East. Contrary to popular legend, the Alexandrine campaigns had not been accompanied by mass enslavements, and the proportion of the slave population does not seem to have risen appreciably in the path of Macedonian conquests.6 Agrarian relations of production were consequently left relatively unaffected by Greek rule. The traditional agricultural systems of the great riverine cultures of the Near East had combined landlords, dependent tenants and peasant proprietors with ultimate or immediate royal property of the soil. Rural slavery had never been economically very important. Regal claims to a monopoly of land were centuries old. The new Hellenistic States inherited this pattern, quite alien to that of the Greek homelands, and preserved it with little alteration. The main variations between them concerned the degree to which royal property over the land was actually enforced by the dynasties of each realm. The Lagid State in Egypt – the wealthiest and most rigidly centralized of the new monarchies – exacted its claims to a legal monopoly of land, outside the boundaries of the few poleis, to the full. The Lagid rulers leased out virtually all land in small plots on short-term leases to a miserable peasantry, rack-rented directly by the State, without any security of tenure and subject to forced labour for irrigation works.7 The Seleucid dynasty in Mesopotamia and Syria, which presided over a much larger and more rambling territorial complex, never attempted such a rigorous control of agrarian exploitation. Royal lands were granted to nobles or administrators in the provinces, and autonomous villages of peasant proprietors were tolerated, side by side with the dependent laoi tenants who formed the bulk of the rural population. Significantly, it was only in Attalid Pergamum, the most westerly of the new Hellenistic States, which lay immediately across the Aegean from Greece itself, that agricultural slave-labour was used on royal and aristocratic estates.8 The geographical limits of the mode of production pioneered in classical Greece were those of the adjacent regions of Asia Minor.
If the towns were Greek in model, while the countryside remained Oriental in pattern, the structure of the States which integrated the two was inevitably syncretic, a mixture of Hellenic and Asian forms in which the secular legacy of the latter was unmistakeably predominant. The Hellenistic rulers inherited the overwhelmingly autocratic traditions of the riverine civilizations of the Near East. The Diadochi monarchs enjoyed unlimited personal power, as had their Oriental predecessors before them. Indeed, the new Greek dynasties introduced an ideological surcharge on the pre-existent weight of royal authority in the region, with the establishment of officially decreed worship of rulers. The divinity of kings had never been a doctrine of the Persian Empire which Alexander had overthrown: it was a Macedonian innovation, first instituted by Ptolemy in Egypt, where age-long cult of the Pharaohs had existed prior to Persian absorption, and which therefore naturally provided fecund soil for ruler-worship. The divinization of monarchs soon became a general ideological norm throughout the Hellenistic world. The typical administrative mould of the new royal States revealed a similar development – a fundamentally Oriental structure refined by Greek improvements. The leading military and civilian personnel of the State were recruited from Macedonian or Greek emigrants, and their descendants. There was no attempt to achieve an ethnic fusion with the indigenous aristocracies of the type that Alexander had briefly envisaged.9 A considerable bureaucracy – the imperial instrument that classical Greece had so completely lacked, was created, often with ambitious administrative tasks allocated to it – above all in Lagid Egypt, where management of much of the whole rural and urban economy devolved on it. The Seleucid realm was always more loosely integrated, and its administration comprised a larger proportion of non-Greeks than the Attalid or Lagid bureaucracies:10 it was also more military in character, as befitted its far-flung extent, by contrast with the scribal functionaries of Pergamum or Egypt. But in all these States, the existence of centralized royal bureaucracies was accompanied by the absence of any developed legal systems to stabilize or universalize their functions. No impersonal law could emerge where the arbitrary will of the ruler was the sole source of all public decisions. Hellenistic administration in the Near East never achieved unitary legal codes, merely improvizing with coexistent systems of Greek and local provenance, all subject to the personal interference of the monarch.11 By the same token, the bureaucratic machinery of the State was itself condemned to a formless and random summit of the ‘king’s friends’, the shifting group of courtiers and commanders who made up the immediate entourage of the ruler. The ultimate amorphousness of Hellenistic state-systems was reflected in their lack of any territorial appellations: they were simply the lands of the dynasty that exploited them, which provided their only designation.
In these conditions, there could be no question of genuine political independence for the cities of the Hellenistic East: the days of the classical polis were now long past. The municipal liberties of the Greek cities of the East were not negligible, compared with the despotic outer framework into which they were inserted. But these new foundations were lodged in an environment very dissimilar to that of their homelands, and consequently never acquired the autonomy or vitality of their originals. The countryside below and the State above them formed a milieu which checked their dynamic and adapted them to the secular ways of the region. Their fate is perhaps best exemplified by Alexandria, which became the new maritime capital of Lagid Egypt, and within a few generations the greatest and most flourishing Greek city in the Ancient World: the economic and intellectual pivot of the Eastern Mediterranean. But the wealth and culture of Alexandria under its Ptolemaic rulers was gained at a price. No free citizenry could emerge amidst a countryside peopled by dependent peasant laoi, or a kingdom dominated by an omnipresent royal bureaucracy. Even in the city itself, financial and industrial activities – once the domain of metics in classical Athens – were not correspondingly released by the disappearance of the old polis structure. For most of the main urban manufactures – oil, textiles, papyrus, or beer – were royal monopolies. Taxes were farmed to private entrepreneurs, but tinder strict State control. The characteristic conceptual polarization of liberty and slavery, which had defined the cities of the classical Greek epoch, was thus fundamentally absent from Alexandria. Suggestively, the Lagid capital was simultaneously the scene of the most fecund episode in the history of Ancient technology: the Alexandrine Museum was the progenitor of most of the few significant innovations of the classical world, and its pensionary Ctesibius one of the rare notable inventors of Antiquity. But even here, the main royal motive in founding the Museum and promoting its research, was the quest for military and engineering improvements, not economic or labour-saving devices, and most of its work reflected this characteristic emphasis. The Hellenistic Empires – eclectic compounds of Greek and Oriental forms – extended the space of the urban civilization of classical Antiquity by diluting its substance, but by the same token they were unable to surmount its indigenous limits.12 From 200 B.C. onwards, Roman imperial power was advancing eastwards at their expense, and by the middle of the 2nd century its legions had trampled down all serious barriers of resistance in the East. Symbolically, Pergamum was the first Hellenistic realm to be incorporated into the new Roman Empire, when its last Attalid ruler disposed of it in his will as a personal bequest to the Eternal City.
1. N. G. L. Hammond, A History of Greece to 322 B.C., Oxford 1959, pp. 535–6.
2. The income yielded by the Thracian gold mines was greater than that of the Laureion silver mines in Attica; Arnaldo Momigliano, Filippo Il Macedone, Florence 1934, pp. 49–53 – the most lucid study of the early phase of Macedonian expansion, which in general has attracted comparatively little modern research.
3. The majority of the new cities were created from below, by the local land-owners; but the largest and most important were, of course, official foundations of the new Macedonian rulers. A. H. M. Jones, The Greek City from Alexander to Justinian, Oxford 1940, pp. 27–50.
4. For the contrast between Lagid and Seleucid policies, see M. Rostovtsev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Oxford 1941, Vol. I, pp. 476 ff.
5. F. M. Heichelheim, An Ancient Economic History, Leyden 1970, Vol. III, p.10.
6. Westermann, The Slave Systems of Greek and Roman Antiquity, pp. 28–31.
7. For descriptions of this system, see Rostovtsev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Vol. I,
