Acknowledgments

This book represents the culmination of over a decade’s worth of research and writing, and I am grateful for the training, support, and indeed nurturing, which made it all possible. It began as a Berkeley PhD dissertation that took root as I studied Bradford Welles’ Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period and the Bulletin épigraphique in the Art History/Classics room of the Doe Library. I am grateful to my supervisors, Emily Mackil, Erich Gruen, and Andrew Stewart, for giving me the courage to take on the topic of the entire political economy and ideological program of a major Hellenistic kingdom, and to my classmates, especially Ryan Boehm, Lisa Eberle, Joel Rygorsky, and Randall Souza, for their input. At the time, I was also receiving crucial training and support in epigraphy and numismatics from my dear teachers, Nikolaos Papazarkadas, Peter Van Alfen, Andrew Meadows, and Alain Bresson. I received institutional support in the form of a dissertation completion fellowship from the Sarah B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy in Berkeley, and I completed summer programs at the American Numismatic Society in New York and on Delos with the École française d’Athènes. I also found myself poking around the Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora and the Epigraphical Museum of Athens with support from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Thanks go also to Jaime Curbera at Inscriptiones Graecae in Berlin for a fun day with squeezes. During this early period, utterly indispensable support for my project arrived by email from two scholars in Oxford, themselves working on the Attalids, John Ma and Peter Thonemann, who assured me that I was in fact on to something.

During a post-doc supported by the Binational US-Israel Fulbright Commission and the University of Haifa, I was able to refine many of the ideas in the dissertation. Seeing Asia Minor from the Levant was enormously beneficial, and I thank my sponsor in the Fulbright program, Ory Amitay, for the opportunity and intellectual comradery, as well as Jonathan Price, for inviting me to present Chapter 5 at Tel Aviv University in the Department of Classics, and Uri Yiftach, for invitations to present parts of Chapter 2 to the Legal Documents in Ancient Societies colloquia. Thanks to Aurélie Carrara, I was able to workshop parts of the book at the Université de Bordeaux with Veronique Chankowski in 2013. Veronique provided me with so much inspiration all along the way. I also received important feedback on the ideas that are contained in Chapter 4 from Stephen White at the University of Texas-Austin. I traveled extensively in Attalid lands in the summer of 2013, and I was generously hosted by Nicholas Cahill at Sardis.

When for several years, the manuscript languished while I taught Classics and archaeology at the University of Oregon and Indiana University, I received unstinting support from my PhD advisors, while mentors such as Nicholas Purcell and Andrew Monson, to name two, continued to show me, each in their own way, how to make a contribution to scholarship. Arthur Eckstein’s feedback on Chapter 4 was a real boost and encouraged completion of the book. The Classicists at Indiana University, especially Adam Gitner and the Homerist Jon Ready, left their mark on Chapters 4 and 6, and Matt Christ helped me jump-start the project again by sending me to New York to join the discussion and festivities around the Met’s 2016 exhibition Pergamon and the Hellenistic Kingdoms of the Ancient World. Thanks in particular to Susan Rotroff for her encouragement and exchange at the exhibition colloquium. During this period, I was also given an apprenticeship in archaeology by Nathan Arrington and Tom Tartaron, under whom I worked on the Attalid frontier in Aegean Thrace, as well as Nicholas Rauh and Günder Varinlioğlu, with whom I investigated the ramifications of the Settlement of Apameia on the ground in coastal Rough Cilicia. It was of great importance that I finish the book by looking at the Attalids from an Anatolian perspective, and I was fortunate to receive a fellowship at Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED) at Koç University in Istanbul for 2017–18. Special thanks are due to Koray Konuk for his support in this endeavor, and I had many interesting conversations with the director, Christopher Roosevelt, who taught me a lot. While in Turkey, I benefited from presenting the project at Boğaziçi University, thanks to Julia Shear. I am so very grateful for the warm reception, aid, and intellectual exchange I received from members of the Pergamon Excavation Project of the German Archaeological Institute, namely, director Felix Pirson, Ute Kelp, Ulrich Mania, Sarah Japp, Güler Ateş, Bernhard Ludwig, and Kıvanç Başak, and to Turgut Saner of Istanbul Technical University for discussions about his work at Larisa-on-the-Hermos. Finally, I signal here my warmest appreciation for my traveling companion in Turkey, Evin Taş: I hope one beautiful morning at the Klimax Pass (Doşemealtı) compensated for a dreadful evening in the Milyas (Korkuteli).

In its final stages, the book has benefited from the patient support of Michael Sharp at Cambridge University Press and from the anonymous reviewers, who greatly improved the manuscript. In 2019, I was able to present a draft of Chapter 6 to Classics crowds at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, by invitation of Simon Oswald, and at Harvard, by invitation of Paul Kosmin. I warmly thank my Harvard hosts, Supratik Baralay and Felipe Soza, for their hospitality and feedback. The History Department of Michigan State University supported a year in Turkey, which Walter Hawthorne helped arrange with funding from the Lab for Education and Advancement in Digital Research. My faculty mentor, Liam Brockey, has been a model and a bulwark. Amanda Tickner of the MSU Library patiently guided the cartography. Illustrations were funded by the Humanities and Arts Research Program Production grant that Kayla Van Dyke truly made happen. The illustrations elicit many expressions of gratitude: to Elena Stolyarik at the American Numismatic Society, Amelia Dowler at the British Museum, Karsten Dahmen at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Frédérique Duyrat and Julien Olivier of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Brian Rose of the Troy Excavation Project, Elmar Schwertheim of Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Sylvie Dumont and Craig Mauzy of the Athenian Agora Excavations, Veli Köse and Lutgarde Vandeput of the Pisida Survey Project, both Baha Yıldırım and, again, the ever supportive Nicholas Cahill of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis.

In the end – in the beginning, actually – I was just curious about the way the Attalids used language and money to shift shape, about the vestiges of the Kingdom of Pergamon, which led me to a hunt in the library – and for that curiosity, for a love of books and of libraries, I have only my dear parents to thank, Dianne Vidmar and Michael Kaye.