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ANOTHER CENTURY OF GODS? A RE-EVALUATION OF SELEUCID RULER CULT
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2018
Extract
This paper proposes that living Seleucid kings were recognized as divine by the royal court before the reign of Antiochus III despite lacking an established centralized ruler cult like their fellow kings, the Ptolemies. Owing to the nature of the surviving evidence, we are forced to rely heavily on numismatics to construct a view of Seleucid royal ideology. Regrettably, it seems that up until now much of the numismatic evidence for the divinity of living Seleucid rulers has not been fully considered. I argue that the evidence from silver coinage produced in the name of the Seleucid kings presents a version of the official image of the reigning king and that images which portray the king as divine reflect central acceptance of the king's divinity. This is clear from the epithets on the coinage of Antiochus IV and his successors, but I will argue that the same principle holds for all earlier Seleucid kings. Thus coinage with divine images of Seleucid kings provided one of the mechanisms through which the royal court transmitted the divine nature of the kings to the population. As we will see, in the case of Antiochus Hierax, local considerations also influenced the numismatic representation of the king. This blurring of boundaries between the local veneration of the king, which has long been accepted as normal civic practice in the Greek city-states and in non-Greek temples, and the royal images of the divine king calls into question the strict division between civic and centralized ruler cults. The reflection of local cults within royal ideology can be seen as a manifestation of a negotiating model of Seleucid power that relied heavily on a dialogue with a wide range of interested groups. This article argues that the inconsistencies in the development of an iconography of divine kingship before the reign of Antiochus IV is a manifestation of the same phenomenon.
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- Copyright © The Classical Association 2018
Footnotes
I would like to thank Professors Coşkun, Edwards and Ogden, Dr Hanesworth, Dr McAuley, Catherine Lorber, my father, the reviewers and the editors for CQ for their help and corrections, as well as the audiences in Lampeter, Durham and Exeter who heard early versions of this paper and made many useful suggestions. Special thanks to Catherine Lorber for the provision of the images. All remaining inaccuracies, inconsistencies and errors are, of course, my own.
References
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28 Johnson (n. 21), 54.
29 For example, Berenice, daughter of Ptolemy III, who receives a cult at Canopus but never appears on coinage. For the cult, see OGIS 56 lines 47 and 57, and von Reden (n. 17), 53.
30 See Iossif (n. 3); and Erickson (n. 3) for the argument that Seleucus I's portrait occurs on coinage from Susa during his lifetime.
31 Kroll, J.H., ‘The emergence of ruler portraiture on early Hellenistic coins: the importance of being divine’, in Schultz, P. (ed.), Early Hellenistic Portraiture: Image, Style, Context (Cambridge, 2007), 113–22Google Scholar. The Hellenistic successors who place their own portrait on coinage do so with some other attribute of divinity, for example the bull horns on the coinage of Demetrius and Seleucus I.
32 See, for example, the hymn from Erythrai: I.Erythrai 205 lines 74–5: ὑμνεῖτε ἐπὶ σπονδαῖς Ἀπόλλωνος κυανοπλοκάμου | παῖδα Σέλευκον. ὃν αὐτὸς γείνατο χρυ[σ]ολύρας …; see Klinghardt, M., ‘Prayer formularies for public recitation. Their use and function in ancient religion’, Numen 46 (1999), 1–52, at 9CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Habicht (n. 5), 85 dates the decree to 274, although a date closer to Seleucus’ death is suggested by the recent discovery of the decree from Aegae in Aiolis (Malay, H. and Ricl, M., ‘Two new Hellenistic decrees from Aigai in Aiolis’, Epigraphica Anatolica 42 [2009], 39–47Google Scholar). P.P. Iossif, ‘Apollo Toxotes and the Seleucids: comme un air de famille’, in Iossif, Chanowksi and Lorber (n. 3), 229–91, at 246–7 follows Goukowsky, P., ‘Sur une épigramme de Thespies’, in Dion, J. (ed.), L’épigramme d'antiquité au XVIIe siècle ou du ciseau à la pointe (Paris, 2002), 218–19Google Scholar in translating παῖδα as ‘servant’ rather than ‘son’, and suggests Seleucus II rather than Seleucus I. Both of these scholars seemingly ignore the statement that the god bore Seleucus in the following line. See also OGIS 212 = I.Ilion 31; compare also Habicht (n. 5), 82–3 for the cult in Ilion. See Habicht (n. 5), 90 for the possibly later cult of Seleucus and Antiochus at Lemnos as preserved in Phylarchus.
33 Smith (n. 25), 39 rightly points out that we should not assume that these similarities were necessarily deliberate, nor should we interpret them in the same clearly deifying manner as specific divine attributes. Furthermore, in most cases these portraits for the most part simply represent gods.
34 The use of horns as divine motif seems apparent not only in Greek but also in Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources. Divine figures in Mesopotamian art are often horned and the bull holds specific divine and royal connotations in Egypt: cf. Rice, M., The Power of the Bull (London, 1998), 116Google Scholar. For Seleucus I, in particular, see Hoover (n. 3). In the Greek world horns appear on a limited number of deities, who are mostly associated with water: E.M.M. Aston, ‘Mixanthropoi: animal/human composite deities in Greek religion’ (Diss., University of Exeter, 2007), 347–8; Smith, M.S., ‘Ugaritic studies and Israelite religion: a retrospective view’, Near Eastern Archaeology 65 (2002), 17–29, at 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a more extensive regional view encompassing the ancient (through the medieval) world, see Mellinkoff, R., The Horned Moses in Medieval Art and Thought (Berkeley, 1970), 37–57Google Scholar; Svenson, D., Darstellungen hellenistischer Könige mit Götterattributen (Archäologische Studien 10) (Bern, 1995), 58Google Scholar; Thomas, R., Eine posthume Statuette Ptolemaios’ IV. und ihr historischer Kontext. Zur Götterangleichung hellenistischer Herrscher (Trierer Winckelmannsprogramme 18) (Mainz am Rhein, 2002)Google Scholar. This view goes beyond that of Stewart, A., Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics (Berkeley, 1993), 197Google Scholar: ‘To some Greeks and Romans, paraphernalia of this kind was indeed a visible sign of apotheosis and signified that the ruler was literally a god on earth: theos epiphanēs or deus praesens. To others, it remained on the level of metaphor, continuing to signal that the ruler's power was like that of the divinity whose attribute he wore, but not that he was himself a god, and still less that he merited a formal cult. Yet, when all was said and done, attributes of this kind were special: they were the specific symbols of the Olympians, who were divine. These images oscillate between two worlds, partaking fully of neither, and for the fastidious and the critical their iconic and symbolic aspects continued to contradict each other, defying reconciliation.’
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43 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), no. 364.
44 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 469–72.
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48 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 767–8.
49 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 800–1.
50 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 710, 716, 767, 768, 800, 801.
51 For a comparison with the creation of the cult for Alexander and other early Hellenistic monarchs, see Chaniotis (n. 8 [2003]), 431–7.
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54 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 866–7.
55 Chaniotis (n. 8 [2003]), 433.
56 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), no. 925.
57 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), no. 942.
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63 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 490–2.
64 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 293–4.
65 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), no. 850.
66 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), nos. 871–2.
67 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), no. 874–86.
68 Houghton and Lorber (n. 39), no. 843.
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72 Mittag, P.F., Antiochos IV. Epiphanes: eine politische Biographie (Berlin, 2006), 118–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
73 Iossif and Lorber (n. 12).
74 Houghton, Lorber and Hoover (n. 58): Antioch: nos. 1396–7, 1403–6, 1408–15; Syria: nos. 1435–9; Dura Europos: no. 1434; Seleucia: nos. 1513–15; Ecbatana: no. 1549; Theos: Ecbatana: nos. 1539–42, 1547; Theos Epiphanēs Nikēphoros: Antioch: nos. 1400–1; Ptolemaïs: nos. 1474–6.
75 Muccioli, F., Gli epiteti ufficiali dei re ellenistici (Stuttgart, 2013)Google Scholar now provides the standard analysis of royal epithets. It should be noted that not only epithets that are clearly divine (e.g. Theos) now appear on Seleucid coinage, but also Antiochus V uses the epithet Eupator (Houghton, Lorber and Hoover [n. 58], 128–9) on his coinage. For a contextualization of this phenomenon across the Hellenistic world, see F. de Callataÿ and C. Lorber, ‘The pattern of royal epithets on Hellenistic coinages’, in Iossif, Chanowksi and Lorber (n. 3), 417–56.
76 Habicht (n. 5).
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