The Hellenistic Court: Monarchic Power and Elite Society from Alexander to Cleopatra

Andrew Erskine · Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones · Shane Wallace

Dis 2017 · Classical Press of Wales

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Hellenistic courts were centres of monarchic power, social prestige and high culture in the kingdoms that emerged after the death of Alexander. They were places of refinement, learning and luxury, and also of corruption, rivalry and murder. Surrounded by courtiers of varying loyalty, Hellenistic royal families played roles in a theatre of spectacle and ceremony. Architecture, art, ritual and scholarship were deployed to defend the existence of their dynasties. The present volume, from a team of international experts, examines royal methods and ideologies. It treats the courts of the Ptolemies, Seleucids, Attalids, Antigonids and of lesser dynasties. It also explores the influence, on Greek-speaking courts, of non- Greek culture, of Achaemenid and other Near Eastern royal institutions. It studies the careers of courtesans, concubines and 'friends' of royalty, and the intellectual, ceremonial, and artistic world of the Greek monarchies. The work demonstrates the complexity and motivations of Hellenistic royal civilisation, of courts which governed the transmission of Greek culture to the wider Mediterranean world - and to later ages.

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Andrew Erskine is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Hellenistic Stoa: Political Thought and Action; Troy between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power and Roman Imperialism. Edited books include A Companion to the Hellenistic World and (with Lloyd Llewellyn- Jones) Creating a Hellenistic World. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University. He is the author of Aphrodite's Tortoise: The Veiled Woman of Ancient Greece; King and Court in Ancient Persia, Ctesias' Persica: Tales of the Orient, The Culture of Animals in Antiquity and Designs on the Past: How Hollywood Created the Ancient World. Forthcoming publications include Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther: The Visual World of Achaemenid Iran. Shane Wallace is Walsh Family Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on the history and epigraphy of the early Hellenistic period. He is currently completing a book entitled The Politics of Freedom: Kings and Cities in the Early Hellenistic Period'.