This monograph, a revised version of V.'s doctoral thesis, is a welcome contribution to recent scholarly work on the Seleucid empire and Hellenistic literature beyond Ptolemaic Alexandria. V. charts the contours of a distinctive ‘Seleucid literature’ with its own priorities and unearths a competitive relationship with the literature and ideology of other Hellenistic powers: especially the Ptolemies, but also the Attalids, the Antigonids and the Romans. V. is indebted to much excellent recent work on the Seleucids (especially that of J. Haubold, P. Kosmin, D. Ogden, A. Primo and K. Stevens), but she builds on their findings to develop a fresh, dynamic and convincing account of Hellenistic political and cultural rivalry.
After a clear and accessible introduction V.'s project is divided into four chapters that focus on key moments in Seleucid literature and history, ranging from Seleucus I to Antiochus III.
The first, ‘Mapping the Realm’, explores the strategies employed by three early Seleucid writers (Patrocles, Demodamas and Megasthenes) to ‘extend, define, and defend Seleucid imperial space’ (p. 25). V. expands the conclusions of Kosmin's The Land of the Elephant Kings (2014) by arguing that these writers were not just interested in consolidating and delimiting borders, but also in constructing an image of world dominion. In addition, she convincingly highlights their focus on the economics of empire (such as trade routes and taxable, exploitable land) and Megasthenes’ attempts to assert control over the vast unconquered space of India through precise measurement. To close the chapter, V. explores later Alexandrian attempts to supersede the Seleucid geographers: in particular, she shows how Eratosthenes’ Geographica simultaneously asserted Ptolemaic primacy and deconstructed the Seleucids’ notion of transcendental world rule.
The second chapter studies literature about and from Babylon, including both Greek and Akkadian texts: Berossus’ Babyloniaca, alongside the Borsippa Cylinder, Astronomical Diaries and Babylonian Chronicles. V. demonstrates how these various texts reflect the imperial discourse of euergetism (in Berossus, through the model of Nebuchadnezzar), as well as the importance of Babylon as a city for consolidating and preserving power. One particularly striking feature is the strong presence of the queen and the royal family in all these sources, even in the Akkadian texts, which seems to reflect a broader Hellenistic concern with dynastic stability (pp. 86–7, 92–3, 96–7). V. again ends the chapter by broadening her gaze to Alexandria, tentatively tracking a possible intertextual sequence of interdynastic rivalries: Hecataeus’ Aegyptiaca – Berossus’ Babyloniaca – Manetho's Aegyptiaca.
While Ptolemaic Alexandria appears as an epilogue in the first two chapters, it takes centre stage in the third, the most original and significant of the book. V. detects an underlying anti-Seleucid polemic in Callimachus’ poetry, especially the Lock of Berenice. She argues that the loving royal couple of Ptolemy III and Berenice II (a latter-day Odysseus and Penelope) serves as an implicit foil for the Seleucid marital dissolution that prompted the Third Syrian War – a political mess which, as she shows, was at odds with the Seleucids’ own ideal of royal romance. In addition, she contends that Callimachus casts the Seleucids as the heirs of the ‘barbaric’ Persians, echoing and reinforcing broader Ptolemaic rhetoric as found in the Adulis inscription and elsewhere. What strengthens V.'s case is the poem's direct connection with the events of the Third Syrian War: as the Lock celebrates Ptolemy's victorious return home, it simultaneously denigrates and ‘others’ his opponents. Yet even more strikingly, V. also detects this same anti-Seleucid stance in Callimachus’ most influential programmatic passages: the Aetia prologue and the epilogue of the Hymn to Apollo. In so doing, she decisively demonstrates how interlinked metapoetics and politics are for Callimachus. Even in his most metaliterary moments the Alexandrian poet is engaged in broader geopolitical and interdynastic disputes far beyond the ‘birdcage of the Muses’.
In the final chapter we jump ahead to the renaissance of literary production at the court of Antiochus III, with studies of Simonides of Magnesia, Euphorion of Chalcis and Hegesianax of Alexandria Troas. V. situates Simonides of Magnesia's retrospective epic celebration of Antiochus I's ‘elephant victory’ over the Galatians within the context of the Seleucids’ and the Attalids’ conflicting claims on Asia Minor. Euphorion emerges from V.'s analysis as a poeta doctus with distinctive Seleucid interests: he offers the earliest known treatment of myths about Seleucus I, focuses on eastern places and personalities, and establishes ties between the East and mainland Greece. Geopolitics comes to the fore again in Hegesianax' Troica, which, V. argues, aimed to assert Seleucid control over not only the Troad but also the history of Rome (with striking deviations from mainstream Roman narratives: Aeneas died at Thrace, and ‘Romos’, not ‘Romulus’, founded Rome). The book then ends with a short conclusion summarising V.'s main arguments.
As this overview demonstrates, V.'s book is full of many rich and stimulating ideas that reframe how we conceptualise Hellenistic literature. V. is at her strongest when exploring how Seleucid court literature both responded to and contributed to broader rivalries between major players of the Hellenistic stage. Nevertheless, at times I would have liked her to tease out a little more from her evidence: for example, how does Euphorion's geopoetics (pp. 182–4) relate to Eratosthenes’ ideologically driven geography (pp. 65–70)? And what should we make of the fact that Hecataeus’ programmatic statement in the Aegyptiaca seems to employ some of the same euergetic language as V. identified in Berossus (φιλοτίμως, pp. 98, 113)? In addition, I wonder whether V. could have gone further in interrogating the very notion of ‘Alexandrian aesthetics’ when calling Euphorion ‘characteristically “Alexandrian”’ (p. 177; cf. pp. 8, 188 etc.); as for the ‘Seleucid’ Euphorion, I missed mention of his possible connection with the aetion of Apamea-on-the-Orontes in pseudo-Oppian's Cynegetica (2.100–58: see A. Hollis, ZPE 102 [1994]; the article is listed in the bibliography, but not cited anywhere).
One broader concern centres on V.'s handling of sources: as she acknowledges, most of the relevant texts for this study are extremely fragmentary or only preserved in summaries and excerpts by later authors. She observes at the outset that she has limited space for ‘source criticism’ (p. 9), but at times her explorations could have benefited from a little more explicit consideration of the issues involved: ‘likely’ and ‘seem’ frequently do too much work (e.g. pp. 39, 41), and we are assured that a passage ‘is almost certainly taken from Patrocles’ without any further supporting argument (p. 36). Perhaps most precarious is V.'s handling of Callimachus’ Coma Berenices via Catullus’ later ‘translation’ (Carmen 66). V. recognises the difficulties inherent in treating Catullus’ creative adaptation as a template for Callimachus’ original, and she promises to take Catullus’ version as a guide to the meaning and not the exact words of Callimachus’ text (p. 123 n. 24). But at times, the two poems are unhelpfully collapsed into each other: for example, Callimachus’ Lock is introduced as ‘a poem of around 100 lines’ (p. 120 n. 6), although we only have around 40 lines of the Greek version extant (many extremely fragmentary). This slippage does not invalidate V.'s fine reading in Chapter 3, but a little more care would have been advisable.
More generally, the thesis-origins of the book are visible in a number of citation-dump footnotes that do not provide much guidance for readers. I was also disorientated by several unconventional bibliographic practices: the listing of bibliography from newest to oldest and the consistent inclusion of full page-ranges when citing an entire article in a note, causing clutter and confusion. The volume could have also benefited from better proofreading and copy-editing to reduce an unfortunate number of typographical errors and corrigenda: for example, ‘H.-G. Nesselrath’ has replaced ‘P. Parsons’ as the second editor of Supplementum Hellenisticum (p. xii).
Nevertheless, despite these quibbles, this is an important book, of great value for Hellenistic historians and literary scholars alike. V.'s study enriches our understanding of Ptolemaic as much as Seleucid literature and encourages us to rethink the scope, intent and impact of Hellenistic literature.
