The Hellenistic Monarchies

Alexander the Great and his main successors changed the Mediterranean World in the course of two centuries, their realms extending from the Adriatic to the Indus and from the Black Sea to Ethiopia. No aspect of the Hellenistic era has drawn more attention in recent decades than the monarchies that dominated its political, social, cultural, and economic life. Earlier generations of scholars believed that the Hellenistic period fostered its own peculiar style of autocracy, one that proved influential for centuries to come. More recently this view has been challenged, on the grounds of the heterogeneity of the regimes that the Hellenistic world produced.

Christian Habicht's work reflects this intellectual transition. The Hellenistic Monarchies is a collection of essays on Alexander the Great and the powerful rulers that followed him, including the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Seleucids of Asia, the Antigonids of Macedonia and Greece, and the Attalids of Pergamum. Habicht presents his latest research on the reign of these distinct monarchies, focusing particularly on their relations with each other and their interactions with the Greek cities inside their domain.

Making use of the latest epigraphical evidence from newly found inscriptions, this volume of new, newly translated, and republished selections documents the elements of government among the major Hellenistic monarchies, including sections on the important monarchies controlled by the Ptolemies and their contemporaries and concluding with a postscript by the author on the four decades of his work in this area.

Christian Habicht is Professor Emeritus, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, and author of Pausanias' Guide to Ancient Greece. He has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Greek and Latin Epigraphy.

Peregrine Stevenson was born in Ireland in 1958. He studied Modern Languages and Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, and Linguistics at Cambridge