The aim of the preceding holistic account of the Attalid fiscal system has been to recast the so-called liberal or bourgeois monarchy as a line of administrative savants, who won an empire not by the spear but by making the cultural reproduction of local constituencies, the elite of the gymnasium, the polis community, and emergent civic organisms in rural Anatolia, all depend on efficient taxation. When we view the Attalid kingdom from this perspective, the kings themselves fade out of view – just as they do on their own coin types.Footnote ¹ Yet, if we follow the taxes back to the metropole, the relationship between culture and power only increases in salience. For we find the Attalids taking a hyperactive role in collecting, curating, producing, and circulating cultural artifacts.Footnote ² From the Library of Pergamon to the Academy of Athens, tax revenues funded the Attalids’ spending spree on culture. Taxes allowed the Attalids to capture pride of place in the archaeological record of Panhellenic centers such as Delphi and Delos. In addition, the manner in which the citadel of Pergamon and its hinterland were developed with the proceeds of empire also represented a cultural statement to would-be subjects. No picture of Attalid political economy can be complete without a consideration of the role of culture in determining the outcome of the Settlement of Apameia. In other words, did the cultural pageantry and positioning of the Attalids contribute to the ideological integration of the new state?

According to a standard reference article on the dynasty, cultural ideology masked real weakness, while monuments and bibliophilic lore have obscured the fact that Pergamon controlled neither its destiny nor its notional territory.Footnote ³ Again, the scale, costliness, and prestige of Pergamene cultural output would seem to belie such pessimism about its material basis. Yet the subject of an Attalid Kulturpolitik, of a commitment to “culture as policy,” has largely been approached as a matter of understanding the subtlety, even genius with which these unpedigreed latecomers to royalty constructed authentic Hellenic cultural credentials, not only by patronizing Athens and the Panhellenic sites of Old Greece but by cleverly building bridges of fictive kinship to Arkadia and coopting the Muses of Thespiai.Footnote ⁴ Meanwhile, in Anatolia itself, we risk losing track of the kind of local reception that postcolonial scholarship has recovered for the other multiethnic kingdoms such as Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleukid Near East. And yet it is this internal, Graeco-Anatolian – in ancient terms – Asian audience that counts for assessing the impact of the cultural content of Attalid imperialism. However, unlike Hellenistic Egypt and the Near East, Anatolia was home to both indigenous Greeks and indigenous non-Greeks. Here, the encounter with the subaltern was strange and unique. In fact, mutual intelligibility was unparalleled, especially since a large population of Phrygians spoke the Indo-European language closest to Greek.Footnote ⁵ Therefore, neither inauthenticity nor cultural appropriation is a suitable lens through which to view the Attalids. In the Mysian context, Greek identity was also bound to take its own forms, distinct from those of the mainland and the islands of the Aegean. Helpfully, by providing a cultural profile of the Greeks of the kingdom’s geographical core, recent studies of the Classical polis network of the Kaikos Valley and of collective memory and cult in Pergamon under the Gongylids shed light on specifically local resonances of the Telephos myth.Footnote ⁶ We must also consider what particular currents of Panhellenism issuing forth from the Library may have meant for an audience of East Greeks. For all their connections abroad, the Attalids could not afford to ignore cultural dialogue with the Greeks at home.

On the other side of the ledger, the extent to which the Attalids acted like Anatolian kings has been seriously underappreciated in accounts of their rise. In fact, the Anatolian substrate of Attalid cultural identity is rarely investigated beyond takedown references to the mixed parentage of Philetairos: his mother was a Paphlagonian of ill repute, and his father, on shaky onomastic grounds, is usually counted a Macedonian. In the Classical period, the lords of the Kaikos Valley had been Greeks and Persians, but the population was a mix of Greeks, who have left us a few Atticizing grave stelai, and, presumably, a silent majority of Anatolians.Footnote ⁷ In the Bronze Age, the region had lacked the Aegean connections of the Milesia or the Troad.Footnote ⁸ We must recall that for Herodotus Pergamon was not one of the eleven Aeolian poleis, and that for Xenophon, the citadel was still “Pergamon of Mysia.”Footnote ⁹ Of course, the muted Hellenism of early Pergamon informs the idea that the Attalids “emerged from the sidelines of history to become one of the dazzling centres of antiquity.”Footnote ¹⁰ Cruelly, the Anatolian cultural background of the Attalids is thereby rendered invisible when it should help us explain how Pergamon transformed itself from vassal to continental empire, adroitly governing both the coastal poleis and the inland ethnê and demoi. Measured against the coastal cities of the deltas of the great Anatolian rivers – Smyrna on the Hermos, Ephesus on the Kayster, and Miletus on the Maeander – early Pergamon is often rated a Hellenic backwater. Yet it was no accident that a city-state on the margins of two cultural spheres emerged with an empire. The Attalids represent a culturally “bilingual,” distinctly Anatolian response to the diasporic Graeco-Macedonian model of empire. This was not a settler state, and the Attalids were not “chameleon kings,” who manipulated local expectations.Footnote ¹¹ In a groundbreaking study, Ann Kuttner has shown that the creative incongruity of Pergamene eclecticism in art and architecture is riven with Anatolian materials, motifs, and topophilia. As she points out, the Attalids continually proclaimed themselves something other than Hellenes.Footnote ¹²

The goal of this chapter is to take stock of the Attalids’ cultural diplomacy to their own people. This means taking seriously the dynasty’s claim to rule a place called Asia, which is part of, but also apart from, Hellas. That claim is voiced already in an epigram of Philetairos, inscribed at Pergamon on an Olympic victory monument, which makes a distinction between Hellenes and Asians.Footnote ¹³ Yet we find the programmatic statement reflected in the 184/3 decree of Telmessos in Lycia, a document for the scramble that pitted the Attalids against Anatolian rivals from Bithynia and Galatia. The inscription recounts that Eumenes II, savior and benefactor, declared war and undertook danger “not only on behalf of those ruled by him, but also on behalf of the other inhabitants of Asia.”Footnote ¹⁴ Asia was the theater of war. The population of Asia looked to Eumenes for salvation. We can understand the ease with which such Pan-Asianism coexisted with Hellenizing tendencies only if we recognize the Attalids as the heirs of Anatolian kings such as Mausolus of Caria and Croesus of Lydia, occupying the same geographical niche defined by East Greece and the Anatolian steppe. We must avoid reducing the cultural universalism of the Attalids to an antithesis of Greeks and barbarians. This is the temptation of the mythic allegory of the Gigantomachy on the Great Altar and of the historical analogies of the Little Barbarians on the Athenian acropolis.Footnote ¹⁵ In mainland Greece, the Attalids joined the Aetolians and others in portraying victory over the Gauls as a replay of the triumph of a united Hellas over the Persians. Unsurprisingly, at Athens, Attalos I catered to the Athenian version of the mythic cycle, which also juxtaposed Trojans and Greeks, as well as Amazons and Greeks. Meanwhile, in their own kingdom, the Attalids invested in the prestigious legacy of Troy and leaned heavily on the support of Aeolian cities allegedly founded by Amazons. Therefore, we begin by investigating the intellectual orientation of the official Panhellenism of the Library of Pergamon, in order to reconstruct a few of the lineaments of the cultural dialogue between the Attalids and the Greeks of Asia Minor. Next, we consider ancient perceptions of the capital as an Anatolian royal city rather than an inauthentic polis, first, from the perspective of its tumulus burials and, second, from the vantage of its mountaintop palace and urban plan. Pergamene Panhellenism, then, emerges as the particularistic expression of the civilization of cis-Tauric Asia. Finally, we reevaluate the relationship of culture to power in Attalid interactions with new or potential subjects in the highlands of central and southern Anatolia. In places like Galatia and Pisidia, we come to see Pergamene Panhellenism as a truly universalistic expression: civilization in cis-Tauric Asia.

The Library of Pergamon

The Attalids had always courted intellectuals, but Eumenes II was the first to attract an academic superstar to the capital, the Stoic philosopher and literary critic Crates of Mallos. Crates arrived at an opportune moment: the physical setting of the Library, wherever it was, now took shape amid a flurry of book buying and book production on the city’s famous parchment.Footnote ¹⁶ In addition, an entire cast of Pergamene intellectuals now found themselves working for much higher stakes. As a Stoic, Crates must have cherished the opportunity to steer an ascendant king and the population of his new empire toward virtue and harmony with nature. He is best known for his work on the text of Homer, especially allegorical and lexical exegesis in pursuit of knowledge of the cosmos. For the Stoics, such knowledge on the global scale directly informed ethics on the local.Footnote ¹⁷ However, we sorely lack any idea of the librarian’s position on the ethical relationship of a wise man to his community of origin (patris). Yet the issue was a central concern of the Early Stoa, treated at length by Zeno of Citium in his Politeia. Building on Cynic critiques of norm and convention, Stoic cosmopolitanism reconsidered the act of political affiliation. Meanwhile, Pergamon’s territorial monarchy was faced with the task of securing commitments from subjects whose primary affiliation remained the conventional one, the community of origin.

Symbolically, as a vast store of cultural prestige, the Library contributed to the power of the dynasty. As a self-proclaimed kritikos, Crates busied himself with the creation of a classical literary canon.Footnote ¹⁸ This put the Attalids in direct competition with the Ptolemies of Alexandria. Emulation of Athens aside, Pergamon became a center of cultural production in its own right. For example, one suspects that the Library produced a royally commissioned, specifically Pergamene edition of Homer.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet if the Library, under the stewardship of Crates, made a distinctive ideological contribution to the maintenance of an empire, which, as I have argued, promoted local, civic identities and institutions, it managed to do so by blunting the hardest edges of Stoic cosmopolitanism. Early Stoicism had inherited a critical stance on the patris from Diogenes the Cynic. The radical stance of an early Stoic named Aristo recalls the view of Diogenes. Aristo is cited for the claim that “the fatherland [patris] does not exist by nature.”Footnote ²⁰ And for a Stoic, what does not exist by nature is of no concern. Aristo, however, was a dissident, and Zeno and his immediate successors, principally Chrysippus, counseled politically active men. In principle, the true polis of wise men stretched beyond the boundaries of any particular city. In fact, the achievement of the ultimate goal (telos) of Stoicism entailed the dissolution of each individual city-state. That the true foreigner (xenos) was the morally bad was a belief held by Zeno, who placed virtue over institutions.Footnote ²¹ The realization of that telos, though, was safely set in the distant future. For the contemporary Stoic sage, to live a cosmopolitan life was to emigrate to the court of a king, even an enlightened barbarian, in order to promote virtue among the greatest number of people. Nevertheless, Chrysippean doctrine suggests the possibility of serving the fatherland and privileging its citizenship, if only as a worst-case scenario for a sage rendered immobile by circumstance. These ideas may have caused some embarrassment for later thinkers of the Middle Stoa, but they formed part of the intellectual background of Crates of Mallos. Later, too, arrived the more humanistic cosmopolitanism of universal community. The Stoicism of Crates would seem to have taken membership in the polis for granted, but harbored doubts about its citizens’ common destiny.Footnote ²²

A more traditional attitude is in evidence in the writings of Arkesilaos of Pitane, an Academic and a client of Eumenes I, who began an epigram for a fallen friend from inland Anatolia, crying, “Far, far away are Phrygia and sacred Thyateira, your native land (patris), Menodoros, son of Kadanos.”Footnote ²³ Plainly, no Pergamene school of thought existed.Footnote ²⁴ Moreover, Stoicism seems to have gravitated back toward practical ethics under Panaetius, said to have been a student of Crates.Footnote ²⁵ Rather, it is noteworthy that the intellectual climate of the Library contained an element of ambivalence about the more exclusive claims of the community of origin on an individual, even if the identity of the average Attalid subject remained rooted in place. Yet a different strain of scholarship, alive and well in the same Library, responded directly to that silent majority’s firm sense of place. This was what Rudolph Pfeiffer once termed “the new antiquarianism” of Pergamon, associated with periegetic art historians such as Antigonos of Karystos and Polemon of Ilion. Polemon deserves close attention, since we know enough about his oeuvre to try to reconstruct its target audience. Born a subject of the Attalids, he is widely believed to have been present at their court.Footnote ²⁶ Like the Attalids, he was honored at Delphi, which he adorned with a history of its treasuries.Footnote ²⁷ He too was deeply familiar with the tribes of Athens and the city’s acropolis, as well as cities such as Sikyon, dear to Pergamon. Yet the Panhellenism of an author nicknamed Helladikos encompassed scores of cities with little or no direct connection to the kings.

The titles and fragments of the works of Polemon point to an abiding interest in the histories of individual cities.Footnote ²⁸ For example, he wrote books on the cities of the regions of Phocis, Lakedaimon, and Pontos. For each city, the antiquarian recorded genealogies, laws, institutions, festivals, and local lore. He wrote in an old, popular tradition, which had survived for centuries, usually alongside, but occasionally mixed in with the historiography of political affairs and military events.Footnote ²⁹ Polemon aimed to distinguish himself from certain rivals in Alexandria by using autopsy to claim more accurate knowledge. He traveled to these locations and studied their monuments and inscriptions. One can imagine that the realia of his traveler’s accounts resonated with readers’ lived experiences and ritualized memories, perhaps more so than the erudite poems of the library-bound Callimachus.Footnote ³⁰ The Attalids were famous for collecting art, and research such as Polemon’s will have lent their prize pieces robust object histories, a context that stuck to the statues accumulating in Pergamon through purchase and spoliation. In fact, in the presentation of art in the citadel’s sanctuary of Athena Polias, the Attalids pointed proudly to objects’ provenance, appropriating prestige without denying individual cities their own histories. The island polis of Aegina, under Attalid rule from 206, is a case in point. In the Pergamene sanctuary, two images from Aegina were juxtaposed side by side, one a classical work of the Aeginetan sculptor Onatas, in the Severe Style, the other, a Hellenistic sculpture by the Boeotian Theron, but inscribed, “(The image is) from Aegina” (I.Pergamon 48–49). The juxtaposition of old and new artifacts, in different styles, both from Aegina, gestured toward the particularity of that city’s history, continually unfolding. The local histories of Polemon, like the statues of Aegina, belonged to a Panhellenic cultural patrimony, now under Attalid management. As Kuttner points out, from our perspective, the notion of a common patrimony of the Greeks sits in tension with the Attalids’ admiration for historically located pedigree and respect for original place.Footnote ³¹

Polemon’s literary output can be considered a response to a crisis of Greek identity, even a reaction against the unmooring tendencies of conquest-driven migration and Stoic cosmopolitanism.Footnote ³² He wrote auto-ethnography for a Panhellenic public. The modern label “antiquarianism” misleadingly implies pedantry; these writings invoked the deep past to buttress contemporary attachments to communities of origin. The figure of Polemon is an important clue about the specific character of Pergamene Panhellenism, which reaffirmed local differences for imperialist aims. One can detect the ideology as early as the reign of Philetairos, who when dedicating in Thespiai and Aigai, employed each city’s local dialect.Footnote ³³ With the increase in their power, the Attalids were able not only to deploy local knowledge but to expropriate it, occasionally right along with the hard currency of cultural artifacts. The paradoxical, even jarring effects of this policy are evident in the signal case of Athens. Attalos I could not convince a certain Lakydes, head of the Academy, to join his court. In an extraordinary gesture for a royal patron, Attalos bowed to the primacy of the place: the king built a garden in Athens for the use of the philosophers, known as the Lakydeion.Footnote ³⁴ From Athens, the Attalids were also not at liberty to remove colossal masterpieces such as the Athena Parthenos or Promachos. In a novel twist, they made copies for their own acropolis.Footnote ³⁵ Close study of the cult and sanctuary of Athena Polias, as well as that of Demeter and Kore further down the slope, shows Athenian influence but not slavish imitation. Imperial Pergamon evoked, honored, and emulated, but, contrary to a scholarly cliché, never claimed to replace or supersede Athens.Footnote ³⁶

The Panhellenism of Polemon’s work is also noteworthy for its geographical limits. The Greek world, for Polemon, was a much smaller place than the effectively limitless domain once envisioned by Isocrates. The fourth-century philosopher had argued that education and acculturation could produce Hellenes, and by the second century, that vision was a reality. When Antiochos IV invaded Egypt, he was able to pick out the Greek residents of the polis of Naukratis, in order to award them each a gold stater.Footnote ³⁷ Polemon, however, did not go looking for Greeks in Egypt. Whereas Polybius, for example, took the entire inhabited world (oikoumenê) as the stage of his history, or the narratives of earlier periegetes such as Herodotus and Hecataeus of Miletus wandered off into barbarian lands, Polemon’s setting was an anachronistic vision of the confines of Hellenism.Footnote ³⁸ As is often remarked, he restricted himself to studies of the Greeks of the mainland, the Aegean islands, Sicily, Magna Graecia, and, indeed, East Greece. For a Hellenistic intellectual, these were noticeably parochial interests. The exceptions, Carthage and Caria, seem to prove the rule, since their earlier histories had been so intertwined with the Greeks.Footnote ³⁹ Polemon’s project highlighted the differences between cities, celebrating the peculiarities of sanctuaries. Yet it also drew a boundary around a comfortably antiquated version of the Hellenic world, one which the Attalids now targeted for support.

Another view of this Panhellenic audience, with its strong local loyalties, emerges from a Polybian vignette about a boxing match at Olympia. It took place on the eve of the Third Macedonian War, as Greece faced the prospect of the destruction of the old geopolitical order at the hands of Rome. The story also highlights popular antipathy for kings. The match pitted a reigning champion named Kleitomachos against a challenger, Aristomachos, whom Ptolemy VI had trained for the occasion. Hungry for an upset, the Olympic crowd began by cheering on the underdog Aristomachos. Polybius describes Kleitomachos on his heels, nearly vanquished, pleading with the crowd, “Did they think he himself was not fighting fairly, or were they not aware that Kleitomachos was now fighting for the glory of the Greeks and Aristomachos for that of King Ptolemy? Would they prefer to see an Egyptian conquer the Greeks and win the Olympic crown, or to hear a Theban and Boeotian proclaimed by the herald as victor in the men’s boxing match?”Footnote ⁴⁰ In an instant, the two competitors, confirmed Hellenes insofar as they had managed to enter an Olympic boxing ring, assumed different, oppositional ethnic identities. The speech ignited the crowd, which carried the Boeotian champion to victory over his Egyptian challenger. The incident does more than simply demonstrate the celerity with which a mob can descend into the humiliation of a perceived outsider; it also captures a specific, popular notion of Hellenicity at a critical juncture in the political history of the ancient Mediterranean. After a century and a half of increased migration and the forging of polyglot monarchies on the eastern lands of Alexander’s conquests, the claims of the community of origin were as strong as ever. The determinant criteria for belonging to the community of Hellenes, at least the one conjured up during the Olympic bout, were backward-looking: identification with an ancestral polis, an ethnos, and a particular place in Old Greece. Idle curiosity did not bring us the methodologically rigorous antiquarianism of Polemon, but rather popular prejudice about the distinctiveness of a homeland. Polemon’s agenda is thus entirely Attalid in that these self-proclaimed stewards of the Greek cultural heritage evince an acute interest in topographic authenticity.

They shared that interest with another second-century intellectual, the historian Demetrios of Skepsis in the Troad. He has been imagined as an “independent country squire,” for Diogenes Laertes calls him a wealthy and noble man, who also may have had access to a first-rate local library – Neleos of Skepsis was purported to have once been in possession of Aristotle’s books.Footnote ⁴¹ Unsurprisingly, Demetrios seems to have taken pride in his native city and participated in its rivalry with nearby Ilion for pride of place in Homeric lore.Footnote ⁴² Yet his ancient reputation implies a broader stature both in the Attalid kingdom and in the world of letters. He practiced textual criticism of Homer and topographic exegesis. He delighted in distinguishing spatial homonyms and, like Polemon, could boast of autopsy, pointing to the very hill on which the Judgment of Paris took place. In fact, Strabo, delving into the hydronymy of Mount Ida, urges his reader to trust Demetrios, a local person with experience of the terrain.Footnote ⁴³ The geographer made great use of the scholar, whom Diogenes Laertes also praises as an excellent philologos.Footnote ⁴⁴ Just as Demetrios’ fragments bear witness to an awareness of Attalid affairs and high politics, it can confidently be assumed that his ideas circulated in the emerging Library of the capital, even if he worked from home.Footnote ⁴⁵ Moreover, his creation, the Trojan Catalogue (Τρωικὸς διάκοσμος), a mammoth commentary of 30 books on the 62-line description of Troy’s federative army (Iliad 2.816–77), Anatolian history as much as local, provided the Attalids – true Trojans on his reckoning – with a model for their pan-Asian empire.

Demetrios’ sprawling study was an attempt to organize the populations and lands of the Anatolian peninsula into a coherent whole. His description of his work as a diakosmos (ordering) implies as much.Footnote ⁴⁶ On the one hand, his interests were restricted to the substance of the Homeric account, the subject of the exegesis. On the other hand, one senses that Homer’s lines were felt to be an inadequate ethnography of contemporary Anatolia. Demetrios needed to account for entire peoples and regions, features of his world that seemed to be sorely missing from the poem. A further mystery was the origin of the toponym Asia itself, which Demetrios located squarely within Attalid territory, in Maeonia-Lydia.Footnote ⁴⁷ To the bedeviling problem of where to draw the line between Trojans and non-Trojan allies, Demetrios offered an intriguing solution. Modern Homeric philology tends to posit a single Trojan contingent, made up of bands of warriors native to the various cities of the Troad, coupled with five allied contingents from distinct geographical zones. These were the likes of Hektor’s Trojans and Aeneas’ Dardanians, in other words, the true Trojans. Demetrios, by contrast, seems to have divided the Trojan core, at least, into nine so-called dynasties. Where did Pergamon fit in? Interestingly, whereas the future site of the city and indeed the entire Homeric Mysia, on the basis of the primary text of Homer’s epic alone, can be assigned to allied units, in Demetrios’ exegesis, the Kaikos Valley and its Telephid rulers belong to the Trojan core. His Trojans ruled “up to the Kaikos.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Yet adding the Attalids’ ancestors to Priam’s kingdom was clearly a stretch. Strabo even seems to waver in his endorsement of Demetrios’ schema, uncertain of the existence of the ninth dynasty, which belonged to Eurypylos son of Telephos, lord of the Kaikos. In an earlier part of the epic cycle, Achilles and company had mistaken Telephos’ Teuthrania for Troy. Was it Troy after all? Pergamon was indeed an alternate name for Priam’s citadel. Strabo’s hesitation may also have stemmed from the fact that among the nine dynastic captains, only Eurypylos arrived at Troy after the events described in the Iliad. The Odyssey knows of the event, but a scholiast states that Priam was obliged to convince Eurypylos to enter the war as the allied king of Mysia.Footnote ⁴⁹

A centuries-old tradition had linked the houses of Telephos and Priam: the mother of Eurypylos was Astyoche, a Trojan princess, and Andromache bore Pergamos, the eponymous founder of the city. The Attalids have been justly accused of constructing mythological links to the winning side of the war as well. In a grotesque twist, Neoptolemos fathered Pergamos, and the position of the stoa of Attalos I at Delphi seems to have stressed the Aeacid connection.Footnote ⁵⁰ Equally ancient must have been the tradition of Telephos’ Arkadian origins, which provided the Attalids with a prestigious link to Herakles (and Alexander). What is new in the work of Demetrios of Skepsis is the identification of the Attalids’ forefathers as primeval Trojans. This anchored the dynasty to the rest of Anatolia – not just the Kaikos Valley.Footnote ⁵¹ The Attalids now gained access to the deep, pan-Anatolian past to which Demetrios was determined to award cultural primacy. Many mountains were called Ida, but it was the one in the Troad, he argued, on which Zeus had been born. It was a daring argument, mounted against the authority of fifth-century Athenian tragedy. What was the proof? Demetrios took a characteristically empiricist tack, declaring that the rites of Rhea (Cybele) were indigenous to the Troad and Phrygia alone. Any claim to the contrary was mythology, he declared, not history.Footnote ⁵²

So much had changed since Trojans in Phrygian dress had graced the tragic stages and red-figure pots of Athens. As is well known, Homer depicts a war between Achaeans and Trojans, not Greeks and barbarians. Those categories had yet to be developed. It took the events of the Persian Wars to initiate a change in self-perception that recast the Trojans in the role of eastern, in the case of Paris, specifically Phrygian barbarians.Footnote ⁵³ Inevitably, the idealized civilization of Priam’s kingdom militated against any such downgrade. It has even proven possible to regard the Ilioupersis (Sack of Troy) depicted on the northern metopes of the Parthenon as a cautionary tale in hubris for imperial Athens.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, it is difficult to deny that the fifth-century Athenians inflated their participation in the mythological war of the epic cycle to match their leading role in recent history’s clash with Persia. The conflation of Troy with Persia followed suit. In the agora, the iconographic program of the Painted Stoa was the first to juxtapose the Battle of Marathon with Ilioupersis. Later, on the Periklean acropolis, in addition to the Parthenon metopes, one can point to a colossal bronze “Trojan Horse” set up in the sanctuary of Artemis Brauronia, stocked with local, Athenian heroes. If in this montage, the acropolis of Athens came to stand in for the citadel of Troy, this was of a piece with Athenian attempts to claim their own primacy in the Troad by rescripting the Aeolian and Ionian migrations.Footnote ⁵⁵ In other words, not only were the Trojans barbarians, by this account, but their occupation of Ilion was illegitimate.

As we have seen, the conception of Demetrios of Skepsis was entirely different. It served Hellenistic Pergamon’s imperial needs, not those of classical Athens. In Demetrios’ conception, Trojans claimed primacy in the Troad, and Pergamenes were counted among their ranks. Ties of kinship bound them to Phrygians, construed as a population of primordial Anatolians. Demetrios’ work brings into focus the multifaceted character of the Trojan connection in Attalid cultural politics, which represented far more than a means of currying favor with the Romans.Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, Ilion was the fulcrum by which the Attalids made themselves kinsmen of the descendants of Aeneas. In 205, we find Ilion and Pergamon set side by side as signatories to the Roman-brokered Treaty of Phoinike. The dynasty’s benefactions at Ilion and other interests in the Troad are well documented.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet at the very same time, Attalos I effected the transfer of the cult of Idaean Cybele to Rome from a seat in Pessinous, the ancient Phrygian cult center. Gruen has written of the way in which the Trojan lineage allowed the Romans to acquire a character “distinct from that of the Greeks but solidly within the Greek construct.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In an analogous fashion, the same lineage gave the Attalids a purchase on a distinct, Anatolian identity, now firmly embedded in the Homeric matrix. Troy was a bridge to Rome, but also to Pessinous.

The Attalids’ stake in the glory of Troy was then of critical importance to their imperial project and no mere window dressing. It may be that a hint of their Trojan affinity is admitted by the historical narrative presented on the Athenian acropolis in the form of the dedication known as the Little Barbarians. In the reconstruction of Andrew Stewart, the Attalid monument presented a universal history, unfolding from the beginning to the present, a series of challenges to the civilizational order: Giants, Amazons, Persians, and, finally, Galatians. The Attalids could rely on a local tradition of assimilating the enemy of the hour to the Persian barbarian, as well as a Panhellenic one that likened the Galatian bands to Xerxes’ army.Footnote ⁵⁹ For Stewart, the dedication “created a Pergamene-Periklean alliance across time and space to defeat the entire gamut of civilization’s foes.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Yet the Trojans were conspicuously absent from the rogues’ gallery. By contrast, the Periklean prototype, as represented by the Parthenon metopes and the Stoa Poikile, included an Ilioupersis. The sack of Troy was later represented on highly visible temples such as the Argive Heraion and the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros, and the iconography reemerged in the Troad itself at Ilion and Chrysa.Footnote ⁶¹ The Attalids seem to have taken part in the construction of the new Athenaion at Ilion, which, ironically or not, featured an Ilioupersis on its metopes with Trojans in eastern garb.Footnote ⁶² We have no way of knowing what, if any, role Pergamene artisans or patrons had in the selection of the theme for the Athenaion. Its appearance, unusual in the Hellenistic period, must be related to the special relationship of the Troad to the Homeric past, especially at a time when Iliadic tourism was booming. On the other hand, we know that the Attalids did not evoke a Trojan theme among their dedications on the Athenian acropolis. This may have been because they saw themselves as the successors of Priam, as civilized a king as any who had ever lived.

The Attalid Way of Death

Faced as they were with the task of ruling a vast and diverse Anatolian territory, the Attalids’ choice to play the part of Priam’s heirs makes perfect sense. Like Priam’s rule, they could argue, theirs too was just and rightful. Likening their empire to the Trojans’ alliance, moreover, would have promoted an ideology of consent and cast a shadow over coercive measures. In the archaeological record, one can detect an allusion to the glory of the heroes of Troy in the form of a series of burial mounds (tumuli) scattered around the periphery of the city of Pergamon. Most of the tumuli of Pergamon are Hellenistic, built in the third and second centuries BCE.Footnote ⁶³ In fact, adjacent to the city’s gate, the early second-century fortification wall of Eumenes II sliced through a third-century tumulus encasing a chamber tomb, effectively incorporating it into the bulwark. Since Archaic times, the names – and cults – of Homeric heroes had been associated with particular hilltops, natural and man-made. On his way through the Troad, Alexander had visited a certain mound then known as the tomb of Achilles.Footnote ⁶⁴ Under the Attalids, the citizens of Ilion undertook a major public works project at the site now known to archaeologists as the Neolithic settlement of Sivritepe. They artificially increased the height of the mound, from 5 to 13 m, an intervention that was sure to capture the imagination of would-be pilgrims. The site was soon roundly recognized as the Tumulus of Achilles.Footnote ⁶⁵ Now, at just this moment, members of the ruling clique of Pergamon were burying themselves in tumuli. Surely, one impression conveyed by the choice of tomb type was the desire to assert Trojan filiation. Were the tombs, then, just one more baldly transparent effort to invent tradition? Quite the opposite: the tumuli fit into a well-documented Anatolian tradition, which informs us about the Attalids’ cultural identity and helps explain their success.

With just a glance over the tumulus field at Pergamon, one notices both considerable diversity in mortuary practice, but also the unique grandeur of the Yığma Tepe tomb (Fig. 6.1) Given their number, differences in size and in the nature of the excavated grave goods, it must have been the case that kings and nonroyal elites alike shared this burial custom. The smaller tumuli, such as Tumuli 2 and 3, have a diameter of ca. 30 m and are braced by a low stone wall called a krepis. Both lack a burial chamber and contain only an andesite sarcophagus buried below ground level. Grave goods from Tumulus 3 are modest compared with those of Tumulus 2, which include a golden oak-leaf wreath. Another significant example is the tumulus on the saddle of the Ilyas Tepe, facing the east side of the acropolis. It is also just 37 m in diameter (5 m tall), but it contains a dromos (entry corridor) and an elaborate, Macedonian-style chamber tomb covered with a barrel vault. Yet the subterranean burial in a stone sarcophagus recalls the rite practiced by the builders of Tumuli 2 and 3.Footnote ⁶⁶ The occupant of the tomb is thought to be an important general of the third-century reign of Attalos I. None, though, matches the grandeur of Yığma Tepe, which is 158 m across, 35 m tall, and surrounded by a deep ditch, the very source of its material, a cavity that enhances the visual impact of the mound. Despite several attempts to find it by digging and with geophysical prospection, a burial chamber has never been located, but a monumental krepis, without an entrance, has been exposed. New excavations have uncovered thin rows of stones above and perpendicular to it, which may be late additions to the monument. Ceramic finds from the excavations of the early twentieth century, taken together with the style of the masonry, offer a provisional date in the second BCE. An important clue for the identification of the occupant of the tomb is the orientation of the Yığma Tepe along an axis that joins both the west side of the Temple of Athena and the stairway of the Great Altar, over 3 km away. The city-builders Eumenes II or Attalos II are therefore the most likely candidates. Given its unique size and suggestive spatial context, the fact that we await the hard proof need not deter us from an analysis of the tumulus as a royal burial monument.Footnote ⁶⁷

Figure 6.1 Yığma Tepe.

(courtesy of Pergamon Excavation of the German Archaeological Institute)

Comparison of the Attalid tumulus tradition with the burial customs of the major Hellenistic dynasties is instructive. The Ptolemies, we know, were interred and displayed alongside the body of Alexander inside a mausoleum known as the Sema or Soma. That building lay within the segregated royal quarter of the city of Alexandria, attached to a complex that also included the Library and the Museum. The monument housed Alexander’s cult as well as the dynasty’s. With this novelty, the Ptolemies clearly broke with pharaonic precedents, but in good Egyptian fashion, they had themselves mummified.Footnote ⁶⁸ While aided by archaeology, our picture of the Seleukid practice is in fact less complete. We know that Antiochos I built a sacred precinct for the remains of his father Seleukos I, known as the Nikatoreion, set within the palace district of Seleukeia Pieria. The precinct contained a large, non-standard Doric temple that covered a crypt, in which, it has been conjectured, Seleukos I’s descendants joined him in death. This combination of precinct, temple, and, therefore, posthumous ruler cult, all housed within a palace district, was repeated in breakaway Bactria at Ai Khanoum. It seems to represent the Seleukid way of death.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the case of the Antigonids of Macedon, direct testimony is lacking. However, it seems very likely that they were buried in tumuli. Certainly, several of their Temenid predecessors were buried in chamber tombs under the Great Tumulus of the royal necropolis, which was not attached to the palace, but lay on the outskirts of Vergina/Aigai. Though the necropolis of Pergamon has not (yet) produced the exposed architectural facades of the conventional Macedonian tomb, shared features include the barrel vault on Ilyas Tepe, the common krepis, and the wreath of Tumulus 2.Footnote ⁷⁰ The fundamental point of similarity between Pergamon and Macedonia is a consistent if not continuous tradition of tumulus building, which the powerful, almost by default, make their own. In Macedonia, we can trace it from the Iron Age mounds at Vergina to the proliferation of large (50–100 m wide) tumuli at Hellenistic Pella.Footnote ⁷¹

Tempting as it is to interpret the Pergamene tumuli as little more than a claim to Macedonian identity, shoring up the link to Alexander that was tenuous at best, we risk overstating the importance of a single point of reference among many. Moreover, by positing diffusion from Macedon, we mistake correlation for causation.Footnote ⁷² It is important to understand that in this respect, the Macedonians themselves were just one party to a heritage from prehistoric southeastern Europe. The neighboring Thracians were another, and as they moved from the central Balkans eastward, the practice spread into the region of modern Kırklareli in the Thracian Chersonnese.Footnote ⁷³ With another Iron Age migration, that of the population that came to be known as the Phrygians, the tomb type appeared around Gordion.Footnote ⁷⁴ To try to pick apart the issue of influence hundreds of years later is next to impossible, though Barbara Schmidt-Dounas has suggested that it was, in fact, Anatolia that influenced the growth in the size of the later tumuli of Macedonia.Footnote ⁷⁵ In short, for an Attalid subject, a tumulus did not read as Macedonian. In Anatolia itself, an impressive number of models for the Yığma Tepe were available. The landscape was saturated with tumuli – from the fuzzy eastern border inland to the boundaries of the coastal city-states. They flanked the capitals of earlier Anatolian empires such as royal Phrygia and Lydia, and had more recently become a defining feature of the Granikos Valley in the Troad. Because these are highly durable monuments, an ancient viewer saw an accretion of tumuli from different periods. Their dates of construction, only a minority of which have been established by modern excavation, were hardly discernible in antiquity. Yet significantly, a chronological synopsis of the tumulus tradition in Anatolia demonstrates continuity of practice. It also provides a broader context for interpretation.

The earliest point of reference for the Yığma Tepe is indeed the tumulus field at Gordion, capital of Iron Age Phrygia, filled with some 240 examples.Footnote ⁷⁶ The Phrygians began building them in the ninth century BCE and increased their size and the richness of their contents in the eighth. If the number of such tombs seems to diminish in the sixth century BCE, Hellenistic examples have also been recorded at Gordion.Footnote ⁷⁷ Now dated ca. 740 BCE, the most monumental of all is Tumulus MM, a royal burial consisting of a wooden chamber covered by a tumulus 53 m high and 300 m in diameter. In the second century BCE, it lay in a part of Galatia that bordered Attalid territory, but one can also find Phrygian tumuli in areas directly under Pergamene control. For example, in the late eighth or early seventh century BCE, Phrygians had built a spectacular series of tumuli far from Gordion, on the piedmont above the plain of Elmalı (Bayındır), in the southern Milyas.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly, in western Phrygia, a recent survey identified 65 tumuli, most of which cannot be dated without excavation. The painted Taşlık tumulus exhibits Phrygo-Lydian architecture, but may date to the Achaemenid period, as does the painted tomb at Tatarlı. On the other hand, the find-rich Kocakızlar Tumulus, 80 m in diameter and erected in open country 3 km from the site of Midaion, is Hellenistic.Footnote ⁷⁹ After the collapse of the Phrygian state, Lydian royals and elites adapted the practice to their own architectural traditions in the second quarter of the sixth century BCE.Footnote ⁸⁰ Certain Lydian tumuli possess a krepis. Ten kilometers from Sardis is a field known today as the Bin Tepe (“thousand hills”); around 100 tumuli have been identified at Bin Tepe, and 500 in greater Lydia. Of these 600, only 54 have been dated to within a century. While several of the largest and most prominent, such as Kocamutaf Tepe, associated with king Alyattes, date to the period of Mermnad rule, the tumulus tradition is best represented in Lydia during the first century of the Achaemenid period.Footnote ⁸¹ At the same time, tumuli of the Lydian style appeared at Delpınar in Persian-controlled Pisdia.Footnote ⁸² The Achaemenid period also witnessed the proliferation of tumuli in Troad’s Granikos Valley, such as the one at Kızöldün, dated ca. 500–490 BCE, the source of the Polyxena sarcophagus. These seem to belong to a mixed milieu of Anatolian, Greek, and Persian estate-holders. Once they were dispossessed of their lands, these sites were largely abandoned.Footnote ⁸³

Clearly, dramatic shifts in the historical center of power affected the distribution of tumuli. A succession of empires left their mark on the landscape. The Attalids, it seems, as heirs to one of the petty fiefs of the Persian period, picked up where the likes of the Gongylids left off. Yet high political history hardly explains the ubiquity, durability, and historical continuity of the phenomenon. Salvage archaeology in contemporary Turkey, driven by the twin threats of economic development and looting, provides a reasonably random sample. The last 26 years of accidental discoveries has produced 43 excavated tumuli. Chronologically, they run the gamut from Iron Age to Late Roman. Significantly, 18, or 42%, have been dated to the Hellenistic period. Their spatial distribution is very broad, with a clustering in the upper Maeander and Lykos river valleys, which Ute Kelp has related to Attalid influence and even a possible refoundation of Hierapolis.Footnote ⁸⁴ Another discernible pattern is that the tumuli seldom lie within a 5-km radius of recorded settlements (Map 6.1). Whether they belong to rural estate holders or to rulers residing in nearby towns and cities, the tumuli do seem to promote claims of land possession.Footnote ⁸⁵ In political terms, they also present the face of power to wayfarers traversing a demarcated territory.

Map 6.1 Tumuli recorded in salvage excavations (Müze Çalışmaları ve Kurtarma Kazıları Sempozyumu Yayınları, 1990–2016) and ancient settlements in the Pleiades data set (pleiades.stoa.org).

From the Aegean to the Euphrates, a dense scatter of tumuli emerged over the course of the first millenium BCE. Ultimately, Pergamon’s tumuli belong to what can be termed an Anatolian koinê of burial practices.Footnote ⁸⁶ In burial, the Attalids behaved precisely as their regional rivals did. The salvage results proffer a more or less approximate idea of the likely appearance of royal or princely Bithynian, Galatian, and indeed Pontic tumuli. At Üçtepeler, for example, near Bithynian Izmit (Nicomedia), excavations have revealed a late Hellenistic tumulus 75 m across and 12 m high, containing a vaulted burial chamber and a dromos – a strong candidate for a Bithynian royal tomb.Footnote ⁸⁷ Philetairos’ native Paphlagonia recently produced a roughly contemporaneous tumulus with a painted burial chamber, at Selmanlar.Footnote ⁸⁸ It is now well understood that the Galatians abandoned La Tène burial practice for the Anatolian tumulus.Footnote ⁸⁹ At Karalar (Blucium), an inscription identifies the tomb’s occupant as Deiotarus the Younger. Galatian tumuli have also been investigated outside Gordion and at Yalacık, near Ankara.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Mithridatids are a fascinating case because they vacillated between Greek, Persian, and Anatolian traditions. Down to ca. 180 BCE, the kings of Pontos were laid to rest in the rock-cut tombs of the royal necropolis of Amaseia. With the transfer of the capital to Sinope under Pharnakes I, a change occurs, and it has been conjectured that later kings, including Mithridates VI, were buried in tumuli.Footnote ⁹¹ The results of the excavation of a Hellenistic tumulus at Arafat Tepesi, 50 km from Çorum, as well as data from an intensive survey of the hinterland of Sinope, render the idea quite plausible.Footnote ⁹² The spectacular monuments of Orontid Commagene also belong in our reckoning, but so too those of Cappadocia. While no Ariarathid royal burial is securely identified, the stone tumulus at Avanos in Nevşehir province is a candidate, while salvage excavations have dated two more Cappadocian mounds to the Hellenistic period.Footnote ⁹³

To be fair, this sample contains a great variety of technical features of construction, size, and placement in the landscape. The tumulus is also an enormous expenditure of wealth, and ostentatious consumption always had a local history and a distinctive role in social structure.Footnote ⁹⁴ Yet what seems to justify analysis on this scale is Pergamon’s own Pan-Asian political claims – enunciated in the Telmessos decree of 184/3. In death, how did the powerful comport themselves within the political space delineated for “the inhabitants of Asia”? Further, the bird’s-eye view makes plain the stark difference between, on the one hand, Asia (Minor), as construed as the coastal Aegean zone conjoined with inner Anatolia, and, on the other, mainland Greece and the islands. Archaic and Classical Greece witnessed a boom-and-bust cycle of ostentation in burial, the record of which includes tumuli among other forms such as peribolos monuments. Broadly speaking, the fifth century seems to have witnessed restraint in the form of burial. Restraint seems to end, at least in Athens, already during the Peloponnesian War. A new cycle of ostentation began that petered out toward the end of the fourth century. The disappearance of monumental tombs like tumuli from the landscape of Greece is often tenuously attributed to sumptuary laws, though it surely also must reflect the redirection of disposable income toward other ends, such as house-building and public works.Footnote ⁹⁵ A sharp decline in the number of tumuli can be discerned already ca. 600 BCE.Footnote ⁹⁶ They disappear from the Kerameikos at Athens and also from the great tumulus fields of Thessaly at Krannon and Pharsalos.Footnote ⁹⁷ Of course, there are some outliers such as the Macedonian-style Tomb of the Erotes at Eretria, but by and large, the tumulus is not a feature of the landscape in Hellenistic Greece. This contrasts markedly with the situation in East Greece. So what? Here, the tumulus tradition appears to be unbroken. From the archaic period, for instance, comes the sixth-century tumulus at Belevi near Ephesus, as well as the archaic tumuli of Larisa-on-the-Hermos.Footnote ⁹⁸ Scores have also been detected in surveys of the Ionian cities Klazomenai and Teos.Footnote ⁹⁹ Classical tumuli are known from the territory of Parion.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ A recent salvage excavation investigated the Biçerova tumulus, a fifth-century tomb 2.5 km from Kyme.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Hellenistic examples from Pergamon’s immediate regional context are not lacking. In the second century, at the modern site of Maltepe near ancient Phokaia, a tumulus was founded on the archaic city wall in the second century.Footnote ¹⁰² Near the port of Elaia, the Seç Tepe tumulus was also in use at this time.Footnote ¹⁰³ In Anatolia, Greeks were not outsiders, socially distanced from the rest – though the modern discipline of Classics has often portrayed them this way. A possible royal tomb at Yığma Tepe, therefore, aligns the Attalids not only with Anatolian kings of an earlier age but with the Graeco-Anatolian aristocracy of many neighboring cities.

City as Acropolis

With the conquest and acquisition by award of new territories, as well as a westward push to seize Aegean islands and gain ever more influence at Rome, it is a curious fact that the Attalids never moved their capital, but retained and embellished a mountain redoubt. As the landscape archaeologist Christina Williamson has shown, that mountainous viewshed makes of the lower Kaikos Valley an inward-looking, landed microregion. Indeed, standing atop the peak of Pergamon (329 m asl), the best line of sight points east and inland, up the Kaikos Valley toward modern Kınık and Soma. By contrast, it is only on a very clear day that the sea and the port city of Elaia are visible (Fig. 6.2).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ With respect to the urbanism of their capital, then, the Attalids made a distinctive, even suprising choice. In Macedonia of the early fifth century, Archelaus had moved the Argead capital down from Aigai to the coastal estuary at Pella. In time, the polis of Pella was refounded on the so-called Hippodameian grid and appended to a royal residence. While the Ptolemies and the Seleukids both inherited the seats of ancient empires, they chose to stake out new cities according to Greek conventions of space. Further, Alexandria and the Syrian Tetrapolis both hugged the Mediterranean. Even contemporary Anatolian rivals did things differently. Mithridates I shifted his capital from inland Amaseia to the polis of Sinope on the Black Sea; the Bithynian Prousias I refounded Kios as Prousa-on-the-sea.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Logistically, the Attalids certainly could have decamped to Ephesus and ruled from a city that had hosted Antigonids, Ptolemies, and Seleukids. In fact, in recent excavations conducted above the city’s theater (Panayırdağ), a lavish peristyle house on the scale of the Attalids’ Palast V (2,400 m²) has been revealed. The excavator has dated the building to the second century and noted many Pergamene architectural features, suggesting an Attalid governor’s residence, perhaps even a secondary palace.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Yet their capital remained what had been an important sub-satrapal stronghold of the late Persian period, which, as the military history reminds us, retained its defensive value. Less obvious, perhaps, is the ideological value of presenting this vertiginous and asymmetrical urban facade to would-be subjects.

Figure 6.2 View to the southwest of the Kaikos Valley from the acropolis of Pergamon.

(author’s photo)

Standard accounts of the monumentalization of the Pergamene acropolis underscore the builders’ reverence for Classical Athens.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It was not Philetairos, in fact, but one of his immediate predecessors, Barsine or Lysimachus, who seems to have replaced the cult of Apollo with that of Athena Polias as the central cult of the city. Yet the late fourth-century construction of the sanctuary and temple of Athena Polias, along with the introduction of the Panathenaia festival by the time of Eumenes I, it has been argued, speak to a wider effort to liken Pergamon, supposedly lacking traditions of its own, to storied Athens.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ For Schalles, the equation of the two cities in Attalid self-presentation is assured by the time of Attalos I, who reorganized Athena’s terrace.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ However, if we zoom out from the sanctuary and consider the cityscape as a whole, the equation breaks down. Athens is a democratic city with an acropolis (Fig. 6.3); Pergamon represents an altogether different, Anatolian, and oligarchic model of urbanism, in which the city is an acropolis (Fig. 6.4).Footnote ¹¹⁰ Astoundingly, the excavated residential quarter (Wohnstadt) is laid out on a slope of about 20–25%, a fine point of comparison to the core of Lydian Sardis, which registers at 16–20%.Footnote ¹¹¹ As once described by an excavator of Sardis, Pergamon is “a typical Anatolian acropolis town,” built on the spur of a mountain, just like the Lydian royal capital.Footnote ¹¹² Many Lycian cities also seem to cascade down steep hillsides, a type of urbanism that is widely recognized as pre-Greek and indigenous. For example, at Xanthos, major changes in elevation (in sum, over 50 m) separate the city’s various districts. Some 25 m above the lower city stands the palace and dynastic monuments of the so-called Lycian acropolis; at about the same elevation is the public space of the presumed Lycian agora. Another 25 m up the hill, one reaches the citadel of Xanthos, conventionally known as the Roman acropolis, but exhibiting Classical-period remains.Footnote ¹¹³

Figure 6.3 Model of ancient Athens.

(courtesy of American School of Classical Studies at Athens: Agora Excavations)

Figure 6.4 Model of Hellenistic Pergamon.

(bpk Bildagentur; Antikensammlung/Staatliche Museen/Berlin/Germany; Art Resource, NY)

Moreover, it was not only the siting of the city that evoked Anatolian precedents, but planners’ treatment of the mountainous terrain. To a far greater extent than the prototypical Greek polis, Pergamon was “sculpted” out of towering volcanic rock.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As has long been noted by archaologists, the landscaping of Pergamon’s peak into its several iconic, monumental terraces, a process accelerated if not completed by Eumenes II, finds a close parallel in Sardis.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the center of the Lydian city (“Acropolis North”), the revetment of the natural spurs of the mountain also created a series of terraces linked together by handsome staircases. Excavation has exposed the Lydian revetment, which consists of the kind of fine ashlar masonry found in royal tombs.Footnote ¹¹⁶ These ashlar terrrace walls were, in a sense, the face of the Lydian royal capital. The best understood of the terraces lie in Sardis sectors Field 49 and ByzFort. The latter is estimated to have enclosed an area of 1.2 ha. While visible from afar, these sculpted bluffs also stand apart from the lower city and its more expansive residential quarters. Yet their connection to the highest point of the acropolis seems assured. A tunnel cut in the bedrock in the valley between ByzFort and Field 49 leads the way. In essence, this regional technique of boldly terracing the mountainside creates dramatic vistas by taking advantage of natural contours. It does not seek to regularize the terrain or organize it modularly. As Nicholas Cahill puts it, “The Lydians, however, treated their sloping ground very differently from the later Greeks.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ Then, when, in the early Hellenistc period, the Sardians finally returned to this area, perhaps already or soon to become denizens of a polis, they recreated the spatial aesthetic of the Lydian period. Current excavations in Field 49 show a remarkable investment in stabilizing and raising the level of the hill with massive subterranean foundations that follow the Lydians’ alignments (Fig. 6.5).Footnote ¹¹⁸ In Sardis as in Pergamon, the geometry of Priene’s fourth-century grid is nowhere to be found, but alongside the grandeur of the untreated rock, it is the sculpted earth and the terrace wall that stand as monuments and showpieces in their own right. It has proven difficult to find a precedent for the urban plan of Lydian Sardis in Anatolia, prompting considerations of Near Eastern influence.Footnote ¹¹⁹ On the other hand, the local vassals of the intervening Achaemenid period offered the Attalids a blueprint for a high-elevation capital.

Figure 6.5 Archaic terrace walls of Sardis, reconstruction drawing by Philip Stinson.

(©Archaeological Exploration of Sardis/President and Fellows of Harvard College)

First, Lycian dynasts were well accustomed to residence in cities built on precipitous slopes that descended from a fortified peak, often containing a necropolis. Just as in Xanthos, we often find important monuments on a level terrace, which is usually not the highest point, but again, set on a spur lower down the mountain. In Xanthos, this is the Lycian acropolis, with its dynastic heroa, palaces, and public buildings. Elsewhere in the same river valley, one finds the same pattern at Tlos and also at Pinara. It is telling that at Pinara the large (ca. 1.7 ha) basileia terrace was once referred to as the “lower acropolis.”Footnote ¹²⁰ In the east of Lycia, the city of Arykanda controls a steep pass into the plain of Elmalı. The earliest remains show it to have been a minor dynastic center, but one which conforms neatly to the pattern of a lofty fortified acropolis, set high above a city that itself clings to the sides of a mountain. The city grew in importance in the Hellenistic period, and, in fact, it seems that Arykanda received its stunning terraces at about the same time that Pergamon’s were completed (Fig. 6.6).Footnote ¹²¹ Second, the Hekatomnids of Caria had provided the Attalids with an obvious model in Halikarnassos, the capital of Mausolus, as well in other cities such as Amyzon. The Hekatomnid influence on Attalid urbanism is glimpsed through Pergamon’s participation in the fourth-century BCE Ionian Renaissance, a cultural program that effectively restored parity between western Anatolia and mainland Greece.Footnote ¹²² Indeed, the Hekatomnid inheritance is also detectable in many other ways, for example, in the mythological gamesmanship that gave both royal houses an Arkadian pedigree and links to Herakles. Yet as a builder, specifically, Mausolus propagated the technique of using terrain and terrace to give a royal city an iconic facade. His two grand terraces dominated the cityscape of Halikarnassos, one belonging to the Temple of Mars, while the other, twice as large and visible from the island of Kos, supported the Mausolleion.Footnote ¹²³ Another Hekatomnid terracing project has been identified at the sanctuary of Artemis in Amyzon, girding a spur of Mount Latmos. Two terraces joined at an angle form a line 168 m long, comparable to the 160 m of the upper terrace of Pergamon’s theater. However, the visual effect of the rusticated terrace walls at Amyzon is to minimize the impact of the buildings themselves – the propylon, and even the temple.Footnote ¹²⁴ In this architectural idiom, platform is as significant as superstructure. One can hardly say the same of Classical Athens, the Propylaia, the Parthenon, and the Acropolis.

Figure 6.6 Late Hellenistic terraces at Arykanda.

(author’s photo)

Gallograeci

Around 281, a large, migratory movement of Celtic-speaking peoples arrived in the Balkans. Under their leader Brennos, they fought through Macedonian territory and threatened to sack Delphi, where Antigonos Gonatas and a coalition of Greeks featuring Aetolian and Athenian contingents stopped the Celtic advance. Reversing course, two offshoots of the original migration, one under Leonnorios and another under Luturios, set off for Anatolia. With their passage across the Hellespont, in 279/8, they came to be known as the Galatians – the Celts of Anatolia. Bands of Galatian warriors, sometimes serving as mercenaries in the armies of Bithynian, Attalid, and Pontic kings, at other times operating as unattached raiding parties, fought in the nude behind the long, oval shields distinctive of Europe’s La Tène tradition. Torques around their necks, their hair dressed with lime, Asia’s newest barbarians struck fear into the hearts of the city-dwellers of the coast. Down into the 260s, “Galatian war” (πολεμὸς Γαλατικός) was a common experience and a “Galatian fund” (τὰ Γαλατικά) a possible line item in city budgets. Ultimately, most – but not all – of the migrants settled in the central highlands, what had once been the upland core of the Phrygian and Hittite empires.Footnote ¹²⁵ By then, they had formed three separate tribes. Each group claimed its own loosely defined territory around a regional emporium: the Tolistobogii in the west, holding Gordion; the Trocmi in the east, around Tavium, in the bend of the Halys; and the Tectosages in between, occupying Ancyra. We know that the Celts did not find these lands empty, and archaeology continues to reveal a subtle process of accommodation to preexisting conditions and culture. Beyond convening a pantribal council to try homicide cases once per year, the Galatians seem rarely if ever to have acted as a unified bloc in politics or war. Nevertheless, a capable set of adversaries confronted the Attalids on their eastern flank. As many have pointed out, the Galatians also presented Pergamon with an opportunity to garner much-needed legitimacy. The Attalids needed the Galatians.

This was certainly the case for Attalos I. He was the first king of Pergamon, the first of the dynasty to take the title of basileus and wear the diadem, and indeed the Hellenistic ruler who squeezed the most out of his triumphs over Galatians. Polybius’ eulogy for Attalos reads, “For having conquered the Gauls, the most formidable and warlike nation of Asia, he built upon this foundation, and then first showed he was really a king.”Footnote ¹²⁶ This account of the birth of the Attalid kingdom as such in the years after 241 is very partial, but also very telling. It occludes the broader context of a breakdown of Seleukid authority beyond the Taurus and perhaps also Pergamon’s enduring vassalage, but it grounds the Attalid kingship in the memory of specific, historical victories over the Galatians girded with myth. This is most evident in several large dedications in the Sanctuary of Athena at Pergamon, which Attalos now remodeled, using free-standing sculpture to depict, it seems, multiple battle scenes featuring Seleukid and Galatian enemies, while the dismembered La Tène-style arms appeared as trophies on the surrounding architecture.Footnote ¹²⁷ The connection between the Attalid claim to kingship and the Galatian triumphs recorded in Athena’s sanctuary appears so tight that scholars have long dated an alteration to the portrait head known as the Berlin Attalos, an update which may have added its diadem, to a moment not long after the “battle near the source of the Kaikos River against the Tolistoagioi Galatians” (OGIS 276).Footnote ¹²⁸ Not only was this piece of local history soon internationalized when a team of high-profile Greek sculptors arrived to commemorate them in Pergamon, but Attalos also trumpeted the importance of his victory in the centers of Old Greece, Delos, Athens, and probably also at Delphi. In so doing, he joined other Hellenistic kings in a Panhellenic discourse that cast the Galatians as a barbaric threat to cosmic order. The Battle of the Kaikos has come to be seen by scholars as a kind of “Pergamene Marathon,” in a construct which allegorizes the Attalids as the Athenians and the Galatians as the Persians. On the mainland, that interpretation holds more weight, as Greeks do seem to have interpreted the defense of Delphi in 279 in those terms.Footnote ¹²⁹ In Asia, by contrast, the nature of events meant that the Galatians’ crossing simply could not fit into the same mythico-historical tradition. Moreover, at home, the goal, as we have seen, was different: not only or even necessarily to burnish Hellenic credentials, but rather to normalize Attalid rule in Asia. For this reason, and because real-life Galatians inhabited the borderlands and surely some of the territory they already claimed, the Attalids’ rhetorical rendering and interactions with the Galatians were more complicated than is usually assumed.

Rhetorically, the fit between the Galatians and the Persians, as expressed, for example, in Hellenistic panegyric, was in fact rather awkward. What kind of barbarian was the Celt? The contemporary answer shades toward tropes of reckless ferocity, mindlessness, and bodily austerity. Barbaric traits, certainly, but hardly an established antithesis of all things Greek. One third-century elegiac poet goes so far as to contrast the effeminate Persian of his purple cloth and tents with the impetuous Galatian who camps in the open air.Footnote ¹³⁰ The Persians of yore remained an important touchstone in political invective. Opponents could paint a Seleukid, even an Antigonid or Lysimachus as a new Xerxes.Footnote ¹³¹ However, the effectiveness of the Persians in a historical analogy drawn to make sense of the Galatians in Anatolia was limited by the fact that one barbarian menace had crossed from Asia and left; whereas the other had crossed into Asia and remained, an event that cried out for explanation. In response, Hellenistic historiography seems to have generated a novel set piece, the unwelcome Crossing of the Gauls, while debating culpability. In multiple source traditions, narratives were built around this critical event. For instance, a chapter heading of Pompeius Trogus reads, “How the Gauls Entered Asia (transierunt in Asiam) and Waged War with Antiochos and the Bithynians.”Footnote ¹³² In historical memory, the Gauls’ crossing to Asia merited its own treatment, distinct from other episodes. The epithet of that very Antiochos I, namely, Soter (Savior), is elsewhere attributed to his expulsion of the “Galatians who had invaded (esbalein) Asia from Europe.”Footnote ¹³³ One of our earliest and best accounts, that of third-century Nymphis-Memnon of Herakleia Pontika, represents an apologetic perspective on the crossing. Amassed on the European side, the patriotic historian relates, the Gauls had long been harassing Byzantium, which his faithful Herakleia had supported with gold. Earlier, the Gauls had repeatedly attempted to cross, without success.Footnote ¹³⁴ At last, on terms of an alliance with Herakleia and the other cities of the Northern League, it is stressed, Nicomedes I of Bithynia “transferred the Galatian population to Asia (τὸ Γαλατικὸν πλῆθος εἰς Ἀσίαν διαβιβάζει).” In a case of special pleading, Nymphis-Memnon contends that the inhabitants of Asia (oiketorês Asias) actually benefited from the arrival of the Galatians, who, he claims, supported democracies against kings. Clearly, the singular event of the migration of the Celts across the continental divide resisted assimilation to the Persian invasion. It also left a wound that stung so long as these newcomers menaced “the inhabitants of Asia.”

In short, the new northern barbarians threatened civilization in Asia, not Greece. Geographically, the concept of a Graeco-Macedonian mainland that was distinct from the continental notion of Asia had emerged in Alexander’s wake.Footnote ¹³⁵ In the early third century, the painter of the Boscoreale Frescoes had personified the two as opposing female figures, inveterate enemies. Of course, in 279/8, many of those who incurred losses would have counted among them the assault on their dignity as Hellenes. This is precisely what the decree for Sotas from Ionian Priene reports: “It happened that many of the Greek inhabitants of Asia were ruined. They were not able to struggle with the Barbarians (πρὸς τοὺς βαρβάρους ἀνταγωνίζεσθαι).”Footnote ¹³⁶ Yet the Attalids were not obliged to adopt the same stance – even in triumph. They could, for example, adopt the stance of the Lycians of Tlos. The epigram of Neoptolemos son of Kressos commemorates the defense of the city, perhaps during the initial wave of migration in the 270s and 260s: “I am Neoptolemos son of Kressos. In the Temple of the Three Brothers the citizens of Tlos set (me), glory of my spear. For them, so many Pisidians and [Paeonians] and Agrianians and Galatians I confronted and scattered away.”Footnote ¹³⁷ For a Greek-speaking Lycian of the Hellenistic period, the Galatians were no more barbarous an enemy than the neighboring Pisidians. Similarly, when Eumenes II addressed the inhabitants of the town of Apollonioucharax in Lydia, with its local milieu of Mysians, the king described the Galatians straightforwardly as “enemies (polemioi).”Footnote ¹³⁸

In Anatolia, there was nothing to gain by representing the Galatian as the non-Greek foil to the Hellene. Rather, advantage was to be had by entering the fight against the Galatians on the side of all of the inhabitants of Asia, irrespective of cultural identity. A decree from Lycian Telmessos, almost 100 years later than Sotas’ from Ionian Priene, strikes a very different note, though the Galatians are still named as enemies. The Telmessians honor Eumenes II as the city’s savior, who, invoking “the gods,” undertook a war against Prousias I, Ortiagon, and the Galatians, “not only on behalf of those subject to him, but on behalf of all inhabitants of Asia ([ὑπὲρ ἄ]λλων τῶν κατοικούντων τὴν Ἀσίαν).” An Attalid king, just as a Seleukid, could claim to be “king of Asia,” the title that the Suda, for example, applies to Attalos II.Footnote ¹³⁹ That pseudo-Achaemenid rank required of its holder both a multifaceted cultural politics and a means of projecting power across the conceptual geography of Asia. In Asia, the ideological value of the victories over the Galatians was not Hellenic respectability, but a stronger claim to rule the nebulous territory allotted at Apameia.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The historiography of the Galatians’ crossing evokes the specter of Asia’s salvation from the beginning. Polybius, as preserved by Livy, also depicts the Gauls mounting their campaign from the European side of the Propontis where their cupidity overtook them, as “a desire for crossing into Asia seized them.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ The goal of what scholars take to have been a migration aimed at finding land for about 20,000 people is distorted into an expedition to plunder all of cis-Tauric Asia.Footnote ¹⁴² According to Livy, the Galatians divided up the revenues of the entire territory into three (tres partes), with the Trocmi drawing tribute from the Hellespont, the Tolistobogii living off Aeolis and Ionia, and the Tectosages assigned the interior. While it is clear from this account that everyone settled upland, in historical Galatia, the barbarians continued to threaten all of cis-Tauric Asia. Thus, when Polybius praises the Romans for suppressing the Galatians in 189, he explicitly commends them for removing that threat.Footnote ¹⁴³ In a dramatic reversal, the local heroes of these narratives stand up to the Galatians, especially at places already imbued with meaning in myth, and ultimately eject them from Asia altogether, or at least from the more civilized reaches of its western seaboard. The Attalids vied with other Anatolian rivals for this role. During the War with Achaios, Polybius writes, Attalos I brought yet another band of Gauls over from Europe, the Aigosages. They damaged the cities of the Hellespont and threatened to take Ilion, but were fought off by the citizens of Alexandria Troas. In the end, Prousias freed the cities of the Hellespont from the danger. In effect, by correcting the mistake of Attalos, he reversed that of his forebearer Nicomedes I, giving “a good lesson to the barbarians from Europe in the future not to be overready to cross to Asia.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The assault of the Aigosages on Ilion in 218 would have recalled an earlier attack on the same city during the initial migration in 279/8. By 218, Ilion seems to have received its sturdy, 2.5–3 m thick fortification wall. On the other hand, Strabo tells us that in 278, the Galatians, fresh from Europe, had reconnoitered Ilion as a potential stronghold. Finding it unwalled, and so unsuitable, they moved on, and the city survived unscathed.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The appearance of two such incidents in our sources may not be a coincidence, but instead an indication of the significance to observers and memory makers of the heroic defense of Troy, perhaps seen as a symbol for the salvation of Asia. In other words, if Ilion could hold, the rest of Asia could also survive the onslaught. This is the implication of a complex of oracles that seems to have circulated in the third century as a series of post eventum interpretations of the Gauls’ crossing. Addressed to the king of Bithynia, one oracle ominously forecast a wave of destruction, but in congratulating “the Hellespont” seems to hint at Ilion’s survival. “O thrice blessed Hellespont, and the divinely built walls of men … by divine commands which [city] the dreadful wolf will frighten under mighty compulsion.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ This oracle may have issued from from the Temple of Apollo in Chalcedon, though it was at some point in Antiquity associated with the name of the Chaonian prophetess Phaennis. Pausanias records her prophecy that an Attalos, ruling in Pergamos, son of a bull and reared by Zeus, would rout the Gauls who had ravaged Asia and harmed those who inhabited its coast.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ While we cannot be certain of the precise origin or authorship of these oracles, nor their relationship to each other, together they preserve a precious, near-contemporary perspective on events. The mythic archetype through which the inhabitants of Asia understood the Gallic crossing was the Trojan, not the Persian War, and they called on their kings to play the part of Priam, not Miltiades. In managing the migration, individual kings may have, in certain contexts, claimed to be champions of the Greeks, but they remained the helmsmen of Hellenistic states on Asian soil.

Despite their intercourse with the enemy, the Attalids managed to spread the idea that they were responsible for, as Pausanias puts it, driving the Galatians away from the sea and out of “lower Asia” (κάτω Ἀσίας).Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Pausanias’ testimony is what Karl Strobel has envisioned as the official Pergamene version of the settlement of the Galatians after the victory of Attalos I.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ This version of events is demonstrably false: not only were individual Celts settled in the urban west of the peninsula, but Galatia as a constellation of tribal polities in central Anatolia in time became a protectorate of the enlarged kingdom of Pergamon.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Yet the important point to note here is that the Attalids’ territorial claim is to parts of Asia that are emptied out of Galatians. That this territorial claim of an Asia without Galatians was foundational for Pergamon is glimpsed on the long, blue marble Base of Philetairos on the island of Delos. Its verse inscription, which seems to have been erected by Attalos I, celebrates the founder’s achievements in war, principally, that “he drove the Galatians far beyond his frontiers (oikeioi horoi).” He did not merely defeat them; he expelled them, defining a border in the process.

This is an exaggeration, since while Philetairos may have skirmished with the Galatians, no major victory on the scale of Antiochos I’s Elephant Battle was ever trumpeted. Further, the verse essentially backdates the birth of the Attalid kingdom by depicting the vassal Philetairos chasing the barbarians beyond borders that were scarcely notional. Yet the rhetoric worked. By Strabo’s writing, it was impossible to conceive of a place as both Pergamene and permanently settled with Galatians.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The geographer describes a two-part process of settlement. First, the Galatians wandered about overrunning Attalid and Bithynian territory, and second, those two monarchies granted them permission to settle in historical Galatia. This neat picture obscures the fact that these dynasties contested each other’s borders and surely competed with Galatian leaders for influence in many places. It also exculpates those who bear the guilt of inviting the Galatians to Asia by crediting them with the creation of a homeland on the periphery of the Mediterranean system.

In the Pergamene version of the Galatian settlement story, elements of truth are combined with major distortions. Both help us understand what was at stake for the Attalids in conjuring up certain Galatians while also interacting with those of flesh and blood. The extent to which any Hellenistic monarch was directly responsible for the creation of historical Galatia is difficult to determine. Yet it was Mithridates I of Pontos, the lord of those parts, who seems to have played the greatest role.Footnote ¹⁵² Apart from the confusing notice in Strabo, the only evidence for Attalid involvement is the episode with the Aigosages, and they were settled in the west, deep inside Pergamene territory. Indeed, it is likely that many Galatians lived inside the Attalid kingdom. This is suggested, for example, by the appearance of Middle La Tène metalwork outside the Galatian core, or even by the Celtic name of one of Toriaion’s ambassadors to Eumenes II. Galatian princes such as Ortiagon and Eposagnatus collaborated with the Attalids. After the dynasty’s fall, a portrait statue of Adobogiona, the Galatian princess who married the powerful citizen Menodotos, was erected inside the Temple of Hera at Pergamon, where it stood next to images of Attalos II and Stratonike.Footnote ¹⁵³ One has the impression that the Galatians never fully vacated the territory. Yet generally, this was a migration aimed at the acquisition of land, not the booty or mercenary pay of the ancient, even modern stereotypes.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Mithridates could offer large amounts of relatively fertile and resource-rich territory in the Anatolian highlands. Unsurprisingly, no Greek city on the Aegean seaboard offered to redistribute choice, alluvial land. In fact, the landless, non-Hellenes of Priene seem to have collaborated with the Galatians and avenged themselves on the landed classes.Footnote ¹⁵⁵

The old picture of the Galatians as semi-nomadic or unsettled has been completely overturned by anthropological and paleoenvironmental studies, although it still haunts scholarship.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ The region between the Sangarius and the Halys was much more heavily forested in Antiquity and, to the incoming Celts, may have resembled the Central European lands of their origin.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ In any case, its diverse resources supported a mixed agricultural regime for a sedentary population. Evidence from the well-studied site of Gordion provides a picture of long-term demographic and economic stability at odds with the turbulence of Pergamene art and rhetoric. For example, landscape analysis shows that the arrival of the Galatians did not alter land-use patterns or rates of erosion. A decline in the intensity of land use that had begun in the late Iron Age simply continued. This is indirectly confirmed by recent work on the domestic architecture of the Hellenistic town. Some houses were abandoned, some were taken over; in the end, the Galatians may have changed the layout of Gordion’s urban plan and even its typical house type, but they preserved the character of the settlement.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Moreover, soil studies show that the rate of sedimentation in nearby streams was unaffected, continuing its decline. The Galatians, unlike, say, the LBA Hittites, did not direct or centralize land use in such a way that erosion was significantly curbed. Nor, however, did they degrade hill slopes with intensive pastoralism like, say, the later nomadic Turks.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Defying their reputation for disruptiveness, the Galatians maintained the structure of the agropastoralist economy, even if the Anatolian, Phrygian-Luwian population now found itself attached to Celtic tribes and clans.Footnote ¹⁶⁰

Hellenistic Galatia would appear to have been more or less economically self-sufficient, lacking strong ties to Aegean and Pontic trade networks such as had existed in the age of Alexander. Again, if we look to Gordion, the extended absence of imported Greek tablewares and amphoras during the second and third quarters of the third century was once attributed to hostilities, but perhaps it is the presence of these artifacts that needs to be explained. Mark Lawall has argued that caches of Rhodian amphoras at the site represent nontrade events, such as the expedition of Manlius Vulso. Goods from the Mediterranean or Black Sea arrived on an irregular basis through pulsatile trade.Footnote ¹⁶¹ The regular contacts remained the pre-Hellenistic ones – links with the other emporia of Ancyra and Tavium, and with sites such as Boğazköy. In what excavators call the Early Hellenistic B and Middle Hellenistic periods (ca. 275–235 and ca. 235–189, respectively), finewares were either local or regional, such as the so-called Galatian ware, a Central Anatolian form, well known from the eastern lands of the Trocmi.Footnote ¹⁶² Similar conclusions can be drawn from an analysis of coin hoards from this region. Over time, large-denomination silver and even gold coins filtered in, accumulating in what appear to be savings, not circulation hoards. Perhaps the contexts in which coinage was useful were limited, though the significant amounts of third-century bronze recovered at the site are suggestive. While these smaller denominations and possible countermarking at Gordion show some low-level monetization, it does not appear that Galatia was fully integrated into the monetary systems to which Pergamon belonged.Footnote ¹⁶³ While we cannot take too seriously the claim of Diodorus that Eumenes II, though not being too rich, “subdued the entire ethnos of the Galatians” with liberal but judicious gift giving, the anecdote may point to the informal nature of Attalid power in many parts of Galatia.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Conditions were never ripe, then, for an expansion east of the Sangarius, since the normal preexisting infrastructure never materialized. The Attalid imperial geography of a lower Asia defined in opposition to an up-country Galatia gained traction and was later endorsed by Pausanias. The cultural politics of Pergamon excluded those who were already outside.

The topography, however, did not always align with the cultural identity of Anatolia’s inhabitants, and a large part of western highland Phrygia, specifically, stretches of what later geographers called Phrygia Epictetus, fell squarely between Galatia of the Tolistobogii and the Attalid core (Map 6.2). Inside the Epictetus of Strabo, in this period, lay the shifting boundaries between Bithynia, Paphlagonia, the Attalid kingdom, and the territory of the Tolistobogii.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Naturally, Pergamene activity is detectable all along this contested frontier zone. In the west, Attalos I was a major benefactor of the sanctuary of Zeus at Aizanoi, and a Pergamene official may have been resident in the handsome house uncovered nearby.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ In the east of this buffer zone, the Attalids were present, we now know, not just at Pessinous, but also in Amorion. An important and early Galatian ally, Eposognatus, would seem to have held sway near here.Footnote ¹⁶⁷ Presumably, the Attalids controlled the fortified mound of Seyitömer, as well as other former Seleukid strongholds with Macedonian identities, such as Dorylaion (Şarhöyük) in the north.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In southwestern Phrygia, we know that the Attalid monetary system reached into places such as Synnada, Lysias, and Dionysoupolis.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ This was a militarized frontier, but it was not a cultural no-man’s land. Or, rather, it did not lack a coherent, even if hybrid, cultural identity. It was widely seen, from some point in the second century, as Gallograecia (Γαλλογραίκια) or Hellênogalatia. The Latinate term, which appears in our earliest source, the younger Eratosthenes of Cyrene, and persists into Byzantine times, admits a Roman perspective. It recalls the speech of Manlius Vulso in Livy, the contemptuous comparison of the Galatians with the true Galli of Europe. Contrasted with the European Gauls, “These are a degenerate lot, mixed, and really, they are called Gallo-Greeks (hi iam degeneres sunt, mixti, et Gallograeci vere, quod appellantur).” Significantly, in the same speech, Vulso calls them Phrygians with Gallic arms.Footnote ¹⁷⁰

Map 6.2 Central Anatolia.

Ironically, the pejorative usage of the Roman outsider may preserve an insider’s perspective.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The second-century inhabitants of the Epictetus may indeed have seen themselves as Gallo-Greeks, and aspects of their material culture were, in fact, Phrygian. Note that Livy’s passive “they are called” lacks a subject. By whom were they called Gallograeci? We should take seriously the possibility that the term was one of self-ascription. Pompeius Trogus, for one, believed that the migrants themselves had come up with the idea.Footnote ¹⁷² For Strabo, Gallograecia was distinct from and lay west of Galatia proper. The Galatians, he writes, “occupied that which is now called ‘Galatia and Gallograecia.’”Footnote ¹⁷³ These inhabitants of the Pergamene frontier may have been uniquely positioned to claim shares in both the Hellenistic koinê and the barbarian prestige promoted by warring Galatian tetrarchs. Indeed, scraps of evidence tell us that the sociopolitical structures of second-century Galatia were indeed becoming quite sophisticated without shedding Celtic institutions. The nobles Ortiagon and Chiomara, for example, gave their son the evocative Greek name Paidopolites (“son citizen”), but his career in public life culminated with an appointment as a tribal judge.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Ideologically, the notion of Gallograecia would have potentially been at odds with the Attalids’ claim to an Asia without Galatians. In practice, however, the cultural makeup of the region boded well for its integration into the rest of the kingdom. Inscriptions show that Neo-Phrygian held a status here that it lacked farther east. Its everyday material culture also differed from that of the Galatian heartland. If we compare Gordion in its final, pre-189 phase to a site like Dorylaion/Şarhöyük, the contrast is striking. At Gordion, local potters had already dropped most Greek forms from their repertoire after ca. 275. In the town that Vulso conquered, just a few imported drinking cups existed. There appears to have been no real demand for drinking cups, as none of the imports were replicated in local fabrics.Footnote ¹⁷⁵ On the other hand, at Şarhöyük (Dorylaion, now Eskişehir), which had been the western outpost of the Hittites, Hellenistic houses have revealed a broad assemblage of Greek vessels that were duly copied in the Phrygian gray ware tradition, such as unguentaria, echinus bowls, and fish plates. Aegean-style drinking was entrenched here, as demonstrated by a series of mold-made bowls that spawned local imitations.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ These patterns are surely the result of a multiplicity of factors, many of which are not recoverable. It is difficult to know what direct effects, if any, the sovereignty of a handful of Galatian elites had on the culture of the many, particularly in light of the fast pace of the leaders’ own assimilation. What we see among the Attalids’ Gallogrecian subjects, then, is perhaps an even higher degree of cultural fluidity, almost entrepreneurial in nature, stimulated by the region’s enduring link to the Aegean. Pergamene cultural politics needed to be sophisticated and imaginative enough to keep pace. The result was the extraordinary investment in the sanctuary of the Mother of the Gods at Pessinous.

Pessinous and Aizanoi

The originality and creativity of Attalid cultural politics were on full display at the sanctuary of Cybele Agdistis in Pessinous. Rather than impose, imitate, or merely appropriate, the Attalids combined different elements of Greek, Phrygian, and Galatian culture in novel ways, in order to stretch and secure their influence along a restive eastern frontier. Several decades of excavation and a remarkable epigraphic dossier show that Pergamon transformed an open-air sanctuary in remote eastern Phrygia into a place of Pan-Asian and indeed international repute. It was once presumed that the Attalids intruded here on a native priesthood, its “temple state,” and a cult with deep roots in Phrygian or even Hittite religion, but that view has become untenable. In the Iron Age, several modest Phrygian settlements dotted the slopes of the Sivrihisar Mountains and the Gallos Valley. Beneath the riverside platform of the large, Julio-Claudian temple in Pessinous itself, modest late Phrygian houses have been uncovered and a presumed, nonmonumental “cult annex.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷ However, nothing suggests that the site was a focal point of the valley before Hellenistic times, let alone a place of wider significance for Phrygian religion.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ With no sign of a Phrygian sanctuary of Cybele in Pessinous, scholars have gone looking for a rock-cut shrine in the surrounding high places, on the order of the Midas Monument in Yazılıkaya. Several surveys of the environs, including the presumed Mount Dindymos, which gave the goddess her epithet Meter Dindymene, have turned up a handful of Phrygian cult sites, such as Tekören and Hamamtepe. None, however, is securely identified as a shrine of the Great Mother. Nor do any of these sites appear to have attracted long-distance pilgrimage or much attention at all. Following Altay Coşkun, it is even possible to doubt the authenticity of the earliest witness to the Pessinountine cult, the early fourth-century historian Theopompus, as cited by Ammianus Marcellinus.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This would make Diodorus, in the first century BCE, our earliest literary source.Footnote ¹⁸⁰

As a result, it has become clear that the so-called temple state of Pessinous grew significantly – or was born as such – in the Hellenistic period. Whereas we once puzzled over how Attalos I, as early as 205/4, could have pilfered the aniconic cult stone for transfer to Rome, in the form of an Idaean Magna Mater, the archaeology now forces us to contend with the question of what was there for the alleged temple-robber to take.Footnote ¹⁸¹ The late Iron Age in Phrygia was characterized by dispersed settlement patterns and the absence of the state.Footnote ¹⁸² It took an outside power, then, to reconfigure the late Phrygian cult on such a grand scale. Therefore, Strobel has argued that one of the Successors, either Antigonos or Lysimachus, drew the cult down from the mountains and equipped its client-priests with a citadel and a sanctuary.Footnote ¹⁸³ This reconstruction has been aided by insecure dates for both the earliest monumental architecture under the Roman temple, that is, the emplekton citadel, as well as the hilltop necropoleis of the bustling Hellenistic emporion. The theory also receives a measure of support from Thonemann, who argues that Pesssinous was the site of Kleonnaion, a Graeco-Macedonian settlement of the late fourth century. However, current readings of the pottery seem to point to the later Attalids and Galatian tetrarchs as the primary builders of the sanctuary, even if the citadel in Sector B receives an earlier date in the third century. Moreover, Strabo tells us, in no uncertain terms, that the “Attalic kings” equipped (κατεσκεύασται) the temenos with a temple and marble stoas.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

Strabo’s description credits the Attalids with sponsoring the construction of the first monumental architecture in the sacred precinct. While Strabo takes for granted the prior existence of the sanctuary, he cannot be construed to point to a rebuild or an expansion of earlier buildings. Rather, the geographer’s use of the same verb elsewhere suggests that, from a conceptual standpoint, temenos and emporion alike were empty spatial containers for humans to fill with their works.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ The Attalids had encountered, then equipped the sacred place with architecture that was appropriate to its holiness, or so it may have seemed in the Augustan age. Perhaps, by Strabo’s time, Pergamene and Roman building had obscured the oddity and contingency of the Attalids’ original investment, which a recent redating of the opening letter of the epigraphic dossier puts in the late third century.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ In other words, it appears that the Attalids grafted their marble design on to a modest, open-air Phrygian sanctuary. As the Pergamene Temple of Cybele has never been located, it has been suggested that it stood on the site of an earlier mountain-top shrine. Philetairos’ Doric temple and sancuary of Meter on Mamurt Kale, 30 km southeast of Pergamon, may have provided a precedent.Footnote ¹⁸⁷ The lost marble slabs of the epigraphic dossier, long thought to have formed part of the wall of an Attalid temple, as well as several column capitals discovered in upland Dinek, are intriguing hints.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Or the Attalid temple may lie unexcavated under the village of Ballıhisar. Either way, the new temple was part of a complex of buildings. Strabo’s mention of the Attalids’ marble stoas, along with the latest analysis of the pre-Roman architecture beneath the massive terrace in Sectors B and H, the core of the Hellenistic town’s residential quarters, points to a break with the past. The material culture inside these buildings, wall paintings, and pottery is said to be broadly second-century and Pergamene.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

If indeed an Attalid, posing as a new Midas, wrested Pessinous from obscurity, the question remains, to what end? Again, finding the answer requires us to take seriously the dynasty’s claim to rule over all of the inhabitants of Asia and, not only that, to represent the cultural ambitions of those now invited, once again, to join civilization. The epigraphic dossier from Sivrihisar and the new Attalid letter, found in a house in Ballıhisar, reinforce the impression that Pergamon was deeply involved with the priesthood, the cult, and the sanctuary, from as early as 207. This cannot have been because Attalos I anticipated the Roman request for aid a few years later or guessed at the Sibyl’s oracular pronouncement. The king had his own reasons, strategic and ideological, for investing considerable resources in the remote Gallos Valley. Most of the epigraphic dossier records correspondence between the Attalids and a priest named Attis, who is a Galatian, we learn, when his brother is identified as a hostile leader named Aioiorix.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ By a process that remains obscure to us, Galatians had entered the Pessinountine priesthood, in which they formally retained their non-Phrygian identity.Footnote ¹⁹¹ The Attalids’ cultivation of Attis was not aimed at instigating defection, since Galatian leaders had diverse interests and rarely engaged in collective action. He was their partner after 188, it seems, because Attalos I had conquered Pessinous around 207. Surely, its territory floated in and out of Pergamene control over the following decades, but this did not necessitate what has often been described as secret communication. On the contrary, the Attalids would have publicized their relationship with Pessinous’ priests to the greatest extent possible. Here is an example of a context in which the Attalids encountered a flesh-and-blood Galatian subject, one ensconced in a (pseudo-?) Phrygian priesthood that occupied a militarily advantageous borderland position. The letters and the building project both attest to their zeal to win over such powerbrokers, who undoubtedly also received other offers, not only from their distant kin in Ancyra or Peion but also from the Bithynians, with whom the Attalids fought a series of border wars that stretched over many decades.

The war of Attalos I and Prousias I of Bithynia over the Epictetus (208–205) is now seen to form the backdrop of the first letter of the Pessinous dossier. Christian Mileta has argued persuasively that I.Pessinous 1 is not a royal letter to the priest Attis, traditionally dated to the late 160s, but an internal Attalid directive issued during this, much earlier war with Prousias.Footnote ¹⁹² Its brusque message, voiced not to an ally but to a subordinate officer, is to take Pessinous (rendered “Pessongoi”) by hook or by crook. The motivation for such an action is made explicit in the final sentence of the communiqué, which, if the letter were addressed to a priest, would be absurd: “For as the place is holy, it must be taken by all means” (ἱεροῦ γὰρ τοῦ χωρίου ὄντος ληπτέον ἐστὶ πάντως).Footnote ¹⁹³ The local priests surely took the holiness of the sanctuary for granted! Our copy of the document was a reinscription of the first century CE, when the sacred status of the land was at issue. Attalos’ memorandum seems to have been dug out of an archive in order to be offered as evidence to secure the sanctuary’s inviolability (asylia). Ironically, the original concern of Attalos, in the third century BCE, had been to take the place by force. Commentators have also noted the strategic connotation of the word chorion. It may be surmised that the king saw the immense value of a fortified indigenous sanctuary because he already anticipated its development as a platform for cultural pageantry. The Bithynians were a great threat to the Attalids in war and diplomacy – but nowhere near as adept at cultural politics.

The Attalids’ distinctive ability to reorganize a Phrygian cultic landscape in the service of securing the borders is also discernible at the site of Aizanoi. It lies in the northwestern Epictetus, in a plain around the river Penkalas, one of the sources of the Rhyndakos. The sanctuary of Aizanoi, as it now stands, is a Roman creation. At its center is a Roman temple of Zeus with a subterranean chamber that seems to have housed the cult of Cybele. Although the tidy work of the Roman builders has again obscured earlier activity on the site, recent excavations have managed to shed light on the Bronze and Iron Age mound beneath the temple’s terrace – and on Hellenistic remains. In Aizanoi, too, Attalos I faced off against Prousias I for control of strategic territory, which Macedonian cleruchs had perhaps already settled.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Yet the sacredness of the topography was also clearly a draw. A bilingual inscription of 128 CE from the wall of the Roman temple tells us that both Attalos I and Prousias I had once donated land to the city and to the god.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ By Hadrian’s time, that land had fallen into private hands. An unpublished inscription is said to indicate that Attalos I distributed land to cleruchs, making it difficult to sort out the original relationship between king, sanctuary, settlers, and the Hellenistic political community that preceded the Roman civitas Aezanitarum.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Many scholars assume that a pre-Hellenistic sanctuary of some importance benefited from Attalid patronage or, alternatively, was dispossessed.Footnote ¹⁹⁷ Control of a powerful Anatolian temple was the prize, on this view, and Attalos behaved much like other Hellenistic kings by assigning lands to a prominent indigenous sanctuary.Footnote ¹⁹⁸ However, as in Pessinous, the antiquity of the temple institutions may be chimeric, or rather, the Attalids may have changed the cult so thoroughly that it bore only a distant relation to its Phrygian forerunner.

Archaeologically, the site of Aizanoi is complex, but excavation of a 7-m-deep trench on the settlement mound and the remains of a large Hellenistic house suggests wholesale transformation under the Attalids. The deep trench on the settlement mound did not turn up late Bronze or early Iron Age material. However, an early Bronze Age building was uncovered, which some suspect could be cultic.Footnote ¹⁹⁹ In the later Iron Age (seventh to fourth centuries BCE), a Phrygian village existed at Aizanoi, but its gray ware pottery is idiosyncratic and out of sync with wares from major centers such as Gordion or Dorylaion.Footnote ²⁰⁰ Clearly, the village was not the administrative seat of a robust, ancient Anatolian temple-state. No such temple has been found, but rather, the local, pre-Hellenistic cult of significance in the area seems to have been housed in the cave sanctuary of Steunos, typologically, a classic, rural shrine of Phrygian Matar, set above a streambed 2 km southwest of the settlement.Footnote ²⁰¹ At Aizanoi itself, the laying of foundations for, first, a Roman pike wall and, then, the massive Roman temple has obliterated that building’s predecessor. Nevertheless, excavator Klaus Rheidt all but assumes that an Attalid temple once existed, arguing that Pergamon transformed Aizanoi into one of the most important sanctuaries of Asia Minor.Footnote ²⁰² The suggestion of the excavator that the original Pergamene cult statue can be glimpsed in a Roman bronze figurine of Zeus of Aizanoi, as well as in the iconography of a Roman coin type, encourages us to reckon with the transformation of the local god on the Attalids’ watch. This is now Zeus with a bushy beard, glimpsed in depictions of Zeus Bronton, which are particularly common in this very area of northwest Phrygia – and indeed reminiscent of the indigenous King Teuthras on the Telephos frieze.Footnote ²⁰³ The deity worshipped at Aizanoi in Attalid times was surely an older Anatolian weather god propitiated by farmers, but the Greek language and architectural idiom now became vehicles for the religious imagination of conservative Phrygia. Local worshipers now saw their aniconic, male weather god (Ata?) anthropomorphized, and they named him “Zeus,” shorthand in these parts for “great god,” surely adding an epithet such as Bronton or any other from the region’s rich palette.Footnote ²⁰⁴ In a powerful display of Pergamene creativity, the god showed the Anatolian face assigned to him by Greek artists in the cosmology of the Great Altar. It also seems probable that the occupant of the large Hellenistic house somehow oversaw this hypothetical Pergamene temple of Zeus-Ata and, considering the sturdy, bronze lock fixture from a chest in one of its rooms, perhaps also its finances. The 46 clay bullae found in the house, surely a fraction of the original archive’s contents, suggests a spike of administrative activity. Further, a cache of 18 nearly complete ceramic vessels, largely of Pergamene origin and datable to the second quarter of the second century BCE, along with a female statue head of fine crystalline marble, give us a sense of the scale and intense pace of change at Aizanoi.Footnote ²⁰⁵

Evidently, Attalos I took the same steps at Aizanoi that Strabo’s unspecified “Attalic kings” took at Pessinous. Picking up on a local mythographic tradition, he erected monuments to match the sacredness of the place, fixing the focus of the surrounding countryside on a new temple and its annexes. Similarly, if there were powerful priests in Hellenistic Aizanoi, it would seem that they were Pergamene creations, not just clients. Centuries later, Pausanias, in his description of the Meter sanctuary at the cave of Steunos, calls it one of the most famous such caves in Greek or barbarian lands. Yet this fame was anchored in the relatively recent past, though the periegete credited primeval Arcadian colonists with the foundation of the Phrygian cult.Footnote ²⁰⁶ The cave has been thoroughly explored, and small finds indicate heavy traffic between the first century BCE and the end of the first century CE, when the cult seems to have been transferred to the Roman temple’s subterranean chamber.Footnote ²⁰⁷ In the recent discovery of a votive dump for the same cult of Meter at the village of Ilicikören, 5 km south of the settlement mound, we can see that the increase in longer-distance traffic to shrines of the Aizanitis had started already in the second century BCE.Footnote ²⁰⁸ Significant numbers of Phrygian worshippers began to patronize a cult annex at Ilicikören, and this may have been a secondary effect of the Attalid elaboration of the sanctuary at Aizanoi. Nearly all of the pottery from Ilicikören is local and indigenous, and many of the figurines are, like those from Steunos, distinctly Anatolian in form. The goddess stands and wears a polos on her head, whereas she already appears seated in Greek iconography after the sixth century BCE.Footnote ²⁰⁹ That a high volume of these decidedly un-Greek figurines appears in the sanctuary site’s preserved cult annexes from the second century BCE suggests that the Attalids had elaborated religious life at Aizanoi in such a way as to make contact with a population of the Phrygian countryside that had remained largely hidden from the state during the later Iron Age.

The large house and Greek cult statue of the lost temple notwithstanding, one has the impression that the cultural identity of the local population remained Phrygian under Attalid rule, and yet the cave of Steunos is notable precisely for its mixture of Greek and Phrygian cult fixtures.Footnote ²¹⁰ While the Phrygian and Greek conceptions of Meter/Matar had been influencing each other since the sixth century BCE, differences endured, and we should try to capture, to the extent possible, the Phyrgian perspective at Aizanoi.Footnote ²¹¹ It is often said that the combination of the cults of Meter and Zeus was facilitated by the early assimilation of Phrygian Matar and Greek Rhea, but we should not overlook the way in which the Attalids also drew on much older traditions of paired deities, Mother and Father (Ata). The so-called Male Superior God of the early Phrygian pantheon, shown with Matar in double idols, survived into the Hellenistic period as Zeus Papas/Papias. In fact, the popular rural cult of Papias even appears outside Phrygia, in a dedication from Lasnedda in Lydia, dated to the late Attalid period.Footnote ²¹²

It has also been suggested that the Male Superior God was worshipped on step structures like the one above the cave at Steunos.Footnote ²¹³ In the Phrygian cultural context of this Hellenizing building program, the Attalids’ new subjects probably understood Zeus as a strange new Ata, seductively endowed with human form and granted a Greek-style temple. The Attalids had long shown abundant creativity when it came to recasting Phrygian religion in monumental form. Philetairos had encased the Phrygian stone-cut base for an earlier cult-statue and a stone-cut altar inside his building complex on the sacred mountain of Aspordenon (Mamurt Kale). The impulse to combine creatively emerged from the Attalids’ deep familiarity with both cultural traditions and the pressing need to integrate rural Anatolia. The luxury of appropriation was not available; they need to manufacture temple power. At the imperial center, the votives tend to be, as expected, rather more Greek in appearance, but the apparent clash of styles is repeated. The sacred geography of the countryside of the Kaikos Valley contained multiple rock-cut Meter/Matar shrines.Footnote ²¹⁴ Matar seems to have had royal associations in Phrygian religion since ca. 700 BCE, and indeed we find the cult of Meter Basileia at Pergamon. Yet it is a civic priesthood, held by priestesses, not male eunuchs. The cult statue has been identified, and it is a magnificent Atticized and seated Cybele, holding her tympanum. Her sanctuary has not been conclusively identified, and may have been, in good Anatolian fashion, attached to the craggy rock of the highest peak of the Pergamene acropolis.Footnote ²¹⁵ In other words, the cultural background of the Attalids matched their cultural politics, which is why at Pessinous and Aizanoi, they correctly identified places charged with local meaning but bereft of a built environment. Iconoclastically, they developed them into showpieces that were no less important to their ambitions than the royal capital.

Pergamon in Pisidia

In the highlands above coastal Lycia and the plain of Pamphylia, the Attalids encountered a far less pliant set of indigenous populations. Geographically, Greater Pisidia includes the mountainous Pisidian heartland, with its deep river valleys and flat alluvial plains, as well as, in the west, the Milyas, the Lysis Valley, and the Kibyratis, and, in the north, Phrygia Paroreios.Footnote ²¹⁶ Already present in rapidly urbanizing Pisidia were precisely the robust forms of social and military organization that were missing in far more rural parts of Attalid Phrygia. Surely, the process had begun earlier, but our first tangible proof of these far-reaching changes dates to around 200 BCE. Ethnic Pisidians, members of the dominant group of Luwian-speakers living in the mixed milieu of the territory of a former Hittite vassal state, began to nucleate in ever greater numbers. Over 50 Hellenistic cities have been recorded. To compare, a Turkish census of 1950 lists only 12 towns across the same region with at least 2,500 inhabitants, or roughly the same size of small Greek and Roman cities.Footnote ²¹⁷ The urban form and governing institutions of these new cities were, in part, modeled on the Greek polis. Indigenous urban antecedents were few and far between, limited, it seems, to Panemoteichos I and the site of Düzen Tepe. In addition to new Greek-style magistracies, a bicameral system appeared in many cities, consisting of a popular assembly (ekklesia) and a council of elders (gerousia), with Termessos and Adada, at least, representing themselves as democracies. Before long, a competitive peer-polity system emerged, a veritable city-state culture, rife with rivalry, war, a creative discourse about kinship and descent, and even colonizing migrations, a place that Mitchell has likened to a microcosm of Archaic Greece.Footnote ²¹⁸ Recent research has shown that Pisidian ethnogenesis, perhaps directed by mercenaries of the Persian period and buoyed by a rising population, was followed by a period of acculturation to Hellenistic habits in the century or so after Alexander. When the Attalids arrived in 188 BCE, the urban transformation was in full swing, so much so that we soon find Pisidians migrating westward and founding new cities in the Milyas and Kibyratis.

The famously martial Pisidians were indeed capable of mounting stiff resistance on the battlefield, which is why we find Attalos II campaigning in person against them for a considerable number of years. They were also conspicuously active agents in their own acculturation, fashioning a Hellenistic cultural bricolage that contains many indigenous elements in novel combinations with Greek ones. A fine example is the phenomenon of partly rock-cut temples, which are faced with a Greek naos, often in the Doric order.Footnote ²¹⁹ The extent of the Attalids’ involvement in Pisidia and the depth of their interference in local society has become increasingly clear.Footnote ²²⁰ Again, however, the imperial project’s success remains unexplained as long as the cultural politics are simply termed Hellenization. While the Attalids fought a high-profile war against the proud city of Selge, coercion may have been the exception rather than the rule. Selge, then, comes to look like a lone and isolated holdout, grasping for Bithynian or Roman support. Archaeological remains and a growing epigraphic record point to a broader projection of soft power that had the effect of reducing rebellion and keeping open this vital link to the eastern Mediterranean via Attaleia. Further, Pergamon’s tactful support of the cultural aspirations of Pisidian cities allowed for their rapid and precocious integration within the kingdom of Asia.

While historians once doubted that the Attalids’ presence in Pisidia was ever more than episodic, several decades of intensive archaeological work have served to highlight Pergamon’s impact on the region.Footnote ²²¹ By contrast, Seleukid activity appears to have been limited, both in its geographic scope (to the north) and in terms of its effect: colonies were planted along major arteries connecting Apameia to Lykaonia, such as Pisidian Antioch, Seleukeia Sidera, Laodikeia Katakekaumene, and, most likely, Apollonia; vestiges of the previous regime may be detected in Macedonian shield reliefs spread around the region and in Sagalassos’ use of the elephant as a civic badge.Footnote ²²² In two key cities, Termessos and Selge, the third century witnessed a prelude of budding civic consciousness and Greek-style urbanism. However, as Veli Köse has shown in a detailed analysis of the datable evidence, the new civic identity in Pisidia did not begin to take monumental form before ca. 200 BCE.Footnote ²²³ The advent of the Attalids in Pisidia came amid a boom in fortification and, in many places, for the first time, the laying out of an agora and the construction of public buildings in stone ashlar. Much of the impetus for these changes was demonstrably ground-up.Footnote ²²⁴ Yet the more we know about the timing of these developments, the more Pergamene influence is apparent. In Pisidia, Attalid influence was deep and unprecedented.Footnote ²²⁵

For example, the well-studied site of Sagalassos now helps date Pisidia’s cultural revolution quite precisely. From the Persian into the early Hellenistic period (fifth to third centuries), the site was occupied, though the character of the settlement has been difficult to tease out from Classical and Hellenistic pottery recovered in the vicinity of the later Upper Agora. Flanking Sagalassos, however, was a primitively fortified sister settlement, Düzen Tepe, which maintained an Anatolian, seemingly anachronistic form of urbanism and material culture until its abandonment, just as the more outward-looking Sagalassos took shape around its first agora.Footnote ²²⁶ Düzen Tepe has been thoroughly explored and, along with Panemoteichos I, attests to the admittedly attenuated existence of a form of urbanism in Iron Age Pisidia. However, the emergence of some 50 cities in the Hellenistic period represents a sharp break with the past. The timing of that break and the character of one of the most important new cities were revealed in controlled excavations of the Upper Agora of Sagalassos in 2014 and 2015. Those digs put to rest old theories of rapid Hellenization immediately subsequent to Alexander’s siege. In fact, the layout of the first, beaten-earth agora took place ca. 200 BCE, with the first ashlar buildings, such as the city’s market building, arriving about half a century later.Footnote ²²⁷ This new date for the onset of the acceleration phase of urban change at Sagalassos accords well with evidence from across Pisidia and coincides neatly with the appearance of the Attalids.Footnote ²²⁸ Admittedly, the kings stimulated and contributed to a process already underway. Yet two cities, Apollonia and Ariassos, even chose to publicize a break with the past by inaugurating new city-eras in 188.Footnote ²²⁹

Perhaps the strongest indication of the Attalids’ presence is the distinctive form of urbanism that ultimately took root in Pisidia. It has become evident that the Pisidians took over or adapted specifically Pergamene urban features from the start. Some scholars have seen Attalid influence in the choice of a trapezoidal agora at Selge, Sagalassos, and Termessos.Footnote ²³⁰ Interestingly, the centerpiece of the newly constituted community was not, for example, a gymnasium. Exceptionally, it seems, Termessos and Sagalassos acquired one in the second century.Footnote ²³¹ The absence of that venue for royal munificence may help explain the oft-noted lack of honorific decrees for kings from Pisidia. In fact, civic life and the interaction with royal power were happening elsewhere. Across the region, the focal point of early civic life was the so-called Pergamene market building. In most places, this “market building,” as the earliest monumental architecture, will have fulfilled a variety of administrative functions on the new city’s agora.Footnote ²³² The Pisidians tended to have added a bouleuterion soon thereafter, with the full complex taking shape ca. 150–100 BCE, though a firm early Imperial date for the bouleuterion at Sagalassos now reinforces the idea that in the initial layout of the agora, the market building stood alone.Footnote ²³³ In smaller cities, such as Sia and Adada, the gerousia may have gathered on the agora in assembly places flanked by steps, the Pisidian version of a council house or ekklesiasterion. Dating these structures is difficult, but they are associated with paved, well-demarcated agoras, which themselves begin to appear only in the second century BCE. Ultimately, we have to contend with the fact that Pergamene market buildings anchored early civic life in Pisidia.Footnote ²³⁴

What this visual quotation means is that the Attalids provided nascent urban communities in Pisidia with a specific vocabulary with which to express their civic identity, one drawn directly from a model built up in the metropole. New civic functions and big-ticket transactions were now conducted in surroundings that recalled Pergamon. Just decades before, the Attalids had developed their own spectacular multistoried stoa, with its substructure and rooms both behind and below the colonnades, bordering and in fact buttressing – as part of a giant terrace wall – the Upper Agora. The Pergamene market building had been a key feature of the Graeco-Anatolian synthesis in urban planning: inspired by East Greek antecedents, but innovatively designed to take advantage of the slope and enhance the prominence of the kind of terrace façade proper to Anatolian royalty. In hilly Pisidia, the idea caught on quickly. Market buildings of this type or a local variation are ubiquitous in a region in which many suspect Attalid builders were active.Footnote ²³⁵ This does not mean that in every case we should suspect a royal architect, let alone Pergamene sovereignty. Several examples have been found in Pamphylia, but also in Caria at Herakleia-under-Latmos and Alinda. On the contrary, the local variations, built on flatter ground, without stoas on the top floor or storage galleries in the central story, show that smaller cities, such as the unidentified cities at Melli and Kapılıtaş, freely adapted the Pergamene blueprint to meet their own needs (Fig. 6.7). Does divergence in design tell us that a city remained outside the Attalids’ direct control? It is foolhardy to use these buildings as a proxy for the kingdom’s borders. Large cities such as Termessos, Pednelissos, and Selge all contain buildings that hew closely to type, but can hardly have shared the same political status. The density and variety of these earliest of all of the region’s public buildings in stone are stark reminders of the power of Pergamene cultural affinity to mold new civic identities in a strategic province.

Figure 6.7 Late Hellenistic Pergamene market building of the unidentified city at Melli in Pisidia.

(courtesy of Veli Köse and © Pisidia Survey Project)

The appearance of the first temples in Pisidian sanctuaries also seems to coincide with the arrival of the Attalids and the departure of the Seleukids.Footnote ²³⁶ At the turn from the third to the second century, a slew of large Ionic peripteral temples were built in the cities of Termessos, Selge, and Pisidian Antioch. In each case, it seems to be the most important local indigenous deity, now Hellenized and placed at the helm of a new civic pantheon, which acquired a new home. At Termessos, Temple N5 housed, most likely, Zeus Solymeus. On the acropolis of Selge, Zeus Kesbelios gained one such temple, and so too did Pisidian Antioch’s main god, Mên, at the site of Karakuyu. Several factors point to an impetus from the outside. First, the similarity in architectural form is striking. Further, save for a possible temple at Panemoteichos I, there are no local precedents. Rather, the model is drawn from coastal Asia Minor. Finally, the scale of building would seem to have outstripped the revenues of these cities. This is especially true at Termessos, where two new temples, N5 and N7 (for Artemis), appeared in rapid succession. It is possible that competition between the two Hellenistic dynasties set off a cascade of construction across Pisidia, but the bulk of the activity appears to have been Attalid. While this is partly due to chronology, the behavior also fits a pattern discernible at Phrygian Aizanoi and at Pessinous, whereby the Attalids brought Greek temple architecture to indigenous sanctuaries.Footnote ²³⁷ At Selge, at least, a Seleukid-era temple may have preceded the Ionic peripteral one that most scholars date to the period of Attalid rule. Polybius gives us a tantalizing hint of the existence of that temple (hieron) of Zeus during the siege of Achaios in 218.Footnote ²³⁸ Yet the appearance of the city’s Kesbedion sanctuary, like much of the cultic landscape of Pisidia, changed indelibly over the course of the second century.

Architectural sculpture on some of the earliest public buildings in the region also provides a window onto the transformative impact of Pergamon in Pisidia. A traditional theme of military valor, a mainstay of third-century Pisidian ossuaries and even the earlier sepulchral monument of Alketas at Termessos, now found its way onto fortification walls, gates, public buildings, and monuments in the form of the weapons frieze. This was a distinctively regional, militaristic expression of civic identity, a Pisidian way of representing the new community.Footnote ²³⁹ However, alongside the traditional repertoire of arms, we also find an imported iconography in an up-to-date style, indeed, direct quotations from the Great Altar of Pergamon. For example, a fragmentary frieze from Termessos depicts Iphigeneia as priestess in the service of Artemis in Tauris.Footnote ²⁴⁰ Both stylistically and with its engaging continuous narrative, the monument recalls the Telephos Frieze. Current interpretations place the two fragments on the base of a pseudo-monopteros shrine to Artemis Tauropolos. Local lore may even have claimed that the cult-statue within was the original, which Iphigeneia herself whisked away from Tauris. If so, the people of Termessos used the Iphigeneia myth and the new medium to make an Attalid-style argument for authenticity, grounded in the primacy of place. Two other examples both feature the Gigantomachy, which admittedly also appears in a variety of non-Attalid contexts in Hellenistic Asia Minor. Yet at Termessos, the two badly damaged frieze slabs, unfortunately missing a secure architectural context, display a Gigantomachy that echoes the Great Altar in particular.Footnote ²⁴¹

A second example is from the unidentified site of Melli, the sensational recent discovery of a Gigantomachy frieze on three sides of a rectangular block of local limestone, perhaps the base of a lost monument from the city’s nascent agora (Fig. 6.8).Footnote ²⁴² It has been dated to the second half of the second century or the beginning of the first century BCE. Most legibly, it features Artemis and Apollo with his bow drawn, taking on one serpentine Giant, while Herakles confronts another. The sculptor appears to have been influenced by images of the Temple of Artemis in Magnesia, but much of the iconography, especially the violent hair-pulling and limb-treading, the form of the Giants’ bodies, as well as the distinctive baroque style, point to Pergamene influence. Art historians taking a bird’s-eye view would rightly caution us from mistaking the appearance of the baroque style as surefire proof of an Attalid presence. Further, we cannot hope to reconstruct the path by which these motifs and techniques arrived in second-century Pisidia. Traveling Rhodian craftsmen are just as likely as royal work gangs to have brought them here. The reception of the Great Altar in Rome, by contrast, will probably always remain much better understood. Yet why should these memes have landed at all, and so quickly, in a place like Melli? It seems they provided the Pisidians with the means to vindicate their own cultural claims in a changing world. In the case of Iphigeneia and Termessos, we can discern a typical Mediterranean play for mythological inclusion. The Gigantomachy of Melli takes the armed struggle for civic identity, perhaps here too in allegorical form, the memory of specific battles, and elevates it all to the cosmic plain. The Pisidian townsmen join the gods’ defense of civilization, not Hellenism as such. What does the reception of the Great Altar in Pisidia tell us about how subjects from the semi-Greek periphery may have interpreted the Great Altar’s own Gigantomachy? It seems to call into question a common conception of the message of the Altar, voiced most recently by Filippo Coarelli, as a statement of the defense of the ostensibly timeless values of Panhellenism.Footnote ²⁴³ Rather, it reveals a message of cultural universalism suited to the needs of communities still on the fringes of the poliad system.

Figure 6.8 Late Hellenistic frieze of Gigantomachy in the agora of the unidentified city at Melli in Pisidia.

(courtesy of Veli Köse and © Pisidia Survey Project)

Pergamon’s armed interference in Pisidia certainly provoked resistance. Some scholars have even seen the symmachy struck between Adada and Termessos as a military alliance against the Attalids.Footnote ²⁴⁴ Still, the dynasty’s lasting prestige in a region it ruled for just half a century underscores the effectiveness of its cultural diplomacy. Naming practice among an indigenous population, which continued to speak Luwian and Phrygian, is revealing in this regard. In northern Pisidia and the Paroreios, for example, the name Attalos is ubiquitous and persists for generations, with many occurrences at Neapolis, which, Hadrien Bru has argued, was in fact an Attalid colony.Footnote ²⁴⁵ An example from the early Roman village of Tynada in the territory of Pisidian Antioch emblematizes the multifaceted cultural identity of the elite families that will have been the power brokers in Attalid times. The demos of the village of Tynada had honored a certain Attalos son of Philetairos with a statue.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Two brothers named Attalos and Orokendeas, sons of Kralos, erected the statue. The two dynastic names are flanked by two local names, one certainly Anatolian, Orokendeas, which itself combines the Greek “of the mountain” (Oro-) with the common Pisidian name Kendeas. The same mixedness is evident in a family from Antioch itself. A man named Attalos and his wife Tateis erected a monument for a certain Manes son of Opnadeios. In a single family, three onomastic layers are visible: the Greek dynastic name, Anatolian names common in Phrygia (Tateis and Manes), as well as a Pisidian name (Opnadeios).Footnote ²⁴⁷ To the ruling classes of mountain towns in the process of becoming city-states, the Attalids offered an entrée to a shared Mediterranean, in which it was possible to become Greek and still remain Pisidian.

On the island of Delos in 113 BCE, less than a generation after the Bequest of Attalos, we find the arrival of the Pisidians on the trans-Mediterranean stage advertised in a display context redolent of dynastic memory. Six envoys of the “demos of the Pisidians of Prostanna,” perhaps returning from an embassy to the Roman Senate, honored Marcus Antonius, the quaestor of the province of Asia, with a statue.Footnote ²⁴⁸ The Pisidian ethnic identity shines through in the new community’s nomenclature. Here too, the persistence of indigenous names is also striking: five out of six are Anatolian, an impressive ratio after almost a century of urban living, half of that spent under a regime whose cultural politics have often been described as a Hellenizing mission. These ambassadors represented the Pisidians of Prostanna on Delos before Roman power and were already accustomed to the normal Hellenistic exchange of honors. One can only imagine that most nonelite Pisidians retained much more than their old names. Yet the findspot of the statue base points to a genuine affinity with the Attalids. It was a monument for one of Asia’s new Roman rulers, but placed near the stoa known as the Portique du Sud, it inevitably garnered some of the prestige of the province’s former kings.Footnote ²⁴⁹ The stoa on the east side of the southern end of the processional way may very well have been a gift of Attalos I. Multifigure statue groups stood at each end, one starring the Pergamene general Epigenes. The other seems to have commemorated a victory of a mounted Attalos I over Galatians, which, perhaps, even depicted the fearsome barbarians.Footnote ²⁵⁰ In such a context, men like Motoxis and Mistanisthos of Prostanna were perfectly at home. The Attalids had offered their fathers a version of civilization that was not the exclusive possession of Greeks.

In practice, that invitation could have looked much like the unpublished decree from Olbasa, a strange and unexpected recent addition to the dossier of the Nikephoria festival. What is so surprising about this discovery is the off-the-beaten-path location of the find. By contrast, the previously known invitations were addressed to political and cultural elites, powerful city-states such as Kos and likely Iasos, as well as to the Aetolians and the Delphic Amphictiony.Footnote ²⁵¹ The new inscription shows a small, just-hatched city in the Milyas region of western Pisidia following the same standard conventions as the “Greek cities”: receiving a Pergamene sacred embassy, recognizing the refounded festival as crowned games and the sanctuary of Athena Nikephoros as inviolable, and arranging to participate themselves. This is remarkable given the way historians have understood the motivation and the message behind Eumenes II’s 182/1 upgrade of the Nikephoria to penteteric games, in which the musical section was promoted to isopythian status, the athletic and equine to isolympic. In the treatment of Allen, for example, the games became Panhellenic in an “outward sign to the Greek world of [Eumenes’] authority and influence after the Treaty of Apameia.”Footnote ²⁵² For Domenico Musti, the festival instantiated a tripartite vision of Classical Greece: Olympia, Delphi, and Athens – but in second-century Asia.Footnote ²⁵³ To be sure, grandiose Hellenocentric rhetoric was not missing from the fanfare. Famously, the Amphictionic decree is full of it. That text even describes the Pergamene ambassadors talking up the role of the Attalids as solicitous benefactors of “all the Greeks, both singly and according to city.”Footnote ²⁵⁴ However, as Kent Rigsby points out, these arguments appear to have been tailored for Delphi.Footnote ²⁵⁵ They would have made little sense in Pisidia, retailed to a population not yet, or even just now, identifying as Hellenes. After all, the trigger for the reorganization of the festival had been the triumph over Prousias I, Ortiagon, and the Galatians, which the people of Telmessos moved in 184/3 to commemorate with sacrifices to Athena Nikephoros.Footnote ²⁵⁶ That text, again, had celebrated a victory on behalf of all of the inhabitants of Asia. Civilization in Asia, the Lycians of Telmessos claimed, was worth saving. Taken together, this evidence suggests that the ambassadors fanning out from Pergamon to announce the Nikephoria carried a culturally differentiated message. For Olbasa, then, participation in the festival was a means not of becoming Greek, but rather of claiming a share in civilization.

We find the Anatolian content of that message emblazoned on an intriguing coin type minted in the name of Athena Nikephoros, a rare silver tetradrachm (Attic standard) known from just three examples (Fig. 3.9).Footnote ²⁵⁷ A date for the coin floats between the relaunch of the festival in 182/1 and ca. 165, making the coin broadly contemporaneous with the epigraphic dossier and a complementary instrument of ideology.Footnote ²⁵⁸ The image on the coin’s reverse seems to be a cult statue, though an epiphany has also been considered.Footnote ²⁵⁹ In any case, this is not the expected Greek iconography – neither the helmeted profile of Athena of two other series minted in the name of Nikephoros nor the seated goddess of the Philetairoi. Yet another Classical model may have presented itself in the form of the Pheidian knock-off from the presumed Library’s eastern hall: the Parthenos type carried a Nike.Footnote ²⁶⁰ Instead, what this coin depicts is an Anatolian goddess with a number of Greek accoutrements: an aegis, a long peplos, the shield resting on her left leg, and the Nike in her right hand. Instead of the familiar Corinthian or Athenian helmet, the goddess wears a high polos and a long veil. Her pectoral and the manner in which she extends her arms are reminiscent of Artemis of Ephesus. The coin depicts an Anatolian mother goddess, perhaps Meter Basileia, who, on one theory, had been worshipped in Pergamon under the name Athena Polias since the late fourth century.Footnote ²⁶¹ Another parallel worth considering is an image of a syncretized Athena Magarsia on a coin image from Mallos in Smooth Cilicia (Fig. 6.9). It is interesting to compare the two, since the posture of the goddess of Magarsos is so much more upright that scholars have been tempted to see there a chiton and chlamys as Greek textiles draped on an older, wooden Anatolian statue – a cultural intrusion. On our coin, by contrast, it is much harder to pick apart the two traditions. In a more subtle blending of cultures, arms flailing out stiffly in the North Syrian–Anatolian manner, Pergamene Athena Nikephoros strikes the unmistakable pose of the Greek contrapposto. Tellingly, it is not obvious whether we should see in the peculiarly hybrid figure an archaic original or a second-century sculptor’s idea of a traditional Anatolian xoanon.Footnote ²⁶² She confounds our categories.

Figure 6.9 Left: reverse of silver tetradrachm of Demetrios II depicting Athena Magarsia, ca. 145–142 BCE (14.26 g, ANS 1984.116.1; courtesy of the American Numismatic Society); right [from Figure 3.9]: reverse of silver tetradrachm in the name of Athena Nikephoros, reign of Eumenes II, ca. 180–165 BCE.

(16.06 g, BM 1975,0208.1 © The Trustees of the British Museum)

Yet if the coin represents, as has been supposed, the cult-statue from the extramural Nikephorion, the image ought to have been new under Eumenes II.Footnote ²⁶³ Though an earlier mintmark of Lysimachus provided cutters with an in-house model for an Anatolian goddess as an iconic badge for the city of Pergamon, the new image does not entirely reflect the prototype.Footnote ²⁶⁴ This was not quite the archaic Trojan palladion nor the “original” cult statue, which Auge had brought from Arkadia. Such an image may well have existed since the fourth century in the form of an archaizing cult statue housed in the Temple of Athena Polias on the Pergamene acropolis.Footnote ²⁶⁵ Indeed, the visual language for such a statement was available to engravers, as can be seen from a silver tetradrachm of Knidos of the 160s. There, an up-to-date, anthropomorphic Artemis leans on what is clearly her own archaic idol.Footnote ²⁶⁶ Yet in this case, Eumenes made no such distinction between the present and the past. This was the goddess that the king wanted subjects such as the Pisidians of Olbasa to picture presiding over the Nikephoria. The numismatists have queried her origins. Le Rider sees an old Asian deity, coming to the surface in this form; Mørkholm suspects an import, the Cappadocian goddess Ma, riding into town in the 180s with Queen Stratonike.Footnote ²⁶⁷ But perhaps such speculation is misplaced. We have good reason to suppose that the cult of Athena in Attalid Pergamon had always belonged to a multicultural system. The city’s very first temple for her, now credited to the acropolis-building activity of Herakles and Barsine (330–325), bore an unusually late, bilingual Lydian-Greek inscription. In a very prominent position, then, 4 m up on a column of the pronaos of the city’s central temple, a donor named Partaras had explicitly equated the Lydian goddess Malia with Athena.Footnote ²⁶⁸ It seems that Greek and Anatolian elements were present from the beginning in the worship of Athena Polias at Pergamon, just as they had been, for example, in Classical Lycia – the local goddess in Eumenes’ time remained “an Athena who had been denatured.”Footnote ²⁶⁹ Yet by emphasizing Anatolian features in the creation of an imperial Nikephoros, Eumenes code-switched in order to convince elites in places like Olbasa that they belonged. What effects if any this had on popular religion can be doubted. As Robert Parker has argued, Anatolia contained a large “zone of indifference to Athena,” in which, under her name, native goddesses were worshipped with native rites.Footnote ²⁷⁰ But in Pisidian Apollonia, for example, Nikephoros did enter the official civic pantheon, presumably, due to Pergamene influence.Footnote ²⁷¹ Similarly, at Blaundos, a late Hellenistic priest with the telling name of Philetairos Diogenous served a cult of Athena Nikephoros and Homonoia.Footnote ²⁷² The ecumenical quality of this odd tetradrachm is further evidenced by the absence of a legend that tags the cult as the possession of any particular city. That is to say, Athena Nikephoros is not “of the Pergamenes,” the way Apollo Aktaios is “of the Parians” or Apollo Smitheus is “of the Alexandrians.” This is a glaring omission given that the design otherwise matches the almost 40 civic coinages minted ca. 175–140 with portraits of poliad deities – but suitably labeled.Footnote ²⁷³ The collective behind the coin of Eumenes was both Pan-Asian and politically idiosyncratic. It was, in short, the Attalid coalition.

Intervention in Greater Pisidia was costly and fraught with risk. It resulted in military and – in the case of Selge – even diplomatic defeat at Rome. What justified all the effort? On the one hand, there was the need for passage. Important army tracks already ran through the region, the basis of the future Via Sebaste, connecting both Pamphylia and Lykaonia to southern Phrygia. It is significant that in the crucial zones of transition, such as the country of the Orondeis and the Milyas, there is a case to be made for the existence of Attalid settlements. A colony at Neapolis among the Orondeis will have secured passage to Lykaonia and indeed the Kalykadnos Valley of Rough Cilicia. The Milyas was, in Ronald Syme’s description, “A land of long plains and easy transit.”Footnote ²⁷⁴ To control it was to keep the new foundation of Attaleia on the Mediterranean coast connected to the Aegean core of the kingdom. What this meant in practice may become clear as we learn more about the Attalids’ southern port from salvage excavations, such as those recently conducted in a necropolis full of Hellenistic chamber tombs at the site of Antalya’s Doğu Garajı. On the other hand, the goal – or perhaps simply the achievement – was to integrate the region to the kingdom, if not always administratively, by ties of culture. Once again, colonies were not the preferred tool of this empire. Yet the Pergamene imprint here was profound, though these effects must be understood in the broader context of epochal changes in Pisidian society, largely driven from below. The long-term cultural complexity of particular pockets of the region is stunning. The Iron Age artifacts from the Bayındır tumuli in the plain of Elmalı exhibit Phrygian, Lydian, and also East Greek influence. Centuries later, Strabo tells us that four languages were still spoken in the Kibyratis.Footnote ²⁷⁵ Ranged against such diversity and cultural fluidity, an attitude of Hellenic chauvinism would have spelled disaster.

In summary, the shrewd cultural ideology that contributed so much to the Attalids’ success was not simply an antipodal Panhellenism that pitted the Greeks of the polis against everyone else. In short, the Polybian perspective, Eumenes’ special pitch at Delphi or Attalos’ at Athens, is not the full story. The Attalids were capable of playing several games at once. Their own cultural background prepared them for it. They had indeed arrived from the Aegean’s semi-Greek periphery, but they returned to that same Anatolian hinterland in order to build an empire. A scholarly trope labels them parvenus. This invariably means that they lacked Hellenic credentials and, therefore, always stressed their links to Greece. “For Pergamon had no Greek mother-city and no proper past,” writes Stewart.Footnote ²⁷⁶ Yet the sting of parvenu status was just as much a result of their lack of illustrious ancestors in non-Greek or pre-Greek Asia. An anecdote from Strabo describes the Attalids’ crucifixion of the grammarian Daphitas on a mountain near Magnesia-on-the-Maeander. His crime? Poking fun in this distich: “Purpled with stripes, mere filings of the treasure of Lysimachus, ye rule the Lydians and Phrygia.”Footnote ²⁷⁷ The joke turns on the idea that their (modest) pecuniary inheritance did not make them the rightful successors of Alexander, Croesus, and Midas. The reproach responds to the Attalid claim to cis-Tauric Asia, a place full of Greeks, non-Greeks, and many people with multiple, fluctuating identities. These were “the inhabitants of Asia,” by no means a corporate identity, but still an imagined collectivity, personified in the Telmessos decree of 184/3 that praised Eumenes as its savior. Moreover, it may also have been present in the background at Magnesia in 208, in that city’s claim to be “the first of those dwelling (katoikountes) in Asia” to vote for stephanitic games.Footnote ²⁷⁸ The task for Pergamene ideologues was to construct a Pan-Asian collective identity, while deploying the relevant symbols of power across a culturally heterogeneous territory.

To try to tell the more complete story of Pergamon’s cultural politics, it was necessary for the purposes of the analysis to make a dangerously arbitrary distinction between essentialized Greek and Anatolian subjects on the receiving end of the message. Many communities had since Alexander’s arrival sensed the economic and political benefits of presenting themselves as Greek to the outside. Further, in the second century, intensifying Hellenizing tendencies among elites in Galatia and Pisidia further contributed to a shared Greco-Anatolian culture. Yet by picking out the non-Greek elements in the Attalids’ self-presentation, we recover another audience for these theatrics and restore to history those who in many places were the silent majority underneath the Hellenic veneer. People who would never see Athens in their lives saw in Pergamon an Anatolian royal capital; in the Yığma Tepe tumulus, an answer to the taunt of Daphitas.

The risk of essentialism may also have been justified by the need to specify the ideological value of the Library of Pergamon. It was suggested that scholars such as Polemon of Ilion and Demetrios of Skepsis did not simply validate the dynasty’s weak association with Old Greece, but strengthened its claim to rule the Greeks of Asia, in part, by seeking to redress an imbalance of prestige between Hellenic East and West. So-called antiquarian research gave heft to the pretense that the king treasured the traditions of each city under his rule. It also placed Pergamon conveniently within the core of Priam’s ancient kingdom. Finally, we examined the tenets of cultural diplomacy and ideological outreach to two peoples of highland central Anatolia. Indeed, Pergamon was obsessed with imaginary Galatians, but not simply as a barbaric antithesis. Internally, the expulsion of the Galatians from the western lowlands – κάτω Ἀσίας – was the territorial kingdom’s founding creation myth. In truth, along the contested frontier of the Epictetus and nearby at Pessinous, the Attalids transformed local shrines in order to precipitate interactions with real-life Galatians. These flesh-and-blood Galatians were scarcely distinguishable from their Phrygian neighbors. Certain elites among them no doubt asserted Greek identity. The Attalids jockeyed with the Bithynians and the Galatian tetrarchs for their loyalties. The overarching goal was not to pacify a population. In Pisidia, where coercive power was least likely to work against a burgeoning city-state system, a lasting cultural affinity was established. Panhellenism cannot explain the integration of aspirant Pisidians, but as the ritual and symbolism of the refounded Nikephoria imply, a much broader notion of civilization in Asia can.