Hannibal could not go to Ptolemaic Egypt or Antigonid Macedon. That left the Seleucids. But their preference for Greco-Macedonian employees meant Hannibal would never be fully accepted: Antiochus listened to Hannibal’s advice without taking it wholeheartedly. Hannibal’s Tyrian agent Ariston, sent to Carthage in Antiochus’ interest, failed. A Roman mission to Antiochus tried to turn him against Hannibal, who reassured Antiochus by recalling his childhood oath. Rome’s decision for war is explained: cooperation in Greece between Antiochus and the Aetolians, disaffected Roman allies. Hannibal’s role, and court intrigues against him, are traced. Antiochus lost on land at Thermopylae (Greece); his fleet under Hannibal was no match for Rome’s experienced allies the Rhodians. The Romans won at Magnesia, commanded by Lucius Scipio with Publius as adviser. Publius as Salian priest was delayed, then missed the battle through illness. He too gave Antiochus (cryptic) advice. Hannibal and Scipio are compared as advisers.

This chapter looks at what the author calls a “system of visual communication” in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. It focuses on “portrait concepts,” which refers to the double process of inventing an ideological image of the king’s public body, on the one hand, and maintaining the conventions of particular visual media, the interests of the composer, and the expectations of the recipients, on the other. The portrait concept thus encapsulates communication and exchange before it reaches the viewer’s eyes. Von den Hoff identifies three different periods in terms of their visual systems of communication. Between 323 and 280 BCE, during the Wars of Succession, there was close entanglement between Ptolemaic and Seleucid portrait concepts. They drifted apart in the subsequent period (280–160) due to dynamically changing local challenges. In the final period (160/40 to c. 100), there was a renaissance of earlier types of portraiture. The author’s emphasis on imperial entanglement in the first period, diversification in the second, and historicizing endeavors in the final period raises questions about the local background to which the visual representation of the kings responded.

This chapter explores the foundation of poleis beyond the capital cities, as well as the alteration and renaming of settlements as marks of imperialism. Rather than presenting an exhaustive survey, the authors emphasize the methodological issues faced by historians of identifying and assessing new settlements – Mairs by focusing on the historiography and archaeology of the early Seleucid Far East, and Fischer-Bovet by offering a typology of Ptolemaic settlements. Seleucid settlements in Bactria can only be understood as a continuation of Alexander’s settlement policy. Their strong military character shows the early Seleucid interest in Central Asia and is not representative of the empire as a whole. The Ptolemaic empire was also connected through a network of either new or transformed settlements, whose variety was adapted to each region and actively shaped by local populations. The existing urban and administrative networks, moreover, did not create the need for new poleis – and complementary explanation to the question raised by Clancier and Gorre in the same volume – but the new and altered settlements reflect the Ptolemaic strategy of combining Greek and Egyptian elements.

This chapter compares different temporal regimes developed by the Seleucids and Ptolemies. Kosmin suggests that the Seleucids created a new “historical field” when Seleucus proclaimed a new epoch of Babylonian history and called the year of his conquest of Babylon year 1. The Babylonian historian and priest Berossus, despite writing a history of pre-Seleucid Babylonia, situated himself in the new world of the Seleucids. Yet in Egypt the Ptolemies continued reckoning with traditional regnal years, showing their subordination to traditional uses of historical time. But there were changes, too. Greek regnal years started with the anniversary of the king’s accession, oaths were sworn by the divinized royal members and Demotic dating formulae used the eponymous priests of the royal cult. All this established the Ptolemaic dynasty as a unit and a method of structuring time in its own way. Manetho and Berossus took over dynastic history, creating thirty dynasties up to the Macedonian conquest. The Ptolemies created a neue Zeit, but the Seleucids were more revolutionary. In both empires the local elites and populations participated in shaping the new politics of time.

This chapter focuses on Babylon and Egypt and offers a systematic comparison of the role of the local elites in the temple administration within the Seleucid and Ptolemaic governmental structures. While in both regions temples were the “centers of public life” before the Macedonian conquest, the traditional religious role of the king offered to the Ptolemies in Egyptian temples granted them a unique position that was not paralleled by the Seleucids in Babylonia. Moreover, the authors emphasize that the temple’s elite were representative of the local elite in Egypt, but that it was not the case in Babylonia. Therefore, these different traditions, notably the conception of the Egyptian king as a high priest superior to all the other priests, may explain why the administrative functions of the temples in Egypt, as well as the priestly elites, were largely integrated into the state structures of power, and why this did not happen in Babylonia. There, Seleucid kings could not play this role through the existing temple institutions and instead founded poleis as tools of governance of local communities.