Rome and the Greek world. But it is not a turning point in the history of religion, in history of culture, in the history of society. And this is why I decided to go beyond this chronological border and discuss also the development of the Greek world in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, that is under the rule of the first three dynasties, until the reign of Hadrian. I could have continued for until one of the successors of Hadrian too. But I decided to stop with the reign of Hadrian, because Hadrian is a peculiar emperor. He's someone who was called by his contemporaries as the Greculus, the small Greek, because he adored Greek civilization. But more importantly, because during his reign, something that started with Alexander the Great came to completion. And this is the idea that all the Greeks belong together. This started with the campaign of Alexander the great in 334 BC when he started a Pan Hellenic campaign, a campaign that was supposed to unite all the Greeks against their enemy, the Achaemenid Empire of the Persians. But it actually was not completed. Contrary to any expectation, the Greeks continued fighting against each other. But it was Hadrian who, with the foundation of an institution called the Panhellenion, the Council of all Greeks, created an institution in which Greek cities were supposed to be represented. This happened in 132. And in a way it closes a circle that started with Alexander the Great. And I found it fitting to stop the narrative and the discussion of the important social, cultural and religious developments with the death of Hadrian.
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Ryan Tripp
Now you hold that the age of conquest has become a dynamic area of study because of the progress of archaeological research, especially in Macedonia, Asia Minor and Central Asia, as well as the publication of inscriptions, in the study of papyri, in coins. How did these new sources result in usually small, but sometimes dramatic revisions and nuances to established ways of knowing this long Hellenistic age?
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Angelos Haniotis
First of all, all these discoveries allow us to get a better sense, a better reconstruction of the historical events. We can provide better dates for historical developments, the reign of kings, the existence of usurpers. But this is for me, less important. What is far more important is that with the help of these new discoveries, especially the discovery of inscriptions and the discovery of papyri, we can really write now a social history and the history of culture in These historical periods. For instance, if we know that in the Hellenistic period And in the first centuries of the imperial period, that is, let's say between 300 B.C. and 200 A.D. we have approximately 500 different festivals in which athletes and musicians and so on compete. This is exclusively thanks to inscriptions and coins. Inscriptions, because they mention. Because they give the names of the victorious athletes and musicians and artists and comic and dramatic poets and epic poets and so on. And coins, because many times coins were issued in order to commemorate important festival. So by collecting all this information, we get an entirely new picture about the festive culture in the Greek world and in the Hellenized world in the centuries. To give you another example, let us take for instance the existence of ethnic of different ethnic groups in both Greece, Asia Minor and the other areas that were controlled by the Hellenistic kingdoms. If we know something about the history of the Jews in the Hellenistic world, it is not exclusively through papyri and inscriptions, but they do help. Otherwise we would have, for instance, the narrative of the second book of the Maccabees that describe the revolt of the Jews against the Seleucid kings. But it is thanks to papyri, for instance, that we get information about the self administration Jewish communities in Ptolemaic Egypt. We get information about how they interacted with non Jews, both in Judea Palestine, but also in other geographical areas. And we get also a lot of information about the function of institutions. For instance, if we know something about the spread of democratic institutions outside of mainland Greece, it is thanks to inscriptions that describe the day, day function of the popular assembly, the council, the magistrates and so on. Not in major cities, but in small towns whose names are sometimes even unknown to professional ancient historians like Morilos in Macedonia. We know, for instance from this small city that there was a benefactor who bought a cow expecting to fund the sacrifices to the gods from the offspring of this cow. This is information that is not contained in any of the main literary works of this period. It's not something that would interest a historian who writes about wars and about the expansion of Rome and so on. But these are the information that allow us, in a sense to travel, like using a time machine, and see how ordinary people live and talk to each other and think and feel and dream and suffer. And this is what interests me as a social and cultural historian. Not so much the reconstruction of the main political events, but what interests me is how people experienced history at their own time. And this is something that we can only do if we read inscriptions and papyri, okay?
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Ryan Tripp
So, first off, to sort of set the stage here, who were Alexander the Great's successors? And I guess, why do you identify them as such? And why was it to be expected that if one of them attempted to gain too much power, the others would unite against him? Kind of offshoot question, can you also address the roles of adventure kings, particularly Pyrrhus of Epirus?
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Angelos Haniotis
Yes. Well, the Hellenistic period starts with the successors. And as the word implies, the death of Alexander the Great created a big problem. Of course, kings always die. I do not know any case in history of an immortal king. Perhaps in TV series or so, but not in reality. And whenever a king dies, there is someone who is going to succeed him. So why are we talking about successors in the plural form? It is because when Alexander died, he not only died without having a male descendant, a son. His wife was pregnant, but nobody knew whether she's going to give birth to a boy or a girl. He had a brother who, under different circumstances, would have been his successor, but his brother had a handicap. But this is not the only problem. The problem, the main problem, is that when Alexander the Great became king, he became king of a kingdom which you could cross by walking or riding your horse within a week from Adria to Thrace. And when he died, he was a king of a huge empire that extended from the Adriatic coast to Afghanistan and from the Black Sea to Ethiopia. And the people who surrounded him had seen how a prince and a king of a small kingdom had conquered what people thought was the world at that time. They had seen how someone with skill and intelligence, but also with courage and with the ability to take risks, with charisma, with the ability to lead armies, could do anything. And this has influenced them. This is why when the opportunity was given for people to try to gain power, they seized that opportunity. And the opportunity was given when Alexander died and there was no successor within his family who could continue his work. This is when the generals, contemporaries of Alexander, sometimes older, sometimes younger, realized that what Alexander had achieved was something that they could achieve, too. And the best example for these ambition and the hope to continually conquer something can be best exemplified in the case of Pyrrhus of Epirus, who started as a king in a very small kingdom, continued his adventures in Italy, created a kingdom that did not last in Sicily, went back to mainland Greece and Macedonia, failed to conquer entire Macedonia, moved to southern Greece. So he was continually trying to add territories to the areas that he controlled. Another good example would be a king by the name of Demetrius the besieger and what united all these people was the ambition and the hope that they could control territories. But what also united them, and this is what brings me to the second part of your question, is why too much power gained by one would make all the others unite against him. What also characterizes them is fear. They also realize how the instability of their rule and whenever one of the successors managed to be too powerful, he would pose a threat to all the others. And this created continually new alliances whereby those who thought that they are weak united in order to undermine the position of the one who was strong for a short moment. And the result was a series of wars for a period of 20 years. This is the most difficult part in any class in the Hellenistic world is to teach the wars of the successors. Not even I remember exactly when happened what in which constellation, because these constellations continually changed. The allies in one year were the worst enemies in the next one. But at the same time, this is what really makes the Hellenistic period into a very characteristic period for the idea of expansion in imperialistic trend. For instance, it is narrated that Epirus was once asked by a philosopher why he wanted to cross over to Italy and conquer Italy. He said, well, if I conquer Italy, then I continue Sicily is nearby. I can continue and conquer Sicily. And then the philosopher asked him, and what will happen after you have conquered Sicily? And he said, well, I'll just cross the sea. There is Libya on the other side of the sea and it is weakened. This is the place where I can continue my war and then conquer Libya as well. And then nobody will ever threaten us. And what are you going to do next? And Pyrrhus said, after that I will just relax and enjoy drinking wine. Of course. The philosopher asked him, why don't you enjoy drinking wine now? Why do you have to go through that trouble? This anecdote about Pyrrhus is a very good epitome of what characterizes the entire Hellenistic period of the drive that ambitious people had to continually try to conquer additional territories. It is also interesting to see that none of these kings calls himself king of something. They are not kings of Syria or kings of Egypt or kings of Thrace. They are kings, simply kings, which means kings of whatever they are in a position to control.
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Angelos Haniotis
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Ryan Tripp
Cut the camera. They see us.
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Ryan Tripp
What examples of people's ideas and institutions can you provide to substantiate your contention that virtuosity in the performing arts, athletic skills and education enhance social position across Hellenistic cities and kingdoms?
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Angelos Haniotis
This is a complex phenomenon. I will try to make it simple. In the periods before the beginning of the Hellenistic period, what counts. What counts for the social position is the ownership of land. People can be wealthy in many different ways, as skilled workers and artisans, or as merchants and so on. But nothing is as important for a high social position as the ownership of land. The problem is that only citizens, and citizens alone have the right to own land in a city. So you may be as wealthy as you like, but if you are not a citizen in the city, you will never be able even to buy a house. The ownership of house and land is the privilege, the exclusive privilege of citizens. What changes in the Hellenistic world is, first of all, mobility, the possibilities of people to travel. I mentioned before the existence of 500 different festivals. Well, 500 different festivals mean that people travel from one place to another, exactly like tennis players today, go from one game to one competition to another. They traveled from Pergamon to Ephesus and from Ephesus to Smyrna and so on, trying to win in these festivals. And I'm just mentioning one example, and winning in a festival is not just winning glory and a wreath or a crown, you also earn money. One characteristic of festivals in this period is the fact that some of these festivals are recognized as equivalent to the Olympic festival, which means that the winners get from their own city money and privileges and pensions and so on for the rest of their life. This means accumulation of wealth in the hands of people who earn this money because of their skills, because their ingenuity or their virtuosity, because of their athletic accomplishments as boxers and runners and so on. And what they can do now, and they couldn't do in earlier periods, is that they can buy land. Because one of the related phenomena in the Hellenistic period is the fact that the rules about ownership of land loosen more. People can become citizens either through individual grant of citizenship or through massive naturalization of new citizens. They can settle in places where they can have exactly the same rights as the local population. This means that by owning land, they can settle in areas, they can become benefactors, they can acquire social prestige through their benefactions, through the service for the community. In other words, phenomena that until that period were limited to a very small number of citizens. The citizens who were born in wealthy families that owned a lot of land gradually become something that can be achieved also by people who were not born in aristocratic origarchic families, but gained their wealth, for instance, by being very good teachers of oratory or by being philosophers or medical doctors. And this is something that can be observed to a great extent in the periods after Alexander the Great, but is very, very rare and unusual in the historical period before the conquest of Alexander.
- [24:57]
Ryan Tripp
How and why did male and female benefactors, voluntary associations of foreign and lower stratum peoples, shifts in the role of the hymnasium and state sanctioned ephebia, an expansion of agonistic festivals, which you've alluded to by size, aesthetic regulations, politics, etc. As well as personal religiosity, all sustain Hellenistic ideas and cultures through the Roman imperial period.
- [25:27]
Angelos Haniotis
This is the most central question concerning my book. As I said at the beginning, I did not want to only study three centuries from Alexander to Cleopatra, precisely because I noticed that many of the phenomena that you mentioned, for instance, the education of the young men in Gymnasia, in the institution of the fab, that is spending two years in military and other training under the supervision of the city, these phenomena do not stop, but continue. And it is this continuity that makes what I call the age of conquest a unified period that can be studied as a historical period. Let us take, for instance, the example of the voluntary associations today we would call them clubs. Such associations existed since the 7th century BC. They are mentioned, for instance, in the legislation of Solon. What changes? What changes is the fact that although we find these associations in earlier periods, in very small numbers, in very few cities after the conquest of Alexander the Great, we find them everywhere. We find them everywhere. Where we have trade, where we have foreigners living there, where we have people who move, where we have mercenary soldiers, where we have worshippers of particular divinities, what we observe in the Hellenistic period and then in the imperial period is the fact that that people who live in a city do not only identify themselves with the civic culture of the city. But they also create alternative forms of identity. They want to find support and solidarity in smaller groups. A form of solidarity that the big city cannot offer. So they organize themselves on the basis of what they do in professional associations. Associations of sculptors or of bakers, or pot makers or linen sellers and so on. They organize themselves in clubs according to what they believe. For instance, worshippers of the Egyptian gods. Or worshippers of the good demon, or worshippers of Zeus and so on. They organize themselves in associations. The basis of who they are. On the basis of their origin or their family. And these voluntary associations become a very important form of social exchange in cities. And this is a phenomenon that cannot be discussed and studied. If one just stops and studied it separately for the Hellenistic period and the imperial period. So this is one of the examples. How a Hellenistic cultural and social forms Continue into the imperial period. Another example is the example of the gymnasium. What the gymnasium originally means. It originates in the Greek word gymnos, which means naked. It is the place where young men train naked. But the gymnasium develops in something more. It becomes the place where people come together. In order to discuss politics. Or in order to listen to the lecture by a philosopher. They not only train the body, they have additional cultural activities. And this is a place in which we may observe again, in a very good way. How culture, socialization, Philosophical ideas, religious ideas, Social prestige and so on can be. Can be observed. How exchanges take place among people who live in the same community. And this gymnasium becomes a characteristic feature of Hellenicity, of being a Greek. For instance, when in Judea, some of the Jews in the Ptolemaic. And then in the Seleucid period. Wanted to show that they follow Greek culture. What they did is they went to the gymnasium. They attended the gymnasium. Because this is the best characteristic of being a Greek polis. When a small city, the city of Tyriaeon, which was a garrison, Decided to become. To declare its independence and become a polis. What made it a polis is the fact that it had a gymnasium. And this feature continues on into the imperial period. And it is also a feature that characterizes Greek culture everywhere. Where the Greeks settled. One of the best excavated gymnasia Is the gymnasium in Ay Khanoum, a city in Afghanistan. I don't know whether this still survives because of the war in the recent decades. But when it was excavated, it was a magnificent building. So by studying such phenomena as the gymnasium or the institution of the Ephes, the participation in festivals, the worship of gods, or the advanced position of women, One may observe the continuity in this historical period and not the break the continuity of Hellenic culture from the period that we traditionally called Hellenistic into the imperial period, the period in which Greece was under the rule of Roman emperors.
- [31:15]
Ryan Tripp
If possible, can you also provide examples of the quoting assimilation of Greek deities with local spiritual systems and vice versa, and explain the shift to varieties of mystery cults and miracles during this long Hellenistic age?
- [31:35]
Angelos Haniotis
One of the reasons that I was interested in the Hellenistic period already as a student is the fact that one may observe similarities with things that we experience today. Let us take, for instance, the case of new religions. People feel in big cities and we have big cities and megacities in the Hellenistic period. In a globalized world, they feel isolated, they feel small. They feel very strongly the need of protection. Protection either in the form of a social network that may offer support or protection by means of appealing to supernatural powers. This is something again that characterizes these five centuries that I discuss in my book. It is a period in which people seek protection in the help provided by divinities. And these divinities are not the divinities that were traditionally worshipped in the cities. Because these traditional divinities do not offer a personal communication between the God and the mortal. This personal communication can be provided through the initiation into a mystery cult. Initiation into a cult which is exclusive, which depends on the transmission of certain secrets, which promises to the one who gets initiated that he or she will be protected by divinity during life. And this protection will continue after death, when the divinity will lead the dead person into a better afterlife. An afterlife that is better than that of those who have not been initiated. Mystery cults existed in Greece again before Alexander the Great. But what we observe again after the conquest of Alexander the Great Great is a tremendous spread of these trends of these mystery cults. And what we observe is the connection between traditional Greek ideas and foreign ideas. One of the best examples are the mysteries of the Egyptian gods or the mysteries of Isis. Isis is a traditional Egyptian goddess. She was worshipped occasionally also in Greece. But her cult is widespread after the conquest of Alexander the Great, mainly after the 2nd century BC. And ISIS is a goddess who unites in her person all powers. She is a goddess who is even stronger than fate. In traditional Greek religion, all gods are weaker than fate. Isis is not. She can change everything. She is a goddess who can be worshipped under different names. In Athens, she can be called the Matter. In Ephesus, she can be called Artemis. He unifies in her person all the powers of all female divinities that the Greeks knew And she offers her protection to those who decide to devote themselves to her cult. And this is another important difference between religion in the pre Hellenistic period and religion after the Hellenistic period. It is the sense of devotion, it is the sense of loyalty to one particular divinity that does not necessarily exclude worshipping other gods. It's not a monotheistic religion, but it is a religion in which some divinity is regarded as more powerful and also closer to the mortal. And this is something that a we can very well study if we turn our attention to inscriptions, because inscriptions are a very direct expression of personal religiosity. They tell us what people have felt, what people have experienced. And in this inscription, people, for instance, tell us that they decided to dedicate a statue because a God or a goddess appeared in their dream. What these inscriptions describe are personal, face to face encounters between the mortals and the gods. This is not new, but it is more intense and it is more widespread than in previous periods. Actually, I could easily almost nothing. None of the phenomena that we observe in the Hellenistic period is something that has never been observed before, but is now being observed in graded intensity in more places and in larger numbers than in earlier periods. And this also characterizes, for instance, the experience with miracles. Miracles happened from the beginning of time. People have been dreaming from the beginning of time. But it is only from the Hellenistic period onwards that people write down that they have seen a dream. They make a dedication explaining, I dedicate this because the God appeared in my dream and this makes the difference.
- [36:49]
Ryan Tripp
Similarly, can you offer evidence of what you refer to as cultural convergence spurred by aquasis or assemblies of philosophers, itinerant scholars, scientific exploration, goods which sometimes were alluded as well as animals across the ecumenical many.
- [37:10]
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- [37:55]
Angelos Haniotis
What we have today is Twitter and with tweet you can reach people whom you have never seen in distant Worlds. We have YouTube and an image can travel very fast. And with the image. What travels are also experiences and sounds and images. We have Facebook and so on. We live in A world that is very closely connected. And precisely because the world is so closely connected, there is a convergence in behavior. For instance, people see what the body language of a journalist is, or the body language of a singer in MTV and so on. And this can be imitated in the period that I study in my book. We don't have Twitter, we don't have Facebook, but we do have a similar or an analogous form of exchanges. These exchanges take form especially in the form can be observed especially in the form of travels. People travel, goods, travel, even animals travel. Exotic animals from Africa, for instance, are used in gladiatorial games and the so called venationes, hunting spectacles in which animals are brought from Africa in order to be killed for the entertainment of the audiences. One of the most interesting inscriptions that I mention in my book is the grave epigraph for a pig. Again, something that would have been inconceivable in earlier periods. And what is interesting in the story of this pig is that the pig speaks from his grave and says pig was my name and everybody loved me. And then goes on to explain that it was victorious in competitions. It was a pig that traveled from today's Durazzo to Edessa in Macedonia. That is a very long distance participating in festivals. Now, of course, a pig won't change culture, but what would change culture through travels is, for instance, the lecture of a philosopher. In the mid second century bc, the Romans experienced for the first time something extraordinary. Three philosophers arrived from Athens in order to defend the rights of the city which had lost a territory. And they appealed to the Romans so that this territory would be restituted to Athens. And then, in addition to defending the rights of the city, they started giving lectures in Rome. Amazing. The young Romans, who have never experienced something like that, went there and they experienced unique things. For instance, one day a philosopher gave a speech for in favor of justice. And the next day gave a similarly convincing speech against justice. Of course, what the Roman authorities decide to do is to kick these philosophers away and get rid of them. But this is just one example of how through travel, through public lectures, through the travel of works of art, through the travel of entertainers, musicians, poets, rhetoricians, historians, who gave lectures, narrating the history that they covered in the book and so on, made it possible that ideas could travel from one place to another. How do we know about it? We know about it through again, inscriptions that mention, for instance, that someone from Crete, a music player who played the organ, that is something that is like the ecclesiastical organ that is played Today, in churches, gave a concert in Delphi, hundreds kilometers away. So this is what makes the Hellenistic culture a culture of Koine, that is, of a unified cultural language. The same forms of dress, the same forms of music, even the same dialects and languages are used in huge areas. And wherever the Greeks come and settle and create new cities, they also introduce these forms. Again, let me give you just one example. The sayings of the Seven Sages, for instance, they were originally written in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, where they have been found in excavations is in Afghanistan, again in a gymnasium at AI Hanum, where a philosopher who has traveled to this area decided to have them written down. And this is one out of many examples of how ideas, philosophical works and so on may become known to people in extremely distant places.
- [43:04]
Ryan Tripp
So let's discuss a little bit. Conflict and alliance. How and why did insurgencies against Macedonian garrisons, spearheaded by statesmen such as the Athenian commodities, result in alliances that in turn demonstrated Polybian simplochi, which is entanglement. And speaking of insurgencies, what role did Celts play in the Greek collective memory and ethnic consciousness vis a vis, for example, Roman Carthage during this short third century bce?
- [43:40]
Angelos Haniotis
Yes, this is a specific question, but also a good question with regard to the big picture. First of all, let me briefly explain with an example what simploque or entanglement means. The best way to explain it is with the small world impact. It is the fly that moves in Beijing and makes a bridge collapse in Texas. It is the domino effect that things that happen in one place may have results in many distant places. For instance, Cremonides in Athens create an alliance between Athens and Sparta against the Macedonian king. The king of Egypt joined this alliance. And before you wait along, you have a small world war. These small wars were. Well, the most famous war of the previous period was the Peloponnesian war that lasted 30 years. These wars did not last for 30 years. They were much shorter, but a lot of cities and federations participated in them. And this is the beginning of the idea of an entanglement of the entire Mediterranean. Polybius, of course, uses this word in order to explain how through Roman expansion and Roman political interventions, the entire world somehow became a unity. Because things that happened in Northern Africa had an impact in Asia as regards the cells, that is the Gauls, more or less the native people of Asterix, the people who lived in what today we call France, or actually north west Switzerland, they made a massive invasion of Greece in 279 BC, 80,000 of them. And this is for the first time, the Greeks failed a threat by barbarians in a period of 200 years. The last similar invasion was by the Persians in 479 BC. And this massive invasion, as many times such wars, made the Greeks also realize their Greekness. They made them realize the Greek identity that they should be united against this foreign enemy. And they actually did join forces against the invasion. And because this was a tremendous threat that they managed to overcome, they attributed their success to the gods. This is a period in which we have a lot of narratives about miracles. One has the impression that exactly as in the Iliad, the gods fight together with the human beings, that the gods had descended from the Olympus and were fighting on earth together with the Greeks against these horrible barbarians. So the invasion of the cells is a very important factor for the creation or for the filling of a Greek identity. And this is something that was repeated in a slightly different form when the Romans invaded Greece. The difference between the Celtic invasion and Roman imperialism is that the Celtic invasion, the Celtic invasion found the Greeks uniting, whereas the Roman invasion found the Greeks separated. Some of them took the side of the Romans for opportunistic reasons. And the result was, a few decades later, the conquest of Greece. However, the Greeks, in order to come into terms with this terrible disaster which is losing their freedom, they decided to make the Romans Greeks. They invented myths according to which the Romans are actually just the descendant of Greek heroes. And this makes the conquest of Greeks by the Romans a little bit less painful. After all, it is not barbarians who conquered the Greeks. It's just distant brothers, so to say, who return to Greece and establish their rule. The Greeks were very good at such sophistic interpretations of their history.
- [48:01]
Ryan Tripp
So, onto governance, can you elucidate the various components of Hellenistic basileia which were the kingships, such as the Philoi, Symposian districts, the people's indebtedness, soldier land distribution, police reciprocities, including citizen communities, the illusion of popular assembly, ruler cults, and the theatrics of remote affability. Just try to give us briefly a framework to address the basileia.
- [48:36]
Angelos Haniotis
I can give it in two sentences. The first sentence is that kingship in the Hellenistic world is not constitutional kingship. And the second sentence is because it is not constitutional, it is a matter of negotiation. Hellenistic kings need to negotiate their power with their friends, with their army, by providing, for instance, gifts and land with the indigenous population in order to acquire the loyalty by accepting local traditions with other kings, by making presents or creating alliances with cities. By making benefactions, or by making the cities believe that actually they are free, although all the decisions or main decisions are taken by the kings. Perhaps you can allow me a third sentence in order to give an example of the theatrics of power. The king of Macedonia, Philip V, wanted to force a city in Thessaly to naturalize foreigners. So he asked them to do that by saying the wonderful sentence. I decided that you vote. And this tells it all. He decided. But in order that this becomes a law, it needed to be voted by the city of Larissa. And the Hellenistic kings were very good in negotiating their power. And in order to do that, they had to show a theatrical behavior which was a balance between, on the one hand, remotedness. They needed to show that they are remote, that they are something better, higher, wealthier than the others, and at the same time, affability. They needed to show that they care. So what we find in Hellenistic kingship is basically a very elementary form of the populism that we find in politics today.
- [50:38]
Ryan Tripp
Can you also describe the rise of Quinin sh shifts in ideas on democracia, performances of oligarchic benefactions, as well as disguised tyranny during Hellenistic poleis phases?
- [50:55]
Angelos Haniotis
Also, this question in a sense concerns theatricality or illusion. That is, the idea that nothing has changed, although everything had changed in the Hellenistic period. We see that the traditional political institution, that is the polis, the city state, remains in theory intact. It has an assembly and magistrates and council, and they vote decisions and they have armies and so on. But in reality, what the cities do and how they act is in a changed framework. They act as cities, but many of them are parts of federations and they act as cities. But many of them are indirectly or directly controlled by kings. And this also affects the institutions. For instance, the democratic institutions remain intact. Magistrates are elected. The accountability of authority remains intact. The assembly meets on a regular basis to approve of decisions. But what is the reality? The reality is that magistrates are elected by the people. But who is elected? Elected are those who are wealthy. They are elected again and again and again. And when they are not elected, then a brother or a son or a nephew will be elected. So, in a sense, their power is inherited. It is connected with their wealth. And in order to maintain this illusion of democracy and the rule of the people, what they do very often is that they provide a small part of their wealth in the form of benefactions, in order to make themselves popular. Again, this is a form of populism. Again, Affability and remoteness. Affability, showing that they care for the people. And of course, they are remote because they have more power, they have greater wealth, they have better connections, and they have more power than the people. This is something that we start observing in the third century B.C. and it continues into the Imperial period. And this is again a very good reason to study the Hellenistic period and the Imperial period together in order to observe how this development take place.
- [53:16]
Ryan Tripp
Can you concisely trace the entanglement of Rome with Hellenistic baserea through the Illyrian and Macedonian wars, addressing perhaps the causes and consequences of dynastic crises in Ptolemaic Egypt Approaching the year 200 BCE the Roman general Flaminius, defeat of the Antigonid king Philip and the subsequent Lutheria. And then the earlier, I think, 168 BCE annihilation of Macedonian phalanxes by the Roman general Paulus, and dissolution of the Antigonid kingdom in Macedonia. And then finally the invitation for Romans to join Panhellenic festivals as Greek kings.
- [54:08]
Angelos Haniotis
In this question, actually you have summarized approximately one century of Greek history which shows the gradual expansion of Rome into the Greek world. How did it started? How did it start? Perhaps through the very small intervention of the Romans in order to to fight pirates that made the life of traders difficult in the Adriatic Sea. This first war brought them into the Balkans. As soon as they were in the Balkans, they encountered another kingdom, a kingdom that did not welcome the presence. This led to a war between Macedonia and Rome and then to the next war. While they were doing one war, of course, they needed allies in Greece. Making allies means assuming obligations. When one of their allies was attacked, they had to protect the ally. Otherwise they would lose a face who would be loyal to them if they wouldn't respect their own treaties of alliance. And to make a long story short, this is how the Romans gradually progressed from one area to the next and to the next and to the next. From the west coast of the Adriatic Sea into Central Greece and from Central Greece to Thrace. From Thrace to Asia Minor and from Asia Minor to Egypt. A historian once said that the Romans conquered the world in a moment of absentmindedness. They didn't realize what they were doing. This is an exaggeration, but I do believe that when the Romans started their interventions, their entanglement with the Greek world, they didn't realize that this is a process that it is very difficult to stop. We have had in the 20th century a similar experience with the gradual expansion of the United States into the World. With the transformation of the United States into a world power. Things started with involvement in the First World War very hesitantly, similarly hesitantly, the involvement in the Second World War. But after that, there was no way to turn back. This kind of entanglement, involvement, engagement is like riding a bicycle. You cannot stop. If you stop, you're going to fall. And this is precisely the experience that the Romans did. They started, as I said, with a small war, and this brought them into Greek politics. Roman became a factor of Hellenistic political history. You mentioned Eleutheria. That is the declaration of the freedom of the Greek cities. And this is a very good example of how the Romans at the beginning, didn't know what to do with these Greeks. They had defeated their worst enemy of Greek freedom, who was King Philip V, but they didn't know what to do with it. So what they did is they adopted a Greek word, Eleutheria, freedom. And they granted freedom to the Greeks to realize very soon that granting freedom to the Greeks meant granting them the freedom to continue with their wars. But since now Rome was part of this framework, was part of this network of alliances, giving the Greeks the freedom to do their work meant that they gave them also the freedom to invite the Romans to intervene in these wars. And these wars led to the next and the next and the next, until finally there was nothing left to conquer after the suicide of Cleopatra in 30 BC and all the Greek kingdoms and independent Greek states fell under the rule of romance Rome.
- [58:15]
Ryan Tripp
Speaking about that suicide, how did dynastic crises and Roman interferences undermine the Seleucid and Ptolemaic kingdoms, culminating in the death of the last Ptolemaic ruler, Cleopatra vii, and the burning of the Library of Alexandria. If possible, please also explore the significance of the 146 BCE Roman raising of Corinth and the corresponding imperial measures, including provincial tax collection for the relief of denizens of Rome.
- [58:48]
Angelos Haniotis
Yeah, first of all, to start with the dynastic crisis, this is. Sometimes I ask myself if things would have been different if one king or the other wouldn't die at a very young age. Because what created most of this dynastic crisis is the first fact that kings died young, living as their successors, minors, children, the age of five or four or six. And this meant that the influence of courtiers and widows and eunuchs and so on increased. And this instability in the Ptolemaic kingdom and the Seleucid kingdom caused also the involvement of Rome until, as I said in a few minutes before, earlier to the gradual conquest of The Hellenistic kingdoms. You mentioned the burning of the library of Alexandria, which was part of one of the wars in Alexandria, actually something that started as a civil war in the Ptolemaic Kingdom. The Romans intervened, and because the library was next to the palace, and the palace was the central of the conflict, it burned. It was not the first. It was the first time, but not the last. And it was one of the greatest disasters in cultural history because all the collected manuscripts, or a lot of them were lost. A similar destruction occurred in approximately 100 years earlier, not in 45 but 146 BC, with the destruction of Corinth, one of the oldest and wealthiest Greek cities. The impact that it had on the Greek world was first of all a shock. The Greeks had never experienced something like that since the destruction of Thebes by Alexander the great in 336bc. And the only parallel that they have for such a massive destruction was the destruction of Troy. For them, the destruction of Corinth was as bad as a destruction or as a major event as a destruction of Troy. The positive impact of this destruction was the looting of treasures that made the Romans acquainted with Greek art, because a lot of treasures were transferred to Rome. And this of course created a new taste for the collection of works of art and for inviting Greek artists to Rome. And this gradually created a unified, homogeneous art in the Roman Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. The Romans did not make themselves very popular by looting treasures, and they made themselves even less popular by introducing taxes. Believe me, the Greeks never wanted to pay taxes. And this applies also to the Greeks of today. And of course they didn't like to pay taxes to a foreign power. They didn't like to pay taxes to to the state, even less to a foreign power. But this is exactly what the Romans gained through the conquest of the world. Sending tax collectors, we know them from the New Testament, for instance, who were taxing almost everything and cashing customs and so on, became the cointesance of unpopular Roman rule. Of course, the Romans realized through protests and so on, that this was something that needed to be moderated. We know again, thanks to inscriptions about the efforts of statesmen and orators and philosophers, but even doctors who had good connections with Rome. Their efforts to persuade first the Roman Senate and after the establishment of the Principate, that is the rule of the emperor, through negotiation, negotiations with the emperor to alleviate this burden, to relieve their citizens and the cities from the burden of taxation. And surprisingly as it may sound, one of the most popular Roman emperors is Nero. He was popular in Greece, not because he burned Rome. He was popular in Greece because he decided to declare the great Greeks free of taxes. Unfortunately, this was something that the Greeks enjoyed only for a very, very short period, because shortly after his return from Greece to Rome, Nero faced a revolt and committed suicide. But the question of taxation and offering benefactions instead is something that can be observed and seen throughout the two centuries that I discuss in the book. It is a very important factor in the political culture of the Greeks. People sometimes think that political culture died as soon Greece was subject to the Roman rule. This is not true. There are a lot of things that the Greeks discussed in the assembly. There are a lot of things that local magistrates had to deal with. And some of them are directly connected with the way the Roman rule was implemented in the cities and the provinces.
- [64:41]
Ryan Tripp
So, heading into our end game here, can you explain the cults of Roman emperors in the Greek provinces as well as imperial measures to revive Greece, including, in a circular fashion, Emperor Hadrian's 132 CE invitation to Greek cities for the founding of an Ephraim, ethnic Panhellenian.
- [65:04]
Angelos Haniotis
Yes, the Roman emperors were worshipped like gods because the power that they had looked like the power of a God. They were not immortal, but apart from that, basically they could do whatever they like. And this assimilated their power with the power of the gods. And because their power was similar to that of the gods gods, they could be worshipped as if they were gods. And in this sense, they continue the worship of Hellenistic kings exactly for the same reason. Already in the early 3rd century BC, the Athenians were singing a hymn to one of the Hellenistic kings, saying, the other gods or other gods are far away or they don't exist, or they don't listen to us. But you, we see you here, present, you are not made of stone, you're not made of wood. We see you here. The same applies to the cult of the Roman emperors. They were worshipped like gods because their power was visible. One of the Roman emperors that was worshiped in the Every emperor was worshipped in the entire empire. But in the case of Hadrian, we can also see that he also enjoyed private worship. People had in their homes, in front of the house doors, little altars to offer libation and small sacrifices to Hadrian. And this is because Hadrian was a lover of the Greeks in both meanings of lover of the Greeks. He also had a Greek lover, Antinomos. Hadrian, in the year 132, created the Panhellenion, which was in part an institution dedicated to his own worship. But also an effort to promote or to make visible the unity of Greek culture by inviting all Greek cities to join, to be part of this institution and gather in Eleusis, near Athens, in an institution that represented the unity of Greek culture. This is a measure of cultural sense of cultural significance. But there were also other measures. For instance, the creation of new roads, enhancement of trade, recognition of markets in which customs did not apply on certain days, allowing cities to mint their own coins, creating aqueducts and so on. Well, the best movie ever made with a historical subject is the Life of Bravo by Monty Python and everybody. Great question. What the Romans ever done for us? And then you have the answer. Well, you can ask the same question. What have the Roman emperors done for us? Well, they made baths and aqueducts and they built roads and so on. And except for the wine, which is part of the answer of the members of the Patriotic Front of Judea, apart from the wine, that the Greeks knew before the Roman Empire came. A lot of the things that we see in terms of material culture in Greece and the Hellenized world under the Roman rule is because of the existence of the imperial power.
- [68:28]
Ryan Tripp
So I have a final question. What can we expect from you next? Are you on sabbatical or vacation? Or are you planning a new project? So what's going on with you next?
- [68:42]
Angelos Haniotis
As professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, that is an institution which we do not teach, I am more or less on a permanent sabbatical. What I am doing is, apart from publishing inscriptions, I'm involved in an excavation in Asia Minor, in Aphrodisias, and I have to publish the inscription that we find there. I have a project for the last six, seven years, which is to write a history of the natural. The Night with N. Not KN what happens in the Greek world after sunset. A history of Greece between sunset and sunrise. I have already written articles on the subject and I have edited a collective volume. I'm also planning an exhibition on the night with the title Nesun Dorma no one should sleep and the well time. The night does not have a history as an astronomical phenomenon. It is exactly the same in Pharaonic Egypt and in Helsinki today. But the night has a history as a social and cultural phenomenon. The way we experience the night today is not the same the way people in different culture have experienced the night. And what I try to do with this project is to describe precisely the changes that occur in the experience and the representation and the understanding of the night in more or less the same historical period that I cover in this book and the factors that influence these changes in the perception and the experience of the night.
- [70:16]
Ryan Tripp
I hope you remember us for that next project. So I thank you, Professor Haniotis, for being on the show today. The book is the Age of the Greek World From Alexander to Hadrian, published by Harvard University press earlier in 2018. This is Ryan Tripp on behalf of the New Books Network and the Archaeology Channel. And Professor Haniotis. Please tune in next time.
- [70:53]
Angelos Haniotis
Sam.