The Roman legate Gaius Sulpicius, Polybius tells us, was a man consumed, given over to madness, reveling in his quarrel with Eumenes II of Pergamon (31.6.5).Footnote ¹ In 164, a perplexed Senate, facing a realignment of power in Asia Minor, dispatched Sulpicius to the region on a fact-finding mission.Footnote ² On arrival, Sulpicius solicited allegations against the king by posting notices in the most important cities. Anyone who wished could come to Sardis at an appointed time and be heard. Sulpicius then retreated to the gymnasium of Sardis where he sat for 10 days, holding court and taking complaints. The Roman investigator appears to have been energetic, systematic, even primed for a fight, but mad? What to make of the characterization of Polybius? It no doubt reflects the depth of the Roman assault on the ideological underpinnings of Attalid power and indeed of the world in which the Achaean statesman had come of age. Wherein, then, lies that depth? It has long been noted that Sulpicius was appealing directly to Attalid subjects in Attalid territory.Footnote ³ The choice of Sardis as the venue must also have stung. The former satrapal capital had grown in significance under the Seleukids, and had acquired under the Attalids the distinction of a cistophoric mint, if not a royal residence.Footnote ⁴

Yet Sulpicius was not the first hot-tempered invader to occupy the gymnasium of Sardis. Antiochos III had even brought an army into its confines during the siege of 215/14.Footnote ⁵ Seleukid forces remained quartered in the gymnasium when Sardis fell, one new imposition among many that would have served to chasten its people for their disloyalty. The next year, however, Antiochos eased the city’s punitive fiscal burden, and simultaneously lightened the occupation. In both cases, the city’s gymnasium was a focus of his beneficence. He restored the gymnasium to the Sardians in its “former condition” – no mean feat – and he set life in the place on firm ground for the future. Much as he later did for Herakleia-under-Latmos, the king earmarked royal revenues for an oil fund (elaiochristion), one which would provide 200 metrêtai of oil to the neoi each year (SEG XXXVII 859; SEG XXXIX 1283 and 1285). Scholarship has always recognized the affections of Hellenistic kings for the gymnasium and “those who frequent it.”Footnote ⁶ The charged and politicized nature of this mode of interaction is on full display in the famous episode from Jerusalem (see the epigraph above), an incident roughly contemporaneous with the visit of Sulpicius to Sardis: a group of young Judean priests approached Antiochos IV as members of an incipient gymnasium under royal patronage; a cataclysm ensued.Footnote ⁷ Now, with the recent publication of the earmarking documents from Sardis and Herakleia, the subsequent discovery of more inscriptions relating to Attalid involvement with the gymnasium, it has become ever more clear that the institution of the gymnasium started to take on new significance ca. 200 BCE and, by mid-century, constituted a primary site of interaction between cities and kings. Though the evidence is sparse, this is very likely to have been the case in Sardis in 164. In the late 160s, the Attalids were making gifts in support of gymnasium life in places as distant and different as Rhodes, once an enemy and always a rival, and the city of Delphi, not to mention in “free” Miletus and Kos, or in Andros, a garrisoned possession. Indeed, not more than a few years before his arrival, the gymnasium where Sulpicius set up shop would have hosted competitions during the inaugural celebration of the Panathenaia kai Eumeneia festival, which honored the goddess Athena and the Attalid king.Footnote ⁸ Sulpicius’ presence in the gymnasium of Sardis was understood by all who observed as an affront – as it was meant to be, so much so, in fact, says Polybius, that the Greeks, as if for pity, rallied to the king (31.6.6).Footnote ⁹

The Problem of the Attalids and the Gymnasium

If Hellenistic kings’ interactions with the gymnasium, with the ephebate of the Greek city, and with the other institutions and groups that “had a share in the oil” form a pattern of behavior that extends across time and space, it is a pattern that is sharply pronounced among the Attalids, especially after 188.Footnote ¹⁰ Consider, by way of a contrast, how when the Seleukids came into control of Miletus, they set about rebuilding the city’s sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma, a god who happened to be their tutelary divinity. The Attalids, on the other hand, also sent a message to the Panhellenic audience, but by paying for a gymnasium in the urban center of Miletus: a promise to promote the identity of each and every polis.Footnote ¹¹ Klaus Bringmann counts 29 foundations for gymnasia in his corpus of royal gifts.Footnote ¹² Of these, an impressive 13 are Attalid (Graph 5.1). And we can add considerably to that count. The practice certainly goes back to the dynasty’s origins: Philetairos consecrated land in Thespiai to Hermes, god of the gymnasium par excellence, and earmarked its revenues for an oil fund.Footnote ¹³ Then, the practice intensified after Apameia: eight of the 13 foundations are securely dated post-188. In addition, the much-improved edition of the decree of Colophon for the Pergamene prince Athenaios now allows us to identify the royal gift of a paidikê (youth) palaistra in the background.Footnote ¹⁴ The decree for Korragos and the new documents from Metropolis and Toriaion show the integration of the polis gymnasium into the fiscal structures of the enlarged Attalid kingdom (D1, D5, and D8).Footnote ¹⁵ The Toriaion dossier may even illuminate RC 51, which Welles called a “letter of an Attalid king to military cleruchs, conferring various grants,” and which he dated to the second century BCE. Its fragmentary line 24 reads, “From which [revenue source] I have given oil to the neoi” (ὧν ἔδωκα τοῖς νέοις εἰς τὸ ἔλαιον).Footnote ¹⁶

Graph 5.1 Royal gifts to gymnasia.

(Data from Bringmann et al., 1995)

Still, to gauge the full extent of the Attalid interest in the gymnasium, we must consider several other categories of evidence. The first is the paper trail left by courtiers, which points to the gymnasium as an interface between kings, represented by their most trusted officials, and the public. The prime example is a lamentably fragmentary decree found in southeastern Lydia, which honors a well-connected courtier named Asklepides, who at the end of a long career in the service of the Attalids served as overseer of an unnamed city, perhaps Apollonia-on-the-Maeander. The inscription describes the by-then-deceased Asklepides as having been both a citizen of Pergamon and an intimate (syntethrammenos) of the future Attalos II.Footnote ¹⁷ The package of posthumous honors awarded to this courtier is full of references to the multiple gymnasia of the city. What is clear from this difficult text is that one or more of the gymnasia was slated to host rituals in memory of the courtier.Footnote ¹⁸ At once an extension of the king’s body and a representative of the citizenry of Pergamon, Asklepides found in the gymnasium of the unnamed polis an exquisitely convenient venue for local politics and the manufacture of collective memory.

Second, the archaeology of the gymnasium of the metropolis of Pergamon is a spectacular demonstration of the dynasty’s attachment to the institution. First excavated at the turn of the century, a recent German research project has intensively reinvestigated the space (Figs. 5.1 and 5.2).Footnote ¹⁹ Its cascade of three terraces supported by huge retaining walls, the product of the original design and investment of Eumenes II, placed the monument at the center of the ancient spectator’s visual encounter with the royal capital.Footnote ²⁰ It evinces an unparalleled concern for the differentiation of space inside a gymnasium according to function, especially cultic. Room H seems to have housed the ruler cult, with statues of Eumenes and Philetairos next to one of Herakles.Footnote ²¹ Below, the sacred quarter of the Middle Terrace represents an unusual internal temenos. Crucially, it is the largest gymnasium on record in the Hellenistic world.Footnote ²² At ca. 20,000 m², it approaches double the size of a normal city’s gymnasium.Footnote ²³ With its three terraces and two temples, xystos and paradromis (running tracks), a precinct 212 m long at its greatest extent, and with an open-air palaistra measuring 35 × 75 m, it is in fact the largest integrated building complex in the entire city of Pergamon. Further, a recent revision of the city’s street plan highlights the central importance of the gymnasium to the city of Eumenes II. A decade of soundings and geophysical prospection have ruled out a grid plan with streets oriented toward towers on Eumenes’ wall. Instead, streets of various modules are oriented neatly toward the entrances and specific features of the gymnasium.Footnote ²⁴ Set just below the old, so-called wall of Philetairos, which became, in effect, a lower boundary for the Upper/Old City with its palace district, religious monuments, and public spaces, the gigantism of the new gymnasium served to anchor the street plan and visual axes of the neighborhoods of the Lower/New City. The western entrance was fronted with a public fountain alongside the city’s main arterial road. Indeed, for the New City of Eumenes II and his successors, this gymnasium complex appears to have been the sole public space of note, with the date of the Lower Agora now fixed in the early Roman period.Footnote ²⁵ Wörrle has recently argued that one of the principal functions of the Pergamene gymnasium was to strengthen polis identity in Pergamon, which is often difficult to discern elsewhere in the city.Footnote ²⁶ This building project may be simply the most resplendent evidence of negotiations that took place in many cities between elites and the Attalids. Poliad identity achieved stable footing, but the bonds of dependence were also strengthened. The Großes Gymnasion dates to the period of downhill urban expansion under Eumenes II, and evidence for a third-century gymnasium at Pergamon is extremely thin, limited to a single inscription, dated by the notoriously unreliable criterion of letter forms (I.Pergamon 9).Footnote ²⁷ On any reckoning, Eumenes II placed the gymnasium at the center of civic life in the polis of Pergamon. And yet only when the dynasty fell did responsibility for the oil fund pass from the royal treasury to the gymnasiarch.Footnote ²⁸ The institution remained to the end a joint venture of king and citizenry.Footnote ²⁹

Figure 5.1 Plan of the gymnasium of Pergamon in relation to adjacent monuments and current reconstruction of street grid.

(courtesy of Pergamon Excavation of the German Archaeological Institute; https://geoserver.dainst.org/maps/5548/view)

Figure 5.2 Gymnasium of Pergamon, looking east across the palaistra of the upper terrace.

(courtesy of Pergamon Excavation of the German Archaeological Institute; photo: Ulrich Mania)

Finally, indirect and circumstantial evidence of Attalid involvement with the gymnasium abounds. The city of Tralles can stand as a case study. It has produced a Hellenistic victor list, mentioning neoi, which Wilhelm Dittenberger dated to the second century, and possessed a gymnasium by the time of Augustus.Footnote ³⁰ While the proximity of ancient Tralles to a modern Turkish military installation puts 65% of the site off-limits to archaeology, an impressive Roman bath–gymnasium complex has been identified. Throughout Asia Minor, complexes of this sort stand over the remains of Hellenistic gymnasia, in many cases, over a gymnasium that the Attalids are known to have patronized.Footnote ³¹ At Apameia, the Attalids received Tralles as a “gift,” stripping it of its Seleukid dynastic title, but adorning it with a cistophoric mint and a palace.Footnote ³² An ostotheke that was found 7 km east of Aydın/Tralles bears the names of several Attalid officials and their wives, attesting to the city’s importance as an administrative center with an open-air military camp on its outskirts.Footnote ³³ In many ways, Tralles resembles Ephesus, where a gymnasium foundation is known only by indirect means, namely, through an ephebic dedication to (Hermes), Herakles, and King Eumenes.Footnote ³⁴ Ephesus too was a gift city, and has produced epigraphic evidence for the local presence of royal officials, the hêgemônes and strategoi who dedicate to Eumenes II and Queen Stratonike (SEG XXXIII 942). It was an Ephesian neos that Attalos II considered the right kind of young man to be educated alongside the future Attalos III.Footnote ³⁵ One can easily imagine that the king was just as familiar with the neoi of Tralles as he was with their coevals in Ephesus.

This chapter offers a new explanation for the profound connection between Pergamon and the gymnasium, which casts the Attalids as participants and agents of change in the social history of ancient Greece. It argues that benefaction of the gymnasium was one more way in which the Attalids deftly synched local, civic culture with imperial fiscal structures. This is a mode of interaction that is not exclusively, but rather characteristically Attalid.Footnote ³⁶ What is unexplained is its efflorescence during the Pergamene floruit – and what longer-term effects Pergamon may have had on this famous incubator of Hellenes. To date, scholarship has identified the pattern, but neither explained it adequately nor charted the ramifications. One has long struggled to divine the motivations behind individual royal gifts.Footnote ³⁷ Nevertheless, the Attalid affinity for the gymnasium is usually understood, first, as a straightforward expression of Pergamene Panhellenism and, second, as part of a general tendency among Hellenistic kings to use the gymnasium to manufacture loyal, worshipping subjects. To take but two examples, Robert calls the gymnasium “this characteristic edifice of Greek culture” and “the place set aside for the royal cult and demonstrations of loyalty toward the Hellenistic kings.”Footnote ³⁸ For Dreyer, the kings wanted to use the gymnasium “to create bonds of loyalty by influencing children and the youth, and to recommend themselves to the adult citizens as benefactors and supporters of Greek culture.”Footnote ³⁹ Both statements collapse the evolution of the gymnasium into a synchronic snapshot. It is a remarkable fact that for Aristotle in the fourth century BCE, the gymnasium was not an essential feature of the polis.Footnote ⁴⁰ For the city’s takeover of the gymnasium was a process transpiring over the course of the philosopher’s life. By contrast, for Pausanias, writing in the second century CE about the modest settlement of Panopeas in Phokis, a proper polis needed a gymnasium.Footnote ⁴¹ Between the age of Aristotle and the time of Pausanias, a major change occurred. Did the Attalids spur or accelerate it?

There is no denying that the Attalids represented themselves as the avatars of the Greeks.Footnote ⁴² One aspect of their Kulturpolitik was to establish themselves in centers of international significance to Hellenes, such as Delphi, Delos, and later Athens, and to pose as the champions of the Hellene in the never-ending war against the Barbarian – in their day, figured as the Galatian. In these respects, their politics were Panhellenic, as Lynette Mitchell understands the term. In her study of the origin and development of concepts of Panhellenism in Archaic and Classical Greece, Mitchell stresses “the very complexity and flexibility of Panhellenism that makes it so difficult, on the one hand, to define, and, on the other, to control.”Footnote ⁴³ Key elements of an earlier Panhellenic ideology remained vital in the Hellenistic period, chief among them, the related themes of supra-poliad unity (koinê homonoia) and commitment to a war of liberation against the Barbarian, both spelled out in Chremonides’ decree of 269/8 (IG II² 686 + 687).Footnote ⁴⁴ These may be the wellsprings of the visual rhetoric of Attalid art, but they will not help explain Attalid involvement with the gymnasium.Footnote ⁴⁵ Some might imagine a cultural Panhellenism behind this behavior, a concern to unify Hellenes around a shared paideia in the nascent Library of the capital as much as in the gymnasia of the cities. We should not confuse motivation with effect. In the most general terms, the gymnasium created and sustained a Panhellenic community of shared cultural practice. But by patronizing the gymnasia, the Attalids were sustaining polis identities, not suppressing them. Paradoxically, Pergamene ideology was by no means supra-poliad; it exalted particularism. For Polybius, Eumenes II was his generation’s greatest royal benefactor of Greek cities (poleis Hellênidas) (32.8.5).Footnote ⁴⁶

There is also no denying that the gymnasium cemented the loyalties of Attalid subjects, but it tied people to Pergamon even as it enhanced their sense of belonging to a particular polis. Young men who enjoyed a youth spent in a palaistra equipped at royal expense – on the condition that they parade and sacrifice to the king on his birthday – were bound to fall into line as adults. Yet this drastically reduces the complexity of their experience. Young men may have been wrestling beneath portrait statues of the royal family, but they were also preparing for close combat under teachers picked by the city that they swore to defend.Footnote ⁴⁷ By patronizing the gymnasium, the Attalids did not create an impassive and apolitical elite. In fact, they produced bands of neaniskoi, crack troops, the fighting force of the young men’s association.Footnote ⁴⁸ These neaniskoi might defend royal affairs (basilika pragmata), as they did in Ionian Metropolis during the War of Aristonikos, or, alternatively, they might pursue the specific military objectives of their home cities.Footnote ⁴⁹ Sometimes, we cannot tell which it was, or whether it might have been both. For example, in the letter of Eumenes II to the polis of the Tabênoi (?), the mysteriously named neaniskoi tôn oikeiôn (“of the clan”), fought under a local big man/courtier named Koteies against the Galatians.Footnote ⁵⁰ Patrice Hamon, however, has provided a new reading of the text, which also sees the group “going out against Apameia (προσελήλυθ’ [ἐ]π̣’ Ἀπάμειαν),” that is, attacking another city.Footnote ⁵¹ At any rate, the society of the gymnasium, while influential, represented a small share of the kingdom’s population. If loyalty alone were at stake, the Attalids would have been much better off putting their money elsewhere. Surely, grain funds or important public buildings such as bouleuteria (council houses) were gifts better suited for the desired result.

Recent scholarship on the Hellenistic polis, with its insistence on the survival and vitality of polis institutions after the Battle of Chaironeia (338 BCE), proposes a different explanation. For Andrzej Chankowski, the cities of Asia Minor stood to gain the most from the interaction.Footnote ⁵² In his model, unlike the gymnasia of the cities of Antigonid Macedonia or of the Syracusan epikrateia, the gymnasia of Attalid cities produced citizen soldiers. In other words, the civic institution lay outside the recruitment structure of the royal army. And because the cities profited the most, so the argument goes, civic initiative and agency must lie behind this pattern of royal behavior. In short, the gymnasium survived because it helped the polis survive; Attalid patronage simply tracked alongside.Footnote ⁵³ Yet the case of Toriaion (D8), on which the argument hinges, in fact points up the weakness of any explanation founded on assumptions of cui bono. Eumenes II offered to provide Toriaion with several ready-made institutions, among them, an oil fund that he supported with an earmark. While Chankowski recognizes the gift as evidence of the Attalids’ active promotion of the gymnasium, he reduces Eumenes to an automaton.Footnote ⁵⁴ The king may have had a model in mind, but not one invented in his own chancery. Rather, we must imagine, Eumenes adopted a model of interaction that took shape in cities such as Herakleia-under-Latmos in the third century.Footnote ⁵⁵ For Chankowski, Toriaion demonstrates once again the inability of the kings to come up with their own ideas in the face of the “vitality of the institutions of the polis.” The popularity of the gymnasium “in and of itself” justified the choice.Footnote ⁵⁶ On this account, the Hellenistic kings affected neither the diffusion nor the shape of an institution born fully formed in fourth-century Athens.

The search for the prime mover in this interaction is futile. For new poleis, we can only guess at what preceded the formalization of the gymnasium in places such as Phrygia, Cappadocia, or Judaea.Footnote ⁵⁷ For the old, coastal poleis of Asia Minor, our first glimpse of the institution is often no earlier than the second century BCE.Footnote ⁵⁸ Instead, we ought to seek models for the Hellenistic polis that reflect more faithfully the staggered vision of polis actors: local concerns in the foreground, but the king, ever present, on the horizon.Footnote ⁵⁹ Our challenge is to make plain the links between local and high politics that were once so obvious. Our difficulty in so doing is acute when it comes to the king and the gymnasium. For example, one has struggled to understand why third-century Halikarnassos asked “King Ptolemy” for “permission (synchôrein)” to renovate its gymnasium, “so that the neoi should have a gymnasium and the paides should reclaim the paidikê palaistra that the neoi are currently using.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The city had sent an embassy to the king before it announced a public subscription.Footnote ⁶¹ This is a curious detail. In what sense did Halikarnassos need royal permission to renovate its gymnasium? Léopold Migeotte, plausibly, suspects that the Halikarnassians were fishing for a contribution from the king, which they may well have obtained.Footnote ⁶² What we know for certain is that the king figured from the beginning in the city’s planning. It is unclear in which sense, if any, they were required to contact Alexandria before undertaking a public works project that would marshal the city’s resources and loyalties. The course of action, it seems, simply implied royal participation. In the panorama of their city that Halikarnassos presented to Ptolemy, the king could find himself.

To explain the Attalids’ promotion of the gymnasium by recourse to its popularity is to risk a circular argument. Indeed, the institution reached the peak of its popularity in the second century, with an ephebate attested in 65 cities. Yet surely royal – and especially Attalid – patronage and promotion helped swell the ranks. Consequently, the gymnasium as we know it is also an artifact of Hellenistic monarchy. An institution that we usually think of as quintessentially civic was transformed by the kings it eventually outlived. The second-century Attalids encountered this institution at a particular point in its development. This was not the ephebeia of late Classical Athens or Eretria, which molded large age classes into the core of the citizen-army, some 500–600 young men at a time in Lykourgan Athens, as the gymnasium found architectural expression in the urban enceinte for the first time.Footnote ⁶³ For that institution, Nigel Kennell’s formulation “citizen training system” is more apt.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nor was this yet the gymnasium of the period that the French have named the basse époque héllenistique (late and sub-Hellenistic), a gymnasium in which cities buried their greatest benefactors and rendered them a founder-hero’s cult, a space that Robert famously labeled the “second agora.”Footnote ⁶⁵ To understand the efflorescence of Attalid involvement with the gymnasium we need to marry high political history to a deeper understanding of the development of this institution. Perhaps an Attalid political culture that fostered ties with civic elites is part of the story.Footnote ⁶⁶ But the other dynasties needed their civic elites too, and their kings too could strike a civic pose in a local gymnasium. After all, the Antigonids Philip V and Perseus had their names inscribed on a donor list in the gymnasium of Larisa, without formal distinction, just like ordinary citizens.Footnote ⁶⁷ In what follows, I analyze the role and functioning of the gymnasium in cities both inside and outside the territory allotted to the Attalids at Apameia. Sulpicius, the Roman disrupter in Sardis, came to meet Attalid subjects where they were accustomed to meeting their king.Footnote ⁶⁸ How that had come to be the normal state of affairs has not been adequately explained.

The Gymnasium as a Civic Institution

When the ambassadors of Eumenes II approached the assembly (plêthos) of the Achaeans in 185 to offer an endowment, which would in the future pay the wages of the league’s Council (boulê), they were shouted down (Polyb. 22.7–8; Diod. Sic. 29.17).Footnote ⁶⁹ The arguments of Apollonidas of Sikyon had won the day. Apollonidas had cast the gift as, in principle, worthy of the Achaeans but, in practice, given the identity of the donor and the purpose of the endowment, both utterly shameful and totally illegal (paranomotatê) (Polyb. 22.8.1–2). The Achaeans, he pointed out, had laws (nomoi) that prohibited archons and private individuals from accepting a king’s gift (dôra). The Achaean Council, then, as a collection of private individuals acting in their capacity as archons, had no business accepting one. Now, we know that the Achaeans were far from allergic to royal beneficence – they had been accepting Ptolemaic gold for years.Footnote ⁷⁰ For Apollonidas and his camp, however, the form of the Attalid gift was unacceptable. It threatened to undermine the autonomy of the boulê, as gift obligated countergift, and to invite more unwanted royal advances: this year it was Eumenes II, but next year, warned Apollonidas, it would be Prousias, and then Seleukos. An Achaean civic institution would become unmoored.

We can consider, by way of contrast, that in 161/0 the Rhodians accepted a gift of grain from this same Eumenes. Proceeds from the sale of the grain were earmarked for an education fund, the instruction, presumably, taking place at least in part in the gymnasium (Polyb. 31.31). The critic of this gift is no Rhodian but Polybius himself, who takes the Rhodians to task for abandoning their usual sense of decency (to prepon). In his view, they had acted indecently in soliciting money (eranizesthai) for the education of their sons when none was lacking.Footnote ⁷¹ Were the arguments of Apollonidas of Sikyon about Attalid interference in the Achaean Council on the mind of the Achaeans historian, as Frank Walbank suggests?Footnote ⁷² Probably not. Polybius finds fault with the recipient, not the donor. Moreover, as has been pointed out, Polybius makes his critique from the standpoint of private morality.Footnote ⁷³ It is a critique, however, that he applies to the body politic (politeia) – and not without reason. The Rhodians who secured the gift from Eumenes were acting more like private individuals than representatives of the state, hence the metaphor of Polybius: the philos (friend/kin/associate) who inappropriately seeks an eranos-loan from his fellow eranistai.Footnote ⁷⁴ Whereas Apollonidas had nomos as law to buttress his claim, Polybius had merely nomos as custom, the inarticulate rules of philia (friendship). Apollonidas speaks only of high politics (pragmata), invoking the warring natures (enantiai physeis) of king and democracy (22.8.6). Polybius speaks of the conduct of fathers on behalf of sons (31.31.1). They were arguing about two entirely different species of civic institution.Footnote ⁷⁵

The moralizing of Polybius on the Rhodians and Eumenes II throws into high relief the distinctiveness of the gymnasium as a civic institution in the decades after Apameia. Despite what the wooden language of polis decrees would have us believe, neither the membership nor the interests of the gymnasium were identical with the body politic. The gymnasium had its own law; even when subjected to the law of the polis, it retained its own norms; and its ideology, in a world where most cities and koina called themselves democracies, was elitist.Footnote ⁷⁶ Its collective psychology and heroic archetypes were antisocial.Footnote ⁷⁷ Its doors were literally closed to certain citizens, but unlike those of the Achaean Council, never to kings. If it was for Pausanias, in the second century CE, the sine qua non of the polis, it had not been for Aristotle, in the fourth century BCE.Footnote ⁷⁸ For the Hellenistic period, one cannot assume that each and every polis contained a gymnasium.Footnote ⁷⁹ Gauthier, more than any other scholar, has recognized the peculiar separateness of the gymnasium as a civic institution. He writes of gymnasia that function “outside the cadre of the polis,” the activities of which are but partially or even “in no way civic.”Footnote ⁸⁰ His insight comes across in editions of various texts – honorific decrees of the city of Xanthos for Lyson and of Colophon for Athenaios, for example – and in his prolegomenon to the study of the institution.Footnote ⁸¹ In stark contrast, much recent scholarship emphasizes the civic character of the gymnasium without qualification.Footnote ⁸² For Hans Gehrke, the gymnasium is not quite the city in miniature, but close.Footnote ⁸³ The catalog of Kennell is billed as a list of “state-run systems of citizen training.”Footnote ⁸⁴

We must contend with the distinctiveness of the gymnasium as a civic institution if we are to understand how it became a privileged site of contact with the Attalids. This is precisely why the only systematic attempt to analyze gymnasium society in its ambiguous and even oppositional relationship to civic society at large, Riet van Bremen’s analysis of the neoi, is also the only treatment to give court and king their due.Footnote ⁸⁵ We often count the gymnasium as one of the central institutions of the Hellenistic polis. In the case of Lysimachus and the city of Nikaia in Bithynia, Strabo tells us, the panoptic, geographic center of the entire urban plan was a single stone at the center of the gymnasium.Footnote ⁸⁶ Yet this very centrality remains difficult to understand. The Korragos decree (D1) shows that a city could plausibly argue to have had a gymnasium “from the beginning.” We in fact know that Toriaion did have one from the beginning (D8). It may not have been a sine qua non, but it was also far from superfluous. Because in hard times too it was important to have one, Philetairos gave the Cyzikenes 20 talents for oil and a gathering (synagôgê) during the Galatian crisis of the 270s.Footnote ⁸⁷ And in calmer times, the resumption of gymnasium life was a sign that things had returned to normal: recall that after Antiochos III’s siege of Sardis the restoration of the gymnasium took priority. The gymnasium was also central because interactions with royal power were central to the political economy of the Hellenistic polis. Paradoxically, these interactions tended to take place in the gymnasium because it remained on the periphery of social and political life as long as kings stalked its peristyle colonnades.

The Gymnasium as an Association

Any insistence on friction and negotiation – on the gap or social distance between the gymnasium regulars and the rest – may still seem strained. We need to examine how the group organized and represented itself, how it took action. This was a voluntary association that straddled the divide between public and private. In fact, it was made up of several smaller groups called paides, epheboi, neoi, presbyteroi, and even apalaistroi, each with its own rules and habits.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Each group also possessed its own sense of corporate identity, but as institutions, their functions varied. In most cases, they all acted together, either passing a decree or partaking of the perquisites of belonging. Men and boys who frequented the gymnasium but did not belong to a subgroup, some probably noncitizens, seem to have been subsumed under the category of “those who belong to the gymnasium (οἱ μετέχοντες τοῦ γυμνασίου)” or “those who have use of the oil (οἱ ἀλειψαμένοι),” κτλ.Footnote ¹⁸² Moderns have struggled to define the umbrella grouping them all together.Footnote ¹⁸³ In particular, the German tradition in legal history has taken up the problem, and German contains words like Vereinswesen and Verein that lack precise linguistic and cultural equivalents in the English language.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Scholars have also doubted whether the ancient names of the associations connoted juridical status.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ For our purposes, it will suffice to think of the gymnasium as a kind of collective, but not one loosely organized by “weak ties” alone.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Members chose to participate, rather than find themselves automatically enrolled as citizens of a certain age class.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ In fact, it must have been the strength of this collective as an institution that led many cities to impose a battery of officials on gymnasia – the civic gymnasiarch, his assistant the paidonomos, and the grammateus (secretary) – just when the power of the Attalids was peaking in mid-second-century Pergamon.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ An institution this strong was liable to run its own line out to royal power, which is what happened in Termessos of 319, during the Wars of the Diadochoi, when the neoi picked a different dynast from their older peers.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

The boldest and indeed most common expressions of the institutional identity of the gymnasium are its decrees. There are scores of inscriptions that emanate from a decision of the collective to honor its patron and publicize the act. It is easy enough to characterize these as harmless exercises in citizenship. What gives pause is the curious use of the procedure of prographê, whereby a gymnasium decree became a draft that the polis later decided to incorporate into a civic decree. We have reason to believe that this was a contentious process and that intergenerational or intra-elite conflict lurks behind our documents.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ A case in point is Attalid Colophon. Prince Athenaios, the youngest son of Attalos I, seems to have endowed that city with a youths’ palaistra, perhaps already in the 180s when he was still a neos himself.Footnote ¹⁹¹ An inscription records honors for Athenaios (D10). The first editor of the text, Theodore Macridy, described it as an honorary decree for Athenaios, but as Gauthier made clear, the stone actually bears two decrees, the first providing for a statue of the prince in the sanctuary of Claros, the second for public sacrifice and games on his birthday.Footnote ¹⁹² The motivation clause for the second decree indicates that a certain collective of the gymnasium, perhaps “the regulars of the place” (οἱ μετέχοντες τοῦ τόπου), had already passed its own decree, or “pre-decree,” the aforementioned prographê. In it, the group honored Prince Athenaios as a benefactor: ψήφισ|[μα προεγράψαντο περὶ τοῦ] τιμῆσαι Ἀθήναιον ὄντα|[εὐεργέτην (lines 6–8). It is worth noting that the honors ratified in the second decree, the athletic events, are distinctly gymnasium-oriented, as is their administration, and even participation in the feast to follow: the gymnasiarch distributes the leftover meat to hoi aleipsamenoi (oil users), victors of past stephanephoric games, and various archons (lines 21–26). We catch a glimpse of the confrontational manner in which the neoi may have presented a gymnasium decree to the Council in an earlier civic decree of Colophon, which depicts a full 153 of them making one such submission.Footnote ¹⁹³ Van Bremen adduces alongside these texts the vivid scene of the Pergamene neoi descending on the Council and Assembly of the royal capital en masse (κατὰ πλῆθος) in order to demand honors for the gymnasiarch Metrodoros (I.Pergamon 252 line 37).Footnote ¹⁹⁴ As she points out, these are all cases of neoi, with all of youth’s potential for disruption, demanding that honors performed in the context of the gymnasium be promoted to citywide acclamation. These young men were not asking for permission to practice their citizenship in the simulation room of the gymnasium.Footnote ¹⁹⁵

Intriguing evidence admits that the city did not dictate the circumstances under which the gymnasium passed its decrees, rendered its accounts, or appointed its magistrates. For example, the surviving fragment of the mid-second-century calendar of the gymnasium of Kos, attesting Ptolemaic, Cappadocian, but especially Attalid benefactions, speaks of a “council” (boulê), perhaps taking place in the sacred grove of Asklepios known as the Kypariss(i)on (D11 line 22). Unfortunately, whatever qualifier preceded the word boulê is gone.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Bringmann et al. hypothesize a meeting of instructors (Konferenz der Lehrer).Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Edward Hicks had proposed a regular meeting of the Council of the polis of Kos, which representatives of the gymnasium were required to attend.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Yet much more likely is an occasion akin to the annual conclave in the gymnasium, termed synodos en tôi gymnasiôi, which the civic benefactor and Attalid courtier Kephisodoros required of the ephebes and paides of Apameia (D6 lines 15–16). Civic calendars do not seem to have had any bearing on the dates of these meetings. We even hear of the civic calendar of Iasos falling out of touch with the calendar of the city’s gymnasium. Herrmann has demonstrated that, at least in late Hellenistic or early Imperial times, the association used a different era than the city proper.Footnote ¹⁹⁹

The organizational homologies between the gymnasium and polis institutions are undeniable. The various associations of the gymnasium imitate civic habits of record-keeping, honoring their benefactors, and publicity.Footnote ²⁰⁰ The question is whether, from an emic perspective, the gymnasium was ever an antagonist of the polis, or just the city writ small, as it is usually understood from our etic perspective. Indeed, already for Aristotle, the nonpolitical association (chrematistikê koinônia) had looked to the polis as its model.Footnote ²⁰¹ For the philosopher, both groups aimed at the advantage (to sympheron) of their members. Yet surely, interests could and did diverge. The association of maritime traders in Aristotle’s treatment, for example, may have differed with their city’s port officials over the most advantageous way to organize harbor dues. Regarding the gymnasium and the city, these rival tendencies peaked in the second century BCE.Footnote ²⁰² Witness what happened on Athenian Delos in 141/0. Up until then, the Athenian practice had been to elect the island’s gymnasiarch in the assembly in Athens. However, in that year, the electing body consisted of the Athenian governor (epimelêtes) and “those who frequent the gymnasium (οἱ ἀλειφομένοι)” (I.Delos 2580 lines 31–32). In the following year, the old practice was reinstituted for good – and spelled out ([χ]ει[ροτονη]θεὶς ὑπὸ τοῦ δήμου) (line 34). According to Christian Habicht, the reasons for this “messiness” are unclear.Footnote ²⁰³ Of course, ad hoc circumstances in Athens or on Delos may have led to this power play by the gymnasium’s regular membership. Yet as a lapse in a city’s control over a gymnasium, albeit one separated by a stretch of sea, it can be regarded as paradigmatic, rather than anomalous. In the absence of vigilance and pressure from the city, those who controlled the gymnasium were the elite, even the noncitizen population – which is to say, those who were present – and those who, like the king and his courtier, could with money make themselves present.Footnote ²⁰⁴

Close study of its architectural ensemble and place in urban plans of the period confirms the impression that the gymnasium restricted access in ways that must have served to exclude elements of the citizenry. In fact, it was only in Hellenistic times that the building complex of the gymnasium acquired a specific architectural typology. Above all, this included a large peristyle court, with rooms and exedrae forming a perimeter around a large central court. Architectural historians emphasize the integrity of the design: the gymnasium complex formed a closed architectural unity. The peristyle helped produce this effect, as did strong walls and built entryways, which eventually gained inviting propylaea. The unity of these complexes, often sited on slopes, made them at once key landmarks, glimpsed by all who approached the city or summoned its vista to mind, and also simple to close off – even from local outsiders. For all their iconicity, gymnasia were never as accessible as civic spaces like the Hellenistic theater or agora. In short, they were not open spaces. Of late, Ralf von den Hoff goes so far as to call their closure “hermetic.” In practice, it was much easier to see inside than to get inside, with propylaea serving as visual provocations: both barriers and windows. Moreover, pathways in and out of gymnasia do not communicate directly or even align along clean axes with public spaces like agorai. For example, from the agora of Sikyon, one can gaze directly up toward the terrace of a large Hellenistic gymnasium (Fig. 5.3). Yet one enters not from the east side facing the agora, but rather from a small, side gate on the north, which itself lacks direct communication with the theater it faces. Additionally, unlike most civic sanctuaries, gymnasia, which included shrines, tend to stand apart from processional routes.Footnote ²⁰⁵

Figure 5.3 Hellenistic Sikyon, view east/southeast from the terraces of the city’s gymnasium toward the adjacent agora.

(Sklifas Steven/Alamy Stock Photo)

At Pergamon, as noted, the Großes Gymnasion anchored the street plan of the East Slope of Eumenes’ city, marking a middle ground between the Old and New City. The terraced complex was highly visible, both from the plain below and beyond Eumenes’ walls, and along the axes of major streets that terminated at the structure’s two original gates. Indeed, the more impressive of the two gates, the western, contains a covered staircase, which is rotated toward alignment with the streets of the East Slope. Building on the work of Bielfeldt, Pirson singles out the Pergamene gymnasium as a rare and singularly monumental civic space in the royal capital.Footnote ²⁰⁶ Yet as these and other scholars have noted, the citizens of Pergamon remain invisible or anonymous in the epigraphy and archaeology of the gymnasium until the final years of the dynasty. Only under Attalos III did the demos begin to dedicate statues in the gymnasium and gymnasiarchs to receive honors.Footnote ²⁰⁷ The architecture itself conflicts with any straightforward characterization of Eumenes’ gymnasium as open to every citizen of Pergamon. On the contrary, access was tightly controlled (Fig. 5.1). One did not enter – as visitors do today – directly from the nearby sanctuaries of Demeter or Hera. Rather, the two original entryways, while set on the main thoroughfare of the city, were quite narrow and did not lead to the decorated Upper Gymnasium. Further, the entire complex of the gymnasium was enclosed, with walls on the east and west and a monumental retaining wall on the south. Late in the Hellenistic period, up-to-date bathing facilities were added to the complex. One entered these baths via the palaistra, which limited access to those already inside.Footnote ²⁰⁸ We may place this architectural closure in the context of a broader second-century pattern of creating self-contained ensembles in urban planning, segmenting the city according to function. However, the assumption that the Pergamene gymnasium restricted access because the institution it housed restricted access to citizens is unfounded.Footnote ²⁰⁹ Access was restricted, but neither limited nor guaranteed to the citizens. For those who belonged, this was a civic space, distinguished by the very absence of the kind of constraint that polis ideology typically placed on Hellenistic rulers. Visible but not transparent, the gymnasium belonged to the new collectivities on which the Attalid state was built.

New Collectivities

Among those who frequented the Delian gymnasium in the 140s were a sizable number of noncitizens.Footnote ²¹⁰ Delos was especially cosmopolitan, but in this respect, it fits a pattern. As the Beroia law and a host of ephebic lists show, the Hellenistic gymnasium did not exclude noncitizens. In another illustrative case, from Eriza in Caria or from Phrygian Themisonion, a gymnasiarch named Chares was honored in 115/14 for providing oil to the “ephebes, neoi, and resident aliens.”Footnote ²¹¹ On the other hand, under the Attalids, it was not the gymnasium’s role to fully assimilate outsiders into the civic corps. If a noncitizen could access the gymnasium, once inside, he still retained his political status. The Attalids’ gymnasium did not so much produce new citizens as new collectivities, rooted in the realities of social life and Mediterranean mobility. The noncitizens of Mylasa – a colorful example – in a late Hellenistic decree of their own, honored Leontiades adoptive son of Philiskos, the gymnasiarch who at his own expense had provided them with 80 months’ worth of oil, which he made available all day and up until night. (Arbitrary closures, apparently, were common, at least for noncitizens.) In their short text, this group of subalterns twice emphasizes that as metics, paroikoi, and aliens, they lacked a share in the public oil distributed in the gymnasium. Yet with their dedication of a portrait statue of Leontiades, the group publicly memorialized their participation in a certain form of civic life.Footnote ²¹² Ultimately, the new collectivities of the gymnasium, these broader cross-sections of the Hellenistic polis, were the targets of the Attalids’ gifts. Indeed, the creation and the performance of the new collectivities owed much to royal sponsorship. So much so, in fact, that the Attalids’ constant care for the gymnasium cannot have been reflexive adherence to a static model of social organization in the polis. Rather, with imperial motives, the Attalids helped increase the formal participation of noncitizens in civic rituals, profiting from the enduring vitality of the polis as a source of identity, while also contributing to a radical overhaul of social relations.

We hear echoes of this process in documents that refer to limited distributions of consumable, which is to say, perishable goods to the typically broad-based gymnasium society: certainly oil, but also food, and perhaps sweet wine, too. These were events like the “royal banquets” of the gymnasium, the basilika deipna mentioned in the long decree of Colophon for Menippos (SEG XXXIX 1244 Column II line 47). We will return to them shortly, but it is enough to point out here that the Colophonians had hoped to reconstitute with civic monies a royal foundation for (annual?) banquets for neoi and presbyteroi. Publishing the inscription from Claros, the Roberts found a comparable institution in the endowment of Philetairos for the synagôgê (gathering) of the neoi in Kyzikos.Footnote ²¹³ At such banquets, Attalid money convened a group in the gymnasium that almost certainly included noncitizens.

The protocols of the gymnasium banquet carried over the old status distinctions of the polis, but reorganized them according to a different logic, creating new symbolic frontiers between a select group of citizens, claiming aristocratic status, and the indistinct mass of other citizens.Footnote ²¹⁴ Inside the gymnasium, it was presence itself, which trumped political rights exercised on the outside. The charters for the gymnasium feasts of Critilaos from Aigiale (Amorgos) and of Elpinikos from Eretria mandate different eating arrangements for citizens, metics, Romans, and temporary residents (parepidêmountes) – a larger piece of meat for the table of the ephebes. They do not, however, bar one from eating for lack of citizenship.Footnote ²¹⁵ These two texts date to ca. 100, but already in the gymnasium honors that a certain Lydian city granted to Asklepides, courtier of Attalos II, a group of participants decidedly larger than the citizenry alone is envisioned.Footnote ²¹⁶ To have a share in the distribution of the gymnasium banquet, it was more important to be present than to be a citizen. The new collective was not a virtual community. Its bonds were forged in real life. Thus, in the case of Critilaos, a share in the banquet goes to “those citizens who are present (τοῖς τε πολίταις τοῖς ἐπιδημοῦσιν),” just as it does to “those foreigners who are temporarily resident (ξένοις τοῖς παρεπιδημοῦσιν)” (lines 72–73). Gauthier underscores the point: this was a religious, not a civic festival, and one which demanded physical participation.Footnote ²¹⁷ The basilika deipna of the gymnasium of Attalid Colophon would have been no different. For nowhere in the entire corpus of royal gifts to gymnasia is there a single instance of a distribution made exclusively to citizens in the manner of the grain fund of a Hellenistic polis. Habicht has restored one for the Gymnasium of Ptolemy in Athens, a conjecture that is worth reconsidering (IG II² 836).Footnote ²¹⁸

On the contrary, the terms of at least one Attalid foundation, that of either Eumenes II or Attalos III for the gymnasium of Andros, imply a distribution in the manner of Critilaos and Aigiale: food for participation (D9). The honorific decree praises the gymnasiarch of Andros for having discharged his duties generously and lawfully, which in part meant organizing a procession and a feast on the king’s birthday. The gymnasiarch seems to have been generous in leading his own cow in procession, but indeed lawful in then sacrificing the animal immediately (παραχρῆμα) (line 8). The mandate to sacrifice immediately prevented the gymnasiarch from slaughtering the animal later, among different company.Footnote ²¹⁹ It ensured that those who ate the meat were those who showed up on the king’s birthday, that the feast took place only in the gymnasium. At Aigiale, Critilaos showed the very same concerns for his feast: ἡ δὲ δημοθοινία γένεσθω ἐν τῷ γυμνασίῳ ἐπάναγκ̣ες (“the banquet absolutely must take place in the gymnasium”) (lines 59–60). And the flowers, the sacrificial victims, along with their skins – they were all to be consumed “immediately,” again, παραχρῆμα (line 62). Both rituals incorporate elements of civic ideology. For example, at Aigiale, the procession begins at the city’s prytaneion, while on Andros, a sacrifice is made on behalf of the demos. Yet in each case, the focus of the ritual is squarely on the patron of the gymnasium and his family: Critilaos and his prematurely deceased, heroized son Aleximachos, or the king, his father, and their queens.

We may now return to the issues raised in the case of Colophon and Menippos. Not long after the War of Aristonikos, the Colophonians had voted to revive so-called royal banquets. The city assumed control and financial responsibility for an Attalid institution. However, sufficient public money did not materialize, and the city resorted to the appointment of magistrate-liturgists called epimênioi to make up the difference. Menippos then intervened to release both the city and any would-be elite peers of the entire financial burden. The city had suffered greatly in a war that ushered in a profound change of the social fabric of the region’s poleis. After Aristonikos, we see fully, on the one hand, the emergence of peerless super-citizens and, on the other, the erosion of distinctions between ordinary citizens and noncitizen permanent residents. Leading citizens like Menippos, but also Polemaios of Colophon, and Moschion of Priene, instituted public feasts that created the new collectivities that crisis seemed to demand.Footnote ²²⁰ As Fröhlich observes, these feasts were at once a gathering of the entire population and also a means of distinguishing elite groups, which is to say, of maintaining – if reorganizing – the status distinctions of the polis.Footnote ²²¹ As heirs to the kings’ legacy and ex-ephebes themselves, the outsized civic benefactors of the period knew the gymnasium as the civic institution in which presence counted the most, in which the role one played was the youth, the king, the hero, Alexander or Herakles, and not the middling citizen. The “royal banquets” of the gymnasium, then, were the perfect model for the new “inclusive” public feasts. Menippos, who as a mere neos, according to his epigraphical biography, proved his worth to Colophon on embassies to the Attalid kingdom (Attalikê basileia), was responsible for reconstituting the kings’ feasts. Yet he was also credited with sponsoring a lavish public feast (dêmothoina) during the Epiphany of Dionysus that fed citizens on the first day, and metics and holders of isoteleia on the second.Footnote ²²² These men literally towered above their co-citizens: life-size portrait statues of Polemaios and Menippos stood on columns over 9 m tall in the Sanctuary of Apollo at Claros. The monument of Menippos, on which his decree was inscribed, squeezed itself between a statue of Antiochos IV and the Temple of Apollo itself.Footnote ²²³ The social distance between Menippos and the other Colophonians recalled the gulf between the kings and the rest. And like the kings, they found in the gymnasium a civic space that conformed to the realities of power and demography.

As we read in the roughly contemporary Colophonian decree for Polemaios, the War of Aristonikos had sent refugees pouring into the city.Footnote ²²⁴ Polemaios helped provide for the outsiders, and seems to have promoted the idea of a public subscription (epidosis) for their welfare. At his wedding, he treated citizens to a sweet wine distribution called glykismos, while to noncitizens he gave a portion of meat. The wedding of Polemaios, just like the public feast of Menippos, was an occasion for the ritual performance of a new collectivity in Colophon. In this respect, these rituals mimicked long-standing practice in the gymnasium, an institution with which both men were familiar.Footnote ²²⁵ Indeed, in Pergamon itself and elsewhere in the region, post-Attalid elites soon began using the rituals of the gymnasium to integrate outsiders.Footnote ²²⁶ The long decree of Sestos in honor of Menas, former Attalid stratêgos of the Chersonnese and the Thracian topoi, priest of King Attalos in his city, and twice gymnasiarch, provides a wealth of detail.Footnote ²²⁷ During Menas’ second stint as gymnasiarch, post-Attalid Sestos was in dire circumstances, with the raids of nearby Thracians preventing the cultivation of its territory. In this case, the integration of outsiders was vital for the survival of the city. Menas consecrated his inaugural Hermaia kai Herakleia festival “for the salvation of the demos and the neoi,” and “he invited to the sacrifice not only those who have a share of the oil, but everyone else as well, even giving a share to foreigners (ἐκάλεσεν ἐπὶ τὰ ἱερὰ οὐ μόνον τοὺς μετέχοντας τοῦ ἀλείμματος|ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς λοιποὺς πάντας ποιούμενος τὴν μετάδοσιν τῶν ἱερῶν καὶ τοῖς ξέ|νοις)” (lines 60–67).

We have lingered over the historical context of the decree of Colophon for Menippos because the novelties of civic life in the sub-Hellenistic world refract earlier interventions by kings. It has long been recognized that a veritable cult of civic benefactors in the first century BCE was modeled on Hellenistic ruler cult. Yet it also pays bearing notice that the Attalid kings, in effect, piloted the expansion of participation in civic rituals that we tend to associate with the chaos and rapid social change that transpired after their demise. The choice of the gymnasium as the quintessential beneficiary of Pergamene redistribution meant that participation of noncitizens in a steeply hierarchical political community was normalized within its walls. Outside, civic intellectuals were just then debating the ethics of an unbridled philanthropy that reduced co-citizens to clients and blurred boundaries with outsiders.Footnote ²²⁸ The logic of the “inclusive” public feasts of the sub-Hellenistic period and the earlier basilika deipna of the gymnasium was the same, namely, the creation of a new collectivity that transformed the status distinctions of the polis without breaking them. The polis remained a powerful source of identity, but the meaning of citizenship and participation in civic life had changed forever. From the Andros inscription, we can discern the logic of an Attalid-sponsored public banquet in the polis (D9). For the processions that led up the feasts, two texts suggest similarly broad participation.Footnote ²²⁹ On Kos, ca. 180, Ariarathes IV celebrated military success with a procession that entailed the participation of the gymnasiarch, the neoi, and the ephebes, and he promised to crown three groups: citizens, paroikoi, and temporary residents of Kos (SEG XXXIII 675, lines 6–7). The Attalids were very active patrons of the gymnasium of Kos in this period and very close allies of Ariarathes IV.Footnote ²³⁰ We may imagine that Attalid festivals on Kos were similarly organized. Moreover, we know much of the procession that welcomed the victorious Attalos III home to Pergamon (OGIS 332 lines 33–38). It included the priesthood and the magistrates of the city of Pergamon, but also its ephebes and neoi, gymnasiarch, paides and paidonomos, and finally the citizens, their wives and daughters, as well as the other inhabitants (enoikountes).

The aim here was to provide a framework of explanation for the Attalids’ habit of funding gymnasia in cities under their control or influence. Scholars have taken the benefits of the arrangement to be self-evident. On this reckoning, the Attalids gave to the gymnasium in order to produce loyal subjects or, in slightly less Machiavellian terms, out of an ill-defined Panhellenism.Footnote ²³¹ As for the cities, the last wave of work on the Hellenistic polis argues that the vitality of civic institutions after Chaironeia left the Attalids with little choice; the cities imposed this model of giving on the kings, further strengthening polis identity in the face of royal power. Behind these explanations lies a pair of related assumptions about the true beneficiary of the arrangement, and so about who initiated it. Yet both sides had something to gain, and, usually, we cannot know who pushed first. Taking a fresh look at the exchange brings out the true nature of the sovereignty play. Attalid patronage of the gymnasium strengthened polis identity, but it weakened popular control of communal self-representation before royal power. An elite group, theoretically open to noncitizens, now negotiated directly with Pergamon over a city’s fate. Those who had a share of the oil also had access to the king, who now had a bridgehead into civic life, precisely what Apollonidas of Sikyon was trying to prevent by blocking the gift of Eumenes II to the Council of the Achaean Koinon. Correspondingly, we can now better sense the full sting of the sovereignty violation of Sulpicius, the Roman who entertained complaints against the Attalids from a seat in the gymnasium of Sardis.

In the mid-second century, the gymnasium was not “the city writ small,” but rather, the preferred site of interaction between cities and kings. Eumenes II, who made an architectural spectacle out of one, unparalleled in its size and spatial complexity, the singular visual reference point for his new capital city, helped focalize civic life into its confines. He helped further politicize the gymnasium, and eventually, after the Attalids were gone, it emerged as a “second agora,” in which the city’s heroized dead were buried and the collective voice of the free inhabitants routinely expressed. Under the Attalids, what facilitated the rise of the gymnasium, it has been argued, were the dynamics of the institution at this juncture in its historical development, such as its peculiar system of finance, or the seemingly endless opportunities for embellishment it offered its patrons. The gymnasium also offered members of this dynasty, ever the financial sophisticates capable of exploiting the anonymizing power of money, a way to launder money to their supporters. We must also be aware that the Attalids faced an institution in flux, and that the intensity of their benefactions must have affected or exploited the following processes. Curty has written of a mid-second-century transitional period in the evolution of the gymnasiarchy, which saw the gymnasiarch take over the oil supply, just as the city began to take charge of honoring the gymnasiarch. The mid-second century also witnessed a race to amass social capital in the gymnasium, in evidence with the formal appearance of the gymnasium’s presbyteroi as an association. The Attalids participated in and stood to profit from any struggle over the definition of the gymnasium as a public space. They certainly contributed to increasing its profile, as the monumental, marble architecture of the gymnasium now begins to turn up in the archaeological record.Footnote ²³²

This chapter was also an essay on the distinctive nature of the gymnasium as a civic institution. If this was the preferred site of interaction with royal power, what might that say about its relation to other civic institutions? The gymnasium enjoyed a measure of autonomy from those other civic institutions, it was argued, and occupied a unique position vis-à-vis king and court. Ironically, this fact has become obscure to us precisely because both parties – the kings and the cities – wanted it to be so. At every turn, cities sought to constrain the elites of their gymnasia and bind them ideologically to the polis. As for the Attalids, they certainly intended their patronage of the gymnasium to be perceived as gifts to “Greek cities (poleis Hellênidas)” in the terms of Polybius (32.8.5). A final example comes from Chios, where an inscription records two gifts of “Attalos,” one for the renovation of the city’s walls, and a second for the heating of the gymnasium.Footnote ²³³ One struggles to relate these gifts chronologically to the voluntary subscription (epidosis) of Chios for wall construction, particularly because the Attalid text also lists the names and properties of locals.Footnote ²³⁴ Yet in epigraphic terms, the association of the two public goods, sturdy walls and a gymnasium, could not have been any tighter. We lack an explicit statement of the Chians on what the gymnasium meant to them, but the epidosis document provides stark testimony for the walls: the freedom (eleutheria) and autonomy (autonomia) of the homeland (patris) (lines 1–2). If the Attalids had convinced at least some of the Chians to think similarly of the gymnasium, they had achieved success.