From Berlin to Bergama

In the sunny, austere central hall of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, wrapping around the room’s walls like a serpent, then rising halfway to the ceiling on marble steps, stands a strident, if also fragmentary statement of empire. It is an unfinished wedding cake of a building. Tourists recline languidly on its ascent, like guests with nowhere to sit. The room is just too small; it is overtaken by the object on display: the Great Altar of Pergamon. The Altar, with its two sculptural friezes, the outer depicting the Battle of Gods and Giants, the inner, the tale of Telephos, son of Herakles and heroic ancestor of the Attalid dynasty, was discovered in 1871, the year in which the Second German Empire was born. The engineer Karl Humann stumbled upon the marble fragments while building infrastructure for Ottoman Turkey, making the Altar as we know it a pure product of German, French, and British competition for influence in the Middle East. Today, Turkey has regained confidence, and officials from the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation expect Ankara to ask for it back.

These sinuous marbles seem to speak to ascendant world powers. The Great Altar exudes confidence. Below the surface, however, does it also betoken demise? King Eumenes II and his brother Attalos II, their faces conspicuously absent among the Altar’s myriad sculpted figures, were responsible for the construction of this colossal monument in the mid-second century BCE. The Attalids were the last of the great dynasties to emerge in Eurasia in the wake of the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the Altar is the loudest expression of their arrival. “We belong,” it seems to say. Consider the themes of its two friezes. On the outside, savage Giants, half-man and half-beast, challenge Olympus for supremacy in the world. Zeus, Athena, and the other Olympian gods are shown battling down the threat of chaos. The barbarians are beaten back from the gates, a Classical example of classic fear mongering. And the message is simple: In an insecure world, the Attalids belong at the helm. On the inside, the Greek exiles from Arkadia, the retinue of princess Auge and her foundling son Telephos, arrive in non-Greek Mysia. Local king Teuthras and his indigenous Mysians receive and absorb them. Together, they even fend off an attack of Greeks on their way to Troy. In short, the Attalids belong in Anatolia.

Yet also ringing out from the marble, from its distended and seething bodies, is the death knell of a Hellenism without Rome. Within a generation, the Attalids were gone, their finery transported to Rome, their kingdom converted into a province, their library and collection of art picked over by Roman looters, their customs houses occupied and their cities picked over by Roman tax collectors. During an 1882 viewing, Jacob Burckhardt, one of the Altar’s first sympathetic critics, was thrilled with its rippling dynamism.Footnote ¹ What he saw as a terrifying creativity breaking free of the straitjacket of convention could also be interpreted as the equally mortifying last gasp of the Hellenistic World. In the end, royal Pergamon disappeared as suddenly as it had emerged onto the stage of history.

The Subject of the Inquiry

The Attalids’ was an overnight empire. The story in a nutshell is that in 188 BCE, Rome defeated the Seleukid army of Antiochos III “the Great” and promptly parceled off to allies the winnings of Aegean-based Asia Minor and inland Anatolia (Map I.1). Those allies were the Attalid kingdom and the island republic of Rhodes. While the Rhodians failed to secure their share of the spoils, the Attalids succeeded, chiefly, by using a set of flexible and noncoercive tools of empire building. These tools were both fiscal and ideological in nature. The Attalids exploited the potent mechanisms of public finance in ancient Greece to bind an urbanized Aegean zone to rural Anatolia in a way that assured both populations of cultural autonomy. It was taxation – not predation – that afforded the Attalids their legacy as patrons of arts and culture in the polis and as prestige brokers in parts of the Anatolian countryside where an Iron Age way of life persisted well into the Roman period. In fact, for fifty years, the Attalids raised such a bountiful harvest of taxes that the Pergamene cartouche is still visible in nearly all of the most prestigious venues of Old Greece. Today, the Stoa of Attalos in the ancient marketplace of Athens stands for Pergamon’s inclusion in Greece and – ever since John D. Rockefeller reconstructed it and Dwight D. Eisenhower rededicated it in 1956 – Greece’s belonging to the West. Overwhelmed by the aesthetic blitz of the Altar, or perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, seeing the hubris of a soon-to-be defunct dynasty in its monuments, we have yet to explain how this young and lightweight empire so effectively raised the money.

Map I.1 Anatolia, ca. 200 BCE.

The explanation is that the Attalids made culture depend on taxation. It is important to remember that for the average Greek of 188 BCE, only death was certain, not taxes. Surely, the new imperial overlord would demand tribute, an outflow of resources – but that amounts to confiscation, not taxation. A fiscal system that works sustains the fiction of reciprocity. With the tax return that Pergamon sent back, a bundle of money and fiscal privileges, the taxpayers funded the reproduction of their own culture. Naturally, lent such dignity, they agreed to pay up. It was all rather like the gambit that C. P. Cavafy imagined in his poem “In a Large Greek Colony, 200 B.C.” (lines 18–20). An outsider appears, a “political reformer,” who meddles with the local economy, making radical changes under cover of carefully chosen words. Just so the Attalids seem to have coaxed their subjects, by arguing, in Cavafy’s telling, “Give up this revenue and that other similar one, and this third, as a natural consequence” (emphasis added).

It is a remarkable fact that the Attalids extracted resources from vast new territories without militarizing them or succumbing to a revolt. Rather, the great revolt, the War of Aristonikos, broke out under the shadow of the extinction of their line. Instead of imposing bureaucrats and garrisons, the Attalids ruled through an extraordinarily wide range of local actors, from the elite of the old Greek cities of the Aegean coast to the tribal leaders of the interior of Anatolia. Instead of abolishing local institutions and identities, they harnessed them. The cities’ budgets were written into the royal tax code. The king inscribed the cities’ emblems on coins, not his own portrait. In the cities, the Attalids profited from ancient civic institutions, a well-oiled administrative machine. In the countryside, a civic awakening was afoot, and Pergamon nimbly helped generate new institutions that instantly meshed with their own. They ruled under the banner of a new universalism, which drew on Panhellenism’s traditional appeal to the Greek polis, but built out their own cosmopolis to encompass zones of backwoods Anatolia as yet unknown to state power.

As a subject of inquiry, the rise and fall of an empire is as old as the writing of history itself. In the fifth century BCE, Herodotus described the formation of imperial Persia, while Thucydides analyzed the origins of the Athenian Empire. In Hellenistic times, the Greek historian Polybius, a contemporary and an admirer of Pergamon’s most famous kings, the brothers Eumenes II and Attalos II, explained to Greece how Rome had risen to Mediterranean-wide power. Philosophically, Polybius’ view was that every great empire must eventually fall, though he left that theme to the likes of eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire very much speaks to the concerns of our own age.Footnote ² Indeed, with American power on the wane, Europe’s cohesion evaporating, and the postcolonial order in the Middle East crumbling, understanding imperial and civilizational collapse is once again on the agenda. Yet between these two poles of birth and demise stands another issue, one now of pressing concern to sovereigns of young empires like China’s or to those who rule over pieces of failed states, namely, the question of how a “successful” empire actually functions. If we define “success” in terms of the capacity of the few to dominate the many, to extract or control the resources of extensive territories, to integrate populations ideologically, and to substitute cooption for coercion, then the Attalid Empire, short-lived as it was, ranks among the most successful of Classical Antiquity.

The subject of the inquiry here, then, is not how an empire came into being or disappeared. The Attalids gained their empire by shrewdly allying themselves with the Romans, who simply created it by fiat to fill a power vacuum and avoid the burden of direct rule. In turn, Attalos III bequeathed his kingdom to Rome, ultimately preserving its unity in the form of Rome’s new Province of Asia, contributing a major building block to the kind of “composite monarchy” that we later find in early modern Europe.Footnote ³ For such perspicacity and timeliness, the Attalids have been rewarded with little attention from historians.Footnote ⁴ Yet what most sorely awaits investigation, the subject of the inquiry here, is how the Attalids’ empire came to be so entrenched, so quickly. Consequently, what follows is micro-history on an imperial scale. It is the story of how an empire embedded itself in society, how an empire came to be a state. While both terms, “empire” and “state,” are notoriously difficult to define, and even vexing when we import to the ancient past the categories of European colonialism or the nation-state, it is important to mind the distinction. Empire implies the effective sovereignty of one polity, the dominant metropole, over another, the subordinated periphery.Footnote ⁵ That domination, of course, rests on the recognition of sharp differences in identity. A state, by contrast, in Max Weber’s famous definition, is a continuous and compulsory political organization, which upholds its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order on a specific territory.Footnote ⁶ Here, local elites cooperate and common identities predominate. Rome handed Pergamon an empire, but it was the Attalids who pursued the path of the state. The task is to narrate and explain the rapid and relatively bloodless conversion of an imperial periphery into a coherent state. Along the way, a further objective is to illustrate the texture of Attalid state power in order to provide a fuller account of the historical development of Hellenistic monarchy and enrich our knowledge of its many regional inflections.

If we step back and survey the grand history of ancient empires, we see a great variety of solutions to the problem of governance. On one extreme, certain empires integrate conquered territories with only the credible threat of violence. The Neo-Assyrian Empire of the early Iron Age operated on this basis. The vanquished faced either integration or annihilation, a choice vividly illustrated on the stone reliefs that show cities toppled, bodies impaled, and all that is sacred profaned. However, that form of integration was administrative and fiscal, but never ideological. On the other extreme, we find empires that can take a step beyond merely attracting the loyalties of local elites on the periphery; they open up new identities for broad segments of the conquered population. The Roman Empire, which turned its provincial Gauls, Africans, and Syrians all into card-carrying Romans, lasted centuries because it penetrated society to an unprecedented depth. This is the fundamental question in the comparative study of empire: To what extent do empires convert their peripheries into parts of their original state?Footnote ⁷

It is a question that remains unanswered for the Hellenistic kingdoms of western Eurasia, which form the chronological and geographical bridge between the Ancient Near East and Rome. In his magisterial The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann calls them “loose, Persian-style states,” with Greeks holding sway.Footnote ⁸ With a wealth of evidence unearthed in recent decades, we can now see the Pergamene iteration of Hellenistic empire in a different light. This late-breaking version, strapped for charisma if not for cash and administrative acumen, evinces a clear break with the old Achaemenid tradition of minimal interference in local affairs. As Peter Thonemann argues, the Attalids now came “creeping into their subjects’ lives in a new and intrusive way,” leaning on the Greek polis and other, non-Greek civic organisms to generate ever more of what Mann calls infrastructural power.Footnote ⁹

Classics

If the Renaissance rediscovered Classics, the original discovery took place in Antiquity itself. Those ancient tastemakers whom we have labeled since the nineteenth century the so-called Hellenistic Greeks are often credited in romantic narratives with spreading Hellenism across the Middle East. Johann Droysen, the Prussian monarchist who coined the term “Hellenistic,” celebrated the scientific and philosophical achievements of their age and exalted their mixing of cultures. Hellenism and Judaism were combined to produce Christianity, on his account.Footnote ¹⁰ We have inherited Droysen’s fascination with cultural mélange, if the fracturing of academic disciplines has also meant a turn away from his mode of synthesis. Yet we can understand the mix only as well as we know the ingredients. Hellenism may have been generalized in the wake of Alexander the Great, but it was also classicized. Drawing on their inheritance, scholars in the Ptolemies’ Library of Alexandria and the Attalids’ Library of Pergamon selected and refined, catalogued, preserved, and transmitted the corpus of literary and artistic output that we call Classics. Not just the shape, then, but also the prestige attached to Classics in its primeval form derives from a specific historical context, in which the new Hellenistic kings gambled on a new conception of culture.

While Alexandria’s earlier role in this process is well recognized, we tend to look past Pergamon, Hellenistic latecomers, toward Rome, though ironically, the Romans themselves believed wholeheartedly that the Attalids were the agents of cultural transfer.Footnote ¹¹ Pergamon commands a crucial, if relatively unexamined position in the mediation of the Classical Tradition. Gregory Nagy describes the Library of Pergamon as both rival and alternative to the centers of Alexandria and Athens. It operated according to a different notion of comprehensiveness, verging on encyclopedism. This is no triviality if it meant that a much larger corpus of Aristotle and more poetry attributed to Homer and Hesiod survived.Footnote ¹² The Attalids were omnivorous and voracious collectors across media. Theirs was a truly bibliophilic city; an ancient etymology for the word “parchment” links it to Pergamon. They collected Athenian intellectuals and refashioned the legacy of Pericles, erecting a replica of Pheidias’ statue of Athena from the Parthenon inside their library. They purchased the island of Aegina and then plundered it for statues, including a portrait of the poet Sappho. They participated in the Sack of Corinth and picked out the paintings of old masters from the rubble. They were no more or less opportunistic than their peers in this regard, only more successful at making their mark with the detritus of Greece’s heyday. Yet inevitably, each king and court with the requisite institutions shaped Classics for the ideological use best suited to the needs of the moment. By focusing on the historical moment of urgent state formation in the decades after the Treaty of Apameia of 188 BCE, and by providing a full account of the ideological challenges and proclivities of the Attalids, who decorated Delphi, Delos, and Athens and built a capital with a royal library and the largest gymnasium on record in the Hellenistic world, we can supply the missing context for a key stage in the development of the Classical Tradition.

Taxation

We live in the most financialized economy in the history of the world. Money is more ubiquitous, fungible, and powerful than ever before; it permeates every aspect of life and of death too. It flies around the globe with ferocious velocity and underwrites American dominance. The differences are striking, if we juxtapose to ours the world into which Philetairos, founder of the Attalid dynasty, was born. Imagine an agrarian society, in which many people rarely laid eyes on a coin, in which there was so much that money could not buy. Kings ruled only as long as they proved themselves worthy on the battlefield; their lands were “spear-won,” and therefore also their right to consume the fruits conspicuously.Footnote ¹³ And yet money is a central theme of the story of the improbable rise of Philetairos and the Attalids. Generations ago, when money was newer and perhaps viewed with more suspicion, this oddity was frequently noted. Theodor Mommsen, for example, cast the Attalids as the Medici of Antiquity, while a historian of the 1920s bemoaned the “money power of Pergamon.”Footnote ¹⁴ An Anatolian archaeologist of the 1950s and 1960s, as if charging stray ruins to their account, opined, “Pergamenes always preferred gold and diplomacy to force of arms.”Footnote ¹⁵ In fact, an ancient critique of the Attalids relates to their moneyed origins: Philetairos was a eunuch and a treasurer (gazophylax), not a king. Indeed, they did descend from this rogue official, a Hellenized Paphlagonian who managed to embezzle 9,000 talents of royal silver stored in a citadel of Lysimachus.Footnote ¹⁶ This was a large amount of silver, if we compare it with the estimated cost of the construction of the Parthenon, around 500 talents, or take these 9,000 talents as roughly equivalent to Herodotus’ guess for the annual tribute of Achaemenid Persia. If minted, Philetairos’ silver would have equaled almost eight years of the copious coinage issued in the name of Alexander the Great (ca. 332–290 BCE).Footnote ¹⁷ On the other hand, hypothetical revenues for the Seleukid kingdom in this period reach 14,000–19,000 talents; the cash income of Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt has been registered at 14,800. In short, the Attalid dynasty was born into money, but not much more than a middling-to-large Hellenistic kingdom collected in a year.Footnote ¹⁸

Yet money came to define the Attalids because of how they deployed it – as a means of girding subjects to express their own communal identities and granting those expressions increased prestige. With characteristic subtlety, they delivered cultural autonomy, status, and risk buffering to many a polis and village, but also, the bonds of dependence. For a Hellenistic king, conspicuous consumption was a given, as was pandering to the cultural prejudices of those he ruled. So why, centuries later, was the Christian moralist Tertullian still railing against “Attalid riches” (attalicae divitiae)?Footnote ¹⁹ Clearly, money was the basis of their power. However, the mechanisms and ideological maneuvers through which Pergamon obtained money and used it to gain an empire have long been opaque. Any investigation into the roots of the Attalid imperial project must shed light on systems of public finance.

The Attalids were heirs to a long line of thinking about taxation that stretches from Xenophon’s reflections on a specifically economic Athenian Empire through the political economy of Pseudo-Aristotle’s Oikonomika, written at the dawn of the Hellenistic period. What makes the Attalids unique is that their question was not just how to raise more taxes, but how to involve the populace more deeply in its own taxation. Pergamon maintained a modest army and fell back behind sturdy walls when attacked.Footnote ²⁰ The Attalids’ subjects did not revere them as pharaohs, nor as the successors of the Great Kings of Persia and Babylonia, nor as the representatives of a Macedonian kinship group. If only for survival, cunning choices about taxation were essential; though just as important were decisions about redistribution, which is why the term “taxation” and not “tribute” is maintained in what follows. The case of Pergamon may even disprove the dictum now attributed to the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter: “The budget is the skeleton of the state stripped of all misleading ideologies.”Footnote ²¹ On the contrary, everything we know about fiscal practice in the Attalids’ empire shows that culture and ideology were inscribed in their tax code.

Taxation provokes debate. Behind arguments about what the state must purchase and how to distribute the costs are debates about the very nature, essential fairness, and even definition of taxation. In the United States, where the Constitutional Convention of 1787 failed to agree on an unambiguous definition of “direct taxes,” taxation is a divisive issue and consensus elusive.Footnote ²² As recently as 2011, the Supreme Court disagreed over whether to qualify as a tax the individual mandate provision of Obamacare.Footnote ²³ Different taxes have received the public’s approbation and its scorn, cast as natural, habitual obligations and sacrifices, or foreign and un-American confiscations. Slavery and its legacy, the impact of industrialization and now globalization, the American way of life, are all debated in the fiscal arena. What we talk about when we talk about taxation is citizenship and democracy, but also the vaunted and loathed exceptional character of American culture.

It turns out that the ancient Greeks were just as divided over taxation. They had budgets.Footnote ²⁴ They also had fiscal preferences and prejudices. From the assembly of Classical Athens to the battlefield of Alexander’s Babylon, public spending debates were surprisingly sophisticated.Footnote ²⁵ The average citizen knew how much was in the treasury and how to investigate the costs of added benefits in new taxes or public borrowing.Footnote ²⁶ Then too, definitions were contested. Greeks had a bewildering number of different names for these taxes. Vocabulary depended on imperial ideology, on one’s vantage point in the economy, or simply on belief.Footnote ²⁷ Was the tax just? Was it Greek? What end did it serve? As Demosthenes once complained, merchants failed to see that the taxes they called “gifts,” in fact, paid for the security of their ships at sea.Footnote ²⁸ In their own way, the Attalids of Pergamon won the perennial debate on taxation. They taxed to build the Great Altar and the Stoa of Attalos in the Athenian Agora, to purchase art and buy Aegean islands, and to fight the wars and fund the festivals, which proffered them a place at the table of high politics. They picked their words carefully, but they also shed the specter of taxation without representation, a plague on the Athenian Empire and the rest of its Hellenistic successors. Throughout the kingdom, the Attalids broadcast on stone the goals of taxation, and they advertised on coins the taxpayers’ role in a credible and profitable fiscal system.

A focus on taxation takes advantage of a generation’s output of empirical studies, but it also builds on a more recent wave of work on ancient Greek political economy that highlights a fiscal system’s power to integrate.Footnote ²⁹ It is no exaggeration to claim that for many ancient Greeks, taxes determined identity. When, where, and how they paid turned a discursive reality into a hard, cold one. Their world was both ecologically and politically fragmented, filled with more than a thousand small city-states, between which they often traveled in search of necessities or profit. In the harbors and at the gates, discriminatory tax collectors checked identities, demanding an answer: Who are you? Are you an Athenian or a Pergamene? In coastal Iasos, for example, the question was more complicated: Are you Iasian? Or are you like an Iasian, that is, a foreigner granted “tax equality”?Footnote ³⁰ Here, taxes effectively assimilated the noncitizen to the citizen. Hellenistic kingdoms contained much larger and more diverse populations. Revenue-hungry rulers relied on fiscal systems that integrated individual subjects and entire subject communities. In Ptolemaic Egypt, this meant a shift from a traditional emphasis on controlling labor to raising revenues in cash. The attendant institutional changes – tax farming, banking, receipts, coinage, and the census – all constrained relationships with the new state.Footnote ³¹ For the cities of Seleukid Anatolia and Antigonid Macedonia, we can now recognize a process of integration alongside the subterfuge and resistance. Paradoxically, what in the Macedonian cities were known as “city dues” were actually services rendered to the central administration of the kingdom.Footnote ³² Old Greek cities gradually found themselves sharing accounts with Seleukid kings, as the royal treasury became a fixture of their fiscal landscape.Footnote ³³

The Attalid case is of particular value, then, as a relatively well-documented Hellenistic fiscal system, in which taxes and transfers reinforced local identities and created imperial ones. The last scholar to fully assess the political economy of Pergamon was the White Russian émigré Mikhail Rostovtzeff in 1930. In fact, Rostovtzeff identified the crux of the Attalids’ success, musing, “It is, however, curious that while taxing heavily the population of the subject cities with one hand, the kings paid with the other hand both to the cities and to the temples, and to the associations of the young men (probably to the Gymnasia) certain subsides in specie and kind.”Footnote ³⁴ For Rostovtzeff, what made this behavior so curious was an anachronistic idea that the Attalids were half-baked liberals. In our own neoliberal age, it continues to haunt the scholarship.Footnote ³⁵ It helps that the Attalids purposively hid their faces, muted their dynastic cult, eschewed the pageantry through which Hellenistic royalty typically circulated images of its power, and sought in every medium and venue merely to blend in. It also helps that Polybius praised one Attalid as a singular champion of “Greek cities.”Footnote ³⁶ Yet Rostovtzeff’s facts have only multiplied, showing even greater interleaving of royal and civic systems of public finance in the Attalid kingdom. By Hellenistic standards, this was big government. Yet, fascinatingly, it was combined with radical decentralization.

Interest in the economic history of ancient Greece and Rome has grown tremendously in the past several decades. Outside academia, the prestige of economics as a mode of analysis only grows in a period of heightened economic insecurity. Inside academia, humanists fatigued with a history of representations have drawn inspiration from historicizing trends within economics and economic sociology, which question the genesis and performance of institutions. Whereas mainstream economics treats institutions, the human constraints of formal and informal rules for interaction, as an aberrance, the so-called New Institutional Economics (NIE), associated with the names Coase, North, and Williamson, treats them as a determinant. Ronald Coase is credited with introducing transaction costs as a factor in economic analysis. They are the price we pay to interact at an acceptable level of uncertainty, the price of having institutions that mitigate risk. As Alain Bresson writes, “NIE substitutes a science of contract in lieu of a science of choice.”Footnote ³⁷ As the new orthodoxy, it has achieved remarkable popularity in ancient history because it broke an impasse and made economic theory relevant again to Classics. The old quarrel between “primitivist” and “modernist” approaches to ancient economic life is absurd if contemporary capitalism is no longer the ultimate reference point.Footnote ³⁸ Under the banner of NIE, much recent scholarship is devoted to demonstrating the extent of markets and the existence of economic rationality in Antiquity.Footnote ³⁹ Ever more, the “glory that was Greece” is chalked up to growth-oriented economic policy.

This book owes an intellectual debt to those who have insisted on the importance of institutions for understanding coordination. The goal is to explain Pergamon’s successful capture of an empire and rapid state formation. The explanation, it is argued, lies in the choice of specific fiscal institutions that gave taxpayers a say and a stake in taxation. The case I am making is therefore primarily qualitative, though as in the case of the dynasty’s 9,000 talents of start-up funds, I try wherever possible to provide the reader with a sense of the quantitative scale by which the distinctiveness of the Pergamene way is also registered. Undoubtedly, the Attalids, just like the other Hellenistic kings, strove to “maximize revenue” within ecological and institutional constraints.Footnote ⁴⁰ They needed to maximize in order to combat the Galatians, Seleukids, Rhodians, Bithynians, Pontos, and other rivals in the anarchic ancient Mediterranean. The more interesting problem relates to how their fiscal system ensured high returns and its own survival. Did the Attalids spread markets? Political unification seems to have strengthened interregional exchange in Anatolia. Did they produce growth? We lack the data to answer such a question, though the city-states that have been credited of late with driving growth in ancient Greece loom large in this story. In the Mediterranean of the second century BCE, the polis, the privileged partner of Pergamon, with its centuries of experience, was by far the most efficient tax authority around. Yet it was also the Greeks’ primary site of cultural reproduction. By taxing through the polis, but also through civic organisms on its margins, the Attalids, to an unprecedented extent, tied their own economic reproduction to the cultural reproduction of their subjects. Attalid taxes were indeed, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, the price of civilization.Footnote ⁴¹

History

In order to clear the ground for the analysis of the specific character of Attalid state power that forms the heart of the book, it may be helpful to lay out a narrative of political history in advance. A wide-lens perspective can enrich our understanding of many of the documents presented later in their local context. Narratives of the history of the fortunes of the Attalid dynasty and the development of the city of Pergamon already abound in scholarship.Footnote ⁴² The basic facts of battles and indeed regnal dates are still debated, even which Attalos, on which visit to Athens, made such an indelible mark on its acropolis, not to mention the question of which monarch was responsible for the Great Altar. This fuzziness is in part due to holes in the literary sources – the text of Polybius is fragmentary for the entire period 188–133 BCE; the only complete account of Attalid history per se is Strabo’s neat summary in two paragraphs.Footnote ⁴³ It is also due to our heavy reliance on epigraphical evidence. For example, the over two decades-long reign of Eumenes I is known from just a handful of inscriptions. Fortunately, new inscriptions turn up all the time, while new readings of old inscriptions help us fine-tune the chronology of events. However, I have not made the traditional timeline, from Philetairos to Attalos III, or a series of Roman interventions in the East, the structuring principle of this book, because my objective is to explain Pergamon’s impact on Anatolia by way of teasing out the distinctive features of Attalid imperialism.

Appropriately, the story begins with the problem of trust and its relation to money. In ca. 302 BCE, Lysimachus, one of Alexander’s Successors, put an official named Philetairos son of Attalos in charge of the citadel and treasury of Pergamon. Belittled in Antiquity as a eunuch, an unheroic “keeper of the treasury” (gazophylax), Philetairos had arrived from Tieion, a mixed city on the southern coast of the Black Sea where Greeks lived alongside Paphlagonians. Indeed, we know that his mother Boa was an Anatolian. However, contrary to an oft-repeated assertion, we cannot be certain that his unknown father was a Macedonian. Certain cognates of the name Attalos are in fact Phrygian, and the dynasty’s later claims of Arkadian and Heraklid descent echo the foundation stories of the people of Tieion, recalling too those of Mausolus of Caria.Footnote ⁴⁴ The family was evidently powerful in Paphlagonia itself, as Lysimachus placed a brother of Philetairos named Eumenes over his new mega-city of Amastris. Ultimately, both brothers were alienated from Lysimachus by ca. 283, the date from which court chronographers later counted the reign of Philetairos. Sensing danger, Eumenes turned Amastris over to Ariobarzanes of Pontos and fled to Pergamon.Footnote ⁴⁵ For his part, Philetairos switched his allegiance to Seleukos I Nikator shortly before his defeat of Lysimachus at Koroupedion in Lydia in 281. When Ptolemy Keraunos subsequently murdered Nikator in Europe, Philetairos was quick to ransom the body, cremate it in Pergamon, and dispatch the remains to Antioch, thereby securing his position as a trusted Seleukid vassal on the western periphery.

As lord of Pergamon, Philetairos occupied a stronghold in the Kaikos Valley that had been host to the Gongylids (Map I.2), Greek exiles in the employ of the Achaemenid Persia, during the fifth and early fourth centuries. From the time of the Peace of Antalcidas of 387/6, the site seems to have functioned as a kind of sub-satrapal capital and to have grown into a minor polis. After 362, the ambitious Bactrian satrap Orontes resided there, governing a satrapy of Mysia that seems to have encompassed much of western Anatolia. The strategic value of the place was also recognized in the age of Alexander. The conqueror’s son and potential heir, known as Herakles, along with his mother Barsine, the daughter of a Persian aristocrat, lived in Pergamon from ca. 325 until their murder in 309. A consensus now holds that either Lysimachus or Barsine built the Temple of Athena on the acropolis, which bore a Lydian-Greek inscription on one of the columns of its pronaos. This act and the inauguration of a Panathenaia festival effectively substituted the goddess for Apollo at the top of the civic pantheon.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet this means that next to no evidence exists for any particular orientation toward Athens on the part of Philetairos.Footnote ⁴⁷ He inherited a fortress with strong defenses, to which he added an arsenal. A late Classical or early Hellenistic wall, the so-called Philetairan Wall, which reinforced an earlier line of possibly prehistoric fortifications, is now considered an achievement of the pre-royal polis.Footnote ⁴⁸ Philetairos, therefore, was not a city founder, but he may have developed the street plan; he certainly embellished what was in his time an extramural sanctuary of Demeter and Kore and projected influence into the surrounding countryside.Footnote ⁴⁹ Just 30 km away on Mount Aspordenos, Philetairos monumentalized a Phrygian sanctuary of Mater with a Doric temple in trachyte. His benefactions are recorded for many of the cities of the region of Aeolis, such as Aigai, Pitane, Temnos, and Cyme. A series of gifts over several years to the Propontic city of Cyzicus established an important and lasting relationship by proffering aid during, among other conflicts, the crisis that attended the migration of the Galatians into Asia in the 270s. Finally, Philetairos also made a name for himself on the Greek mainland by spending money with tasteful discrimination. He followed in a grand tradition of Anatolian rulers as a benefactor of Delphi, where he gained proxeny for himself and his family. Less conventional were his dedications at the sanctuary of the Heliconian Muses at Thespiai in Boeotia, associated with the archaic poet Hesiod, which included oil for a gymnasium. From the beginning, with targeted giving, the Attalids were attaching themselves to high culture as much as to local culture.Footnote ⁵⁰

Map I.2 Pergamon and its environs.

Childless, the dynasty’s founder had at some point adopted his nephew Eumenes (son of his brother Eumenes), who succeed him in 263. Eumenes I gives us our first glimpse of the relationship of the Attalids to the city of Pergamon, by now a full-fledged polis with civic institutions at least as old as the first half of the fourth century. He pushed the city’s assembly to honor the powerful board of officials known as stratêgoi for resolving a fiscal crisis born of malfeasance.Footnote ⁵¹ He is also the first on record to honor Athena as Polias at Pergamon.Footnote ⁵² One of the only other facts known about his reign of 22 years is that he defeated Antiochos I in a battle at Sardis in 262. A momentous victory on its face, it is not actually clear what effect if any the battle had on the shape or character of Eumenes’ fiefdom (now a dynasteia, in Strabo’s account).Footnote ⁵³ The temptation to tell Attalid history as a number of steps toward emancipation from Seleukid control should be resisted. Client rulers on the margins of the Seleukid space were constantly winning and surrendering sovereignty.Footnote ⁵⁴ At any rate, Philetairos had already minted coins in his own name and – seemingly, at the end of his life – coins bearing his own image. Further, while the Pergamene mint issued coins under Philetairos in the name of Seleukos I, it never minted in the name of his son and successor Antiochos I.Footnote ⁵⁵ Eumenes may have enjoyed a greater freedom of action while Antiochos II was busy fighting Ptolemy II during the Second Syrian War (260–253), which affected coastal Asia Minor. Thanks to the preservation of an oath sworn between the king and mercenaries who had recently been in revolt, we know that Eumenes I possessed the military settlements of Attaleia in the upper Lykos valley near Thyateira and Philetairea on Mount Ida.Footnote ⁵⁶ Both were attempts to exploit rural resources, but it is also possible that the forests of the Troad provided the timber that now allowed the Attalids to further engage the urbanized Aegean. The same mercenary oath alludes to ships, and an archaeological investigation of Elaia has concluded that the port came under Attalid control shortly after the mid-third century and saw its harbors militarized and city plan transformed.Footnote ⁵⁷

The 44-year reign of Eumenes’ adopted son Attalos I (241–197) witnessed the birth of the kingdom as such. Livy tells us that Attalos was the “first of the inhabitants of Asia (primus Asiam incolentium)” to refuse the Galatians tribute (38.16.14). War ensued, with what Attalid memory cast as the decisive defeat of the barbarians taking place “around the source of the river Kaikos” or, according to Pausanias, “in Mysia.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In his eulogy for Attalos, Polybius relates that by vanquishing the Galatians, the king “established his rule and first showed himself to be a king (ταύτην ἀρχὴν ἐποιήσατο καὶ τότε πρῶτον αὑτὸν ἔδειξε βασιλέα)” (18.41.7–8). Despite uncertainty about whether Polybius was in fact referring to the battle at the Kaikos, his testimony has often been used to date the event to the first years of the reign and, by extension, give us a date for the assumption of the royal title (basileus), the donning of the diadem, and the appellation Sotêr (savior).Footnote ⁵⁹ The father of Attalos was the son of another nephew of Philetairos, but his mother was a Seleukid, Antiochis daughter of Achaios the Elder. Ultimately, he won his kingdom by taking advantage of internecine conflicts within his mother’s family. In 239, the younger Antiochos Hierax defeated his brother Seleukos II at Ankyra and established himself as the independent ruler of cis-Tauric Asia. By ca. 228, Attalos had in turn defeated Hierax and his Galatian allies in Lydia, inland Caria, and on the Hellespont, and presumably claimed a certain portion of this territory. In Pergamon, these victories were memorialized on monuments set up in the sanctuary of Athena Polias, which indeed spotlighted the Galatian victory at the Kaikos on the spectacular Round Monument, but also trumpeted the defeat of Seleukos III (r. 225–222) and his general Lysias, probably of the rival Anatolian dynasty of the Philomelids from Phrygia Paroreios.Footnote ⁶⁰ Some of the new territories were soon lost to Achaios, a Seleukid pretender who in 220 broke with Antiochos III Megas and claimed the cis-Tauric kingdom vacated by Hierax. To suppress the usurper, Antiochos was compelled to contract an alliance with Attalos, and the subordinate’s sovereignty seems to have been formally recognized by 212.Footnote ⁶¹ In 218, with the army of Achaios busy fighting Pisidians, Attalos for a time secured his two key domestic constituencies, the Aeolian cities and the villages of rural Mysia Abbaitis, in the process settling his own Galatian clients deep inside the boundaries of his own kingdom.Footnote ⁶²

To a far greater extent than his ancestors or contemporary Anatolian rivals, Attalos I pursued reputational and territorial aggrandizement in Greece and the Aegean. He was the first Attalid active at the Panhellenic sanctuary of Apollo on Delos, where he publicized both his Galatian victories and his family’s Mysian origins. At Delphi, he built a stoa dressed with historical paintings that is the sole monument to break the line of the sanctuary’s framing peribolos wall. He also placed his own portrait statue on a column that occupied prime real estate directly in front of the Temple of Apollo.Footnote ⁶³ These construction projects surely required the acquiescence of the Aetolians, who then held sway at Delphi and had gained Attalos as an ally against Philip V in the First Macedonian War (214–205). Pergamene forces entered the fray, consisting now of ever fewer mercenaries and more call-ups from places such as Cyzicus, hometown of queen Apollonis. Still, Attalos used cash to purchase the storied island of Aegina from the Aetolians, with all its artistic heirlooms, ca. 210. At around the same time, the crucial relationship with Rome began with an alliance that hardly required Attalos to fight to the end, despite his appearance as a signatory on the Roman side of the Peace of Phoinike at the war’s conclusion. With his own kingdom under attack by Philip’s kinsman Prousias I of Bithynia,Footnote ⁶⁴ Attalos crossed back into Asia already in 209. The war with Prousias lasted four years, at the end of which, Attalos seems to have conquered the Aezanitis in Phrygia Epictetus and the Galatian borderlands around Pessinous with its sanctuary of Mater/Cybele.Footnote ⁶⁵ From Pessinous, Attalos was able to transfer to the Romans, who were seeking a divine intervention against Hannibal, the aniconic cult stone of the Magna Mater, transported up the Tiber in 205.

When Ptolemy IV of Egypt died the following year, leaving a child of five in power, Philip and Antiochos formed a pact to divide up his kingdom.Footnote ⁶⁶ The collapse of the century-old state system in the Mediterranean was a grave danger to middling powers such as Pergamon and Rhodes, which now found common cause. By 200, their ambassadors were in Rome for the first time, begging the Senate to launch what we call the Second Macedonian War. Meanwhile, Antiochos III had returned from a seven-year campaign of eastern reconquest to seize parts of Caria from Rhodes in 204 and 203. Philip had taken his own Carian positions and had invaded the Propontic area in 202. Rhodes and Pergamon joined forces with a coalition of smaller maritime states to confront Philip, leading to a destructive sea battle near Chios in 201. Attalos narrowly escaped his wrecked ship, leaving gobs of royal paraphernalia on deck, shiny loot to divert the Macedonian seamen, as he hurried back to a capital that Philip had severely damaged. Polybius tells us that Philip destroyed the Nikephorion at Pergamon, our first indication that Athena Polias had taken on the additional epithet “victory-bearer” (16.1.5–6).Footnote ⁶⁷ In the end, Attalos had a hand in persuading not only the Romans to join the war but the Athenians and the Achaean koinon (league) as well. In addition to military leadership, Attalos offered the Greeks financial support and received immediate recompense in the form of honors in places such as Sikyon. The Athenians, deprived of their rural sanctuaries by Philip, welcomed Attalos in 200, showering him with honors.Footnote ⁶⁸ In turn, he seems to have deposited the so-called Little Barbarians sculptural program on the Acropolis at this time, which inserted the Attalid Galatian victory into a cycle of civilizational triumphs.Footnote ⁶⁹ The war allowed Attalos to strengthen his foothold in the Aegean, gaining the Cycladic island of Andros in 199 after making a play for Euboea. He died in 197, exhorting the Boeotians to join a war that was concluded the same year at Kynoskephalai.

Eumenes II, devoted son of Attalos I and Apollonis, Polybius tells us, inherited a small, diminished kingdom (32.8.3). The Seleukid alliance notwithstanding, already by 209, Antiochos III had taken back core Mysian territories bordering the upper Kaikos.Footnote ⁷⁰ From 198 to 193, Antiochos reconquered much of western Asia Minor, and we find Eumenes pushing for another Roman intervention. Cagily, in 192 Antiochos offered the Pergamene king a final chance to return to vassalage by marrying one of his daughters. Rebuffed, Antiochos crossed to Europe the same year to join his Aetolian allies, then lost his first engagement with the Romans in a battle at Thermopylae. The Seleukid then retreated to Asia, where in 190/89 he was vanquished again by the Romans at Magnesia-under-Sipylos, this time certainly with an Attalid army present. The greatest opportunist in a dynasty full of them, as R. E. Allen puts it, Eumenes II sprang into action to take full advantage of a power vacuum.Footnote ⁷¹ He set off to Rome to plead his case for Antiochos’ cis-Tauric territories, which the Rhodians wanted to see set free from kings. Meanwhile the future Attalos II, the brother of Eumenes, joined the new consul Manlius Vulso on a punitive expedition against the Galatians, some of whom had fought with Antiochos. Tellingly, Livy tells us that the consul regretted Eumenes’ absence, since the king possessed thorough knowledge of the people and places of Galatia (38.12.6; gnarus locorum hominumque). The Attalids had clearly long been active in inner Anatolia, but now had a chance to extend their power. The expedition of Vulso took a path that left from Ephesus and reached Apameia at the headwaters of the Maeander, then turned south into Pisidia, the Milyas, and the Cibyratis, and only then headed for Galatia proper. Much of the journey traversed lands that became – in theory – Pergamene once Roman legates had drawn up a new map at Apameia in 188. In addition to European territories, principally the Thracian Chersonese, the Attalids received all of cis-Tauric Asia north of the Maeander, the Carian outpost of the Hydrela region and the Lycian port of Telmessos, while the Rhodians were awarded most of Caria and Lycia (Map I.3).Footnote ⁷²

Map I.3 The core of the Attalid kingdom and the Rhodian peraia after 188 BCE.

Overnight, Eumenes seemed to have exchanged the diminished kingdom of his inheritance for an Anatolian empire. However, more wars and the patient implementation of the techniques of domination described and analyzed in this book were required to vindicate the settlement. An alliance was struck with Ariarathes IV of Cappadocia, who now betrothed his daughter Stratonike to Eumenes in penance for his earlier support of Antiochos. However, the first decade after 188 saw a series of challenges from rival Anatolian kings that threatened to block the emergence of a cis-Tauric kingdom. First, Prousias I of Bithynia, having allied with the Galatian leader Ortiagon, marched and sailed against Eumenes in 184/3. Hannibal was at the court of Prousias and famously advised the stratagem of hurling pots of snakes at Pergamene ships in a naval battle that is still occasionally glimpsed on the Great Altar’s Gigantomachy.Footnote ⁷³ Eager to finish off Hannibal, the Romans offered diplomatic support. Yet from a local perspective, the last stand of the Carthaginian was a sideshow at most. We learn from a decree of Telmessos that the conflict was viewed by contemporaries as a crucible for “all of the inhabitants of Asia,” with Eumenes now playing the role of Sotêr.Footnote ⁷⁴ It is not clear how much Bithynian territory accrued to the Attalid victors, though for a time, Philetairos’ old city of Tieion became a Pergamene outlet on the Black Sea. The treaty that settled the war also brought Bithynia into alliance, but Eumenes now found himself at odds with Pharnakes I of Pontos. In 183, Pharnakes occupied the entrepot of Sinope, panicking both the Attalids and the mercantile Rhodians. Roman diplomacy did not prevent war, but rather a protracted conflict (183–179) broke out, drawing in nearly every major state on the Anatolian peninsula.Footnote ⁷⁵ Eumenes traveled deep into Galatia, as far as the Halys, the riverine counterpart to the eastern Taurus line of Asia Minor. There, he rendezvoused with his father-in-law Ariarathes IV of Cappadocia, as well as Morzius of Paphlagonia and Prousias II of Bithynia. The various tribal polities of Galatia were further fragmented. A peace treaty included a host of Black Sea states, both Greater and Lesser Armenia. Eumenes was able to turn his attention to helping the Rhodians suppress a rebellion in Lycia. It was in this context that the Nikephoria festival was upgraded to truly international, so-called iso-Olympic and iso-Pythian status in 182/1. Pergamene sacred embassies were sent out in all directions to request recognition, from Delphi, from the old Greek cities of the Aegean, and from new cities of the Anatolian interior.

Polybius also tells us that Eumenes enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for benevolence among Greek cities and private citizens (32.8.5). He squandered some of that goodwill, earned in a popular war against the Spartan king Nabis (195) and in the Antiochene War, by coaxing the Romans into a decisive clash with Perseus, son of Philip V and ruler of Antigonid Macedon since 179. Whether with policy or with charisma, Perseus simply bested Eumenes in the court of public opinion and isolated him by making marriage alliances with both Prousias II and Seleukos IV, whose daughter Laodike the Rhodians conveyed to Pella in 178. In response, Eumenes helped his own man Antiochos IV grasp the diadem after a minister murdered Seleukos in 175. With Eumenes outwitting him at Rome, Perseus turned to violence. In 172, assassins hurled a boulder at the Pergamene king in a narrow pass below Delphi. Eumenes was feared dead, but the Attalid state did not crumble. In an act of loyalty that was quickly canonized in official memory, the future Attalos II Philadelphos (“the brotherly”) took power and even temporarily married Stratonike, later abdicating and renouncing the marriage when his brother Eumenes recovered.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Third Macedonian War (172–168) ended with the defeat of Perseus at Pydna and the Roman dismemberment of the Antigonid kingdom. The strongest of the Attalids’ rivals had been eliminated or neutralized, but the Romans promptly withdrew their support over suspicions of double-dealing with Perseus. While the Rhodians received the same cold treatment and consequently lost control of Caria, Lycia, and their position in maritime commerce, the Attalids seem to have consolidated their post-Apameian kingdom at precisely this time. First, they took on a Galatian war (168–165) that touched their own Lydian and Phrygian territories but also secured them. The people of Sardis were so relieved to have survived the war that they instituted sacrifices and a joint festival in honor of Athena and Eumenes, which commemorated the removal of the “great danger.”Footnote ⁷⁷ The Ionian League proclaimed him the “common benefactor of the Greeks.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Diodorus tells us that Eumenes now subjugated the whole of the Galatian ethnos (tribal state), no doubt an exaggeration, but evidence of territorial ambitions on the plateau.Footnote ⁷⁹ Further, it appears that at this time the Attalids launched a new monetary system of their own in order to integrate the urban and rural, Aegean and Anatolian components of their kingdom.

Eumenes II was responsible for a major expansion of the city of Pergamon that extended its walls to the foot of the great hill, increasing the fortified area from 21 to 91 ha with a circuit of 4 km.Footnote ⁸⁰ Under his rule, at least according to the Roman antiquarian Pliny, the cultural rivalry with Ptolemaic Alexandria finally burned hot (HN 13.70). Ptolemy V is said to have imprisoned Aristophanes of Byzantium rather than see him decamp for the Library of Pergamon, but Eumenes did nab an intellectual superstar in the Stoic philosopher Crates of Mallos. Ptolemy’s ban on the export of papyrus is said to have compelled the Pergamenes to invent parchment.Footnote ⁸¹ We know that Eumenes dramatically increased the grandeur of the royal capital.Footnote ⁸² He was certainly responsible for at least the beginning of construction of the Great Altar.Footnote ⁸³ Archaeological soundings show that he devised an entirely new grid plan for the city, with possibly the largest gymnasium of the time as its anchor point and architectural centerpiece. Remarkably, the development of a prestigious imperial metropole did not destroy the partnership of the sons of Apollonis. Roman attempts to woo Attalos away in 167 by offering him an independent kingdom in Aegean Thrace failed. Rather, by 160, he was co-regent. Twin inscriptions from Delphi show that both brothers financed educational foundations in 159, a final collaborative act for Eumenes, who died that year or the next.Footnote ⁸⁴

Finally succeeding his brother at the age of sixty-two, Attalos II successfully protected the achievement of his brother, replicated many of his accomplishments, and safeguarded the inheritance of the future Attalos III. The landscape of Athens provides an illustration. Whereas Eumenes had built a stoa adjacent to the Theater of Dionysus, Attalos built his own in the agora early on in his reign. In addition, both brothers seem to have left chariot monuments in Athens.Footnote ⁸⁵ Alliances with the cities of Crete, which had been essential to the victory of Eumenes over Pharnakes, were maintained.Footnote ⁸⁶ In Anatolia, Attalos further extended Pergamene dominance. Already in 165, Prousias II had brought to the Senate’s attention the complaints of certain Galatians and of the citizens of Selge, perhaps the most developed and belligerent city in Pisidia. We know that Attalos had personally campaigned in Pisidia in 160, and we find him in the nearby region of the Milyas in 138/7.Footnote ⁸⁷ It seems probable that the Pergamene impact on Pisidia that is so evident in the region’s distinctive form of urbanism owes something to the king’s active presence. We know that he dedicated a stoa on the agora of Termessos.Footnote ⁸⁸ He also seems to have attempted to improve the kingdom’s harbors, both at Ephesus and with the foundation (?) of a Mediterranean port in Pamphylia, christened Attaleia (Antalya). Mastery over upland Pisidia facilitated passage from Antalya overland to the river systems that finally terminate in the Aegean in places such as Ephesus.

Strife with Prousias II resulted in yet another war in which the Pergamenes abandoned arms and watched from behind their walls as the enemy wreaked havoc on the plain below and in several other cities of the Aeolian core (156–154). While the Romans imposed another set of unfavorable terms on Prousias, this time a cash indemnity, by 149, Attalos II had fully eliminated his Bithynian rival by cleverly using a patricidal civil war to install the more pliant Nikomedes II. Subsequently, he seems to have punished Thracian allies of Prousias with a European raid in 145.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a family feud over Cappadocia, he was just as wildly successful in protecting Attalid interests with a mix of soft power and threats. Ariarathes V, his brother-in-law and former schoolmate in Athens, had lost his kingdom to Orophernes II in 158. While the parties argued it out at Rome, Orophernes managed to deposit 400 talents in a banking institution located in Attalid territory, the temple of Athena Polias in Priene. When Ariarathes regained sole power, despite the Senate’s recommendation of power sharing, he claimed the 400 talents for the Cappadocian monarchy. The people of Priene refused to release what they considered a private deposit. Ariarathes attacked Priene, with the connivance and encouragement of Attalos, says Polybius (33.6.6), though the city dispatched embassies to Rhodes and Rome. In the end, the money was returned to Orophernes.Footnote ⁹⁰ Ultimately, Attalos was not willing to destroy confidence in private property rights or civic institutions of public finance.

Attalos II has often been accused of obeisance to Rome in foreign policy. This conclusion is largely based on his letter of 156 to Attis the priest of Cybele in Pessinous, regarding a military action in Galatia. The letter purports to describe internal deliberations at court, the final decision to consult the Romans, since “to go ahead without consulting them seemed to involve considerable danger.”Footnote ⁹¹ However, this is not quite the admission of powerlessness that the textbooks relate. Rather, it is the Attalid regime’s own representation of the relationship with Rome, produced for its own advantage.Footnote ⁹² In any case, as has long been pointed out, the king was able to intervene in the affairs of his neighbors without Roman interference.Footnote ⁹³ Like Eumenes, he helped raise up his own contender for the Seleukid throne. This was Alexander Balas, a youth from Pergamene Smyrna, who with Ptolemaic and Cappadocian help ousted Demetrios I in 150. Attalos thereby settled a score with Demetrios for his support of Orophernes. Admittedly, the Senate had recognized Balas, and as an ally, Attalos was never far behind when the Romans campaigned in Greece. Yet it is not difficult to find domestic concerns behind Attalid support for the war of Metellus against the pseudo-Philip (Andriskos) in 148. The Antigonid pretender was born in Adramyttion, recruited supporters in Miletus and in Thrace, and perhaps even meddled in the marriage of the Pergamene prince Athenaios. In other words, he was also a domestic problem.Footnote ⁹⁴ In the Achaean War, an Attalid army participated in the destruction of Corinth (146), but also in the appropriation of its legacy. Pausanias describes works of art looted in the sack still visible in his day at Pergamon (7.16.8). Perhaps, a divergence of interest among the victors is part of the point of the libelous story about the Roman general, which depicts Attalos inadvertently alerting Mummius to the value of the painting his legionaries were using as a dice board.Footnote ⁹⁵

Whether or not he was in fact the biological son of Eumenes II, Attalos II chose to describe the future Attalos III that way in a letter sent to Ephesus concerning the boy’s tutor.Footnote ⁹⁶ Also, co-regent or not, already as an adolescent in the late 150s, young Attalos was associated with his guardian in acts of royal administration.Footnote ⁹⁷ Thus, when the octogenarian Attalos II died in 138, Attalos III Philometer (Mother-lover) Euergetes (Benefactor) succeeded him according to plan.Footnote ⁹⁸ However, the nearly preternatural solidarity of the dynasty was finally breaking down. The literary sources agree that Attalos began his five-year reign by executing many of his own kin, the entire upper echelon of courtiers and administrators. While it is a sensational claim and hardly would have been practicable, the portrait of Attalos III as an eccentric, paranoid, and violent man, who butchered the courtiers whom he suspected of killing his mother and wife, probably derives from the polemics and dustups of this first – and remarkably late – succession crisis in Attalid history. In other respects, the accounts of Diodorus and Justin are just too contradictory to salvage. Justin describes a recluse, the pharmacological gardener known also from Galen, who essentially abandons his kingdom; but according to Diodorus, Attalos III ran his kingdom into the ground.Footnote ⁹⁹ What we know from the documentary evidence is that he did rule actively and largely in a traditional manner, even insofar as his innovations in the domain of public religion were not necessarily unusual. For example, after an epiphany he promoted to co-equal status with Athena Nikephoros the syncretized Zeus Sabazios, reputedly his mother’s import from Cappadocia but increasingly popular all across Anatolia.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, a long decree of the city of Pergamon, which was issued to celebrate an undated military victory, granted Attalos III a string of unprecedented lifetime cultic honors.Footnote ¹⁰¹ With a ruler cult of the sitting king now performed daily in civic space and those rituals enshrined in the sacred laws of Pergamon, Attalos may have hoped to insulate himself from looming challenges. His perception of a threat from an illegitimate son of Eumenes II named Aristonikos may have prompted him to make the Roman people his testamentary heir, copying the ploy of Ptolemy Euergetes in 155.Footnote ¹⁰² With even a potential Eumenes III waiting in the wings, the Attalids were in a sense finally normal. They now began suffering from the typical infighting of Hellenistic courts. Attalos is said to have sent gifts to Publius Africanus in distant Numantia (Spain).Footnote ¹⁰³ That Attalos leveraged his relationship with Rome to secure his position does not mean that the annexation of his kingdom was inevitable. The end of the Attalids was not what Mommsen called “merely a further recognition of the practical supremacy of Rome.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ It took the Romans a decade to finish deliberating and then to fully convert the kingdom into a province. The contingent fact is that in 133, after a century and a half of carefully planned and executed power transitions, a Pergamene ruler less than 40 years of age died unexpectedly without a consensus successor. This set off what amounted to a brutal war of succession, the War of Aristonikos (133–129), which drew in not only the Romans, but all the other Anatolian kings, vying for supremacy over Pergamon’s former partners, scavenging for pieces of the Attalid state. A grand coalition fragmented, but many structures held up and reappeared later as fundaments of the Roman province of Asia.

Road Map

Money and culture were both key to the success of the Attalids. These two themes structure the book. The first part of the book, Chapters 1–3, treat taxation and coinage. Chapter 1 presents the practice of earmarking as a prominent and distinctive feature of a fiscal system that forced cities across the empire to participate in their own taxation, but did so in a way that sustained civic identity. Through bilateral negotiations with taxpayers, the kings honed the tool of earmarking – tagging, case-by-case, specific revenues for specific public goods. For the cities, public life and with it collective identity came to depend on cooperation with the kings. This habit of earmarking entailed risks for the Attalids, as the king often ventured into the realm of private property. However, the opportunity it afforded to demonstrate a providential interest in removing risk from subjects’ lives was priceless.

Zooming out from budgets to capture a snapshot of the full fiscal system, Chapter 2 presents the first comprehensive analysis of Pergamene taxes. It presents what comparative economic historians have termed a “fiscal constitution,” the tax morphology of the Attalid state, that is, the scope, incidence, and modalities of taxation. It argues that the distribution of risk in the system was carefully managed, local customs were faithfully maintained, tax rates were negotiable, and tax collectors were local men who answered to their communities. By premodern standards, the system was supple and light on coercion. Certainly, the Attalids were hungry for revenue. In fact, their deep fiscal reach is refracted in a legend about the fate of Aristotle’s library. The heritors of the books were Pergamene subjects, who buried them to hide their wealth from the kings’ inspectors. Indeed, revenue seeking took the form of a deepening of the incidence of taxation, rather than the creation of new fiscal categories, which states under pressure, such as the Ancien Régime, are want to invent. Principally, the Attalids targeted mobility, the movement of goods and people, by investing in an infrastructure of surveillance.

Coinage, the subject of Chapter 3, allowed Pergamon to further reorder economic life by introducing a startlingly innovative currency. No one had ever seen anything like it. They erased the king’s face, the convention for royal coinage since Philip and Alexander, and replaced it with ecumenical religious iconography and the badges of cities. A lightweight coin known as the “cistophorus” was issued at a value above its weight in silver. This helped close off the currency system, which in turn helped Attalid Anatolia cohere into a solid whole without cutting it off from exchange with the Aegean, the Black Sea, and the Levant. The participation of old Greek cities like Ionian Ephesus and new ones like Phrygian Toriaion guaranteed the experiment’s success. The profits that accrued were shared all around, as the new money reproduced the local symbolic repertoire on a visual plain devised at the imperial level.

In the second part of the book, the ramifications of Attalid rule for the patterning of culture take center stage. Chapter 4 assesses the urbanization of inner Anatolia under the Attalids. The surprising conclusion is that the Attalids achieved fiscal and ideological integration without the heavy-duty city building that we have come to associate with Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors. In the countryside, the Attalids drew towns and villages into their orbit without forcing people to move or change their way of life. They also capitalized on an upsurge in civic consciousness among Anatolian peasants. They stoked the fire of ethnogenesis for the tribesmen of Mysia, who came to see themselves as heroes of the Attalid army, immortalized in myth on the inner frieze of the Great Altar. For the rural and indigenous population, joining up with the Attalids did not mean being pushed into a city, relinquishing a territory or the prerogatives of a body politic. On the contrary, that these civic organisms held on to their own fiscal territories and maintained their own memberships is what enabled resource extraction and interaction with the state.

Chapter 5 offers a twist on the history of the gymnasium of the Greek polis, which aims to explain why and with what effect the Attalids pumped so much money into that cultural institution. Why did the gymnasium – of all the institutions of the polis – attract the interest of kings and courtiers? Answering this question requires rethinking the gymnasium. Against the standard view of a “city writ small,” an incubator for citizens, I marshal the evidence for sharp distinctions between the gymnasium and everyone else. This kind of philanthropy allowed Pergamon to play the part of civic benefactor without getting dirty with city politics, while city elites gained their own line out to power. That the gymnasium eventually became the ancient city’s new center for politics and self-representation was part of the legacy of the Attalid fiscal system.

Finally, having drawn our attention to this monarchy’s ability to disappear into the background, I attempt in Chapter 6 to specify Pergamon’s own cultural politics. An old-fashioned view describes the Attalids as inauthentic Greeks, deploying an aggressive Panhellenism aimed to erase a cultural deficit. Yet their particular brand of cultural universalism can be historicized and explored through figures from the Library of Pergamon. In the works of the periegetic writer Polemon of Ilion, we find an emphasis on topographical authenticity and the parity of Asia Minor with Old Greece. Another intellectual often associated with the Library, Demetrios of Skepsis, is seen to have strengthened the dynasty’s claim to the mantle of Troy. Fundamentally, the Attalids claimed the kingship of Asia, and we need to take that claim seriously. I argue that the deficit they faced was one of prestige, rather than Hellenicity, and I try to uncover their true cultural background. The picked-over Classical sources record a trail of Asian money, the cash behind Horace’s Attalicae condiciones – “Attalid offers,” slightly foreign but just too good to turn down (Carm. 1.1).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Largely unrecognized, however, is the Greco-Anatolian background of the Attalids that was a crucial ingredient of their success. Within their kingdom, they posed as the successors of Mausolos, Midas, Gyges, Croesus, and indeed Priam, whose very territory they occupied. Their ability to do so authentically is glimpsed in the urban landscape of the capital and in the tumuli in which they were buried. Further, rather than simply coopt or Hellenize the great Anatolian sanctuaries in Galatia and Phrygia Epictetus, it appears that the creative and culturally hybrid Pergamene rulers transformed these cult sites into august, so-called temple estates, which extended their reach into the countryside. The imaginary Galatian barbarian, who blocked Pergamene supremacy in Asia, required expulsion, but the real-life one needed blandishment. The cultural impact of the Attalids both on Galatia and on rapidly urbanizing Pisidia was profound.