Attalid Kingdom

The treasurer

Drafted from Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)formation

Philetaerus was a eunuch, of obscure and probably Paphlagonian origin, and he was the officer Lysimachus left in charge of the fortress of Pergamon with nine thousand talents of treasure in it.

In 282 BC he changed sides. Lysimachus was destroyed the following year at Corupedium and Philetaerus kept the money, spent the next twenty years spending it carefully — subsidising cities, dedicating at Delphi and Delos, paying for walls at Cyzicus, buying the body of Seleucus for burial from the man who had murdered him — and handed a going concern to his nephew.

States get founded on rebellions, conquests, migrations and revelations. This one was founded on a treasury somebody did not give back.

Forty-four years without a crown

What the Attalids did with the money is instructive about what money can and cannot buy in the third century.

They did not take the royal title for forty-four years. Philetaerus, his nephew Eumenes I, and Eumenes's cousin Attalus all governed Pergamon as dynasts without calling themselves kings, and in a world where Antigonids, Seleucids and Ptolemies were all wearing diadems that restraint was a policy. A diadem is a claim to be somebody's equal, and until about 238 the Attalids were not.

What changed it was the Galatians. Bands of the same Gallic migration that had killed a Macedonian king in 279 — and whose defeat, on the Antigonid record entered alongside this one, is how that dynasty got its throne — had settled in central Anatolia and were extracting protection payments from the Greek cities of the west. The Attalids had been paying. Attalus I stopped paying, beat them, and took the diadem and the cult title Soter on the strength of it.

Two kingdoms, thirty-nine years apart, both founded on the same enemy. In the third-century Aegean world, beating Galatians was how a man who was not a king became one.

The argument in marble

The dynasty then spent a century and a half making the point. The Gallic dedications at Pergamon and the copies at Athens produced the sculpture the kingdom is remembered by — the Dying Gaul, the Gaul killing his wife and himself — and the Great Altar's gigantomachy frieze puts the same argument in myth: gods against giants, civilisation against the formless thing beyond it.

So the claim was a victory rather than an ancestry. Everything about Attalid self-presentation says: we stand between Greek Asia and the barbarians, and that is why we are kings.

It was a good argument and it had one weakness. By the time the sculpture was finished, the thing standing between Greek Asia and anybody was Rome.

Enough and to spare

Drafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)expansion

The Attalid kingdom doubled in a room in Rome, and the argument that doubled it was made by somebody else's ambassadors.

Antiochus III had been beaten at Magnesia in 190 and the Senate had to decide what to do with western Asia Minor. Eumenes II had fought on the Roman side and wanted the cities. The Rhodians, who did not want a large Attalid kingdom on their doorstep, argued that the Greek cities of Asia should be free — and argued it, cleverly, as being in Eumenes' interest too.

Polybius gives their case, and its central image is the one worth keeping. There was no need to choose between rewarding a loyal friend and honouring Rome's own proclamation of Greek freedom, because there was plenty for everybody: as in a costly banquet, there was enough and to spare for all. Lycaonia, Hellespontine Phrygia, Pisidia, the Chersonese and the districts round it were all at Rome's disposal to give away. A few of them added to Eumenes' kingdom would double its present extent. All of them, or most, would make it second to no other in Asia.

What Rome thought it was buying

The Rhodians then told the Senate what its own motives were, and Polybius — a Greek writing for Greeks about Roman power, from inside Roman custody — records the flattery without comment.

Other nations went to war to seize cities, wealth or ships. Heaven had arranged that Rome should need none of those, having already put everything under its rule. What Rome still had to want was praise and glory among mankind, which is hard to win and hardest to keep. Look at the war with Philip: Rome had declared it was fought to liberate Greece, that was the only prize it took, and the glory of it was worth more than the Carthaginian indemnity. Money is common to all mankind. Honour is not.

That is the argument a Greek state made to the Roman Senate about how the Senate should dispose of Asia, and the striking thing is that it half worked and half did not.

The list

The settlement commissioners restored the Phocaeans their ancestral city. They gave the Rhodians Lycia and Caria as far as the Maeander, except Telmissus.

And to Eumenes, over and above what the treaty with Antiochus had already allowed him, they assigned the Chersonese, Lysimacheia and the border castles, everything Antiochus had held in Europe, and in Asia: Hellespontine Phrygia, Great Phrygia, as much of Mysia as he had already taken, Lycaonia, Milyas, Lydia, Tralles, Ephesus and Telmissus.

Pamphylia was disputed — Eumenes said it lay on the near side of the Taurus, the Syrian ambassadors said the far side — and the commissioners, unable to decide, referred it back to the Senate.

What kind of empire this is

A kingdom founded on a treasury stolen from Lysimachus had, in one afternoon of someone else's deliberations, become the largest power in Asia Minor.

Not one of those provinces was taken by an Attalid army. They were assigned, from a list, by commissioners, on the strength of loyalty in a war fought mainly by somebody else — and the same body that assigned them could, and would, un-assign them. Eumenes had exactly as much kingdom as Rome currently thought he should have.

He had twenty years to enjoy it.

A gift and a leash

Drafted from Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)peak

At Magnesia in 190 BC Eumenes II commanded the right wing of the Roman army that destroyed Antiochus III, and it was his charge that broke the Seleucid left. The Seleucid empire never recovered from that afternoon.

The settlement two years later at Apamea handed the Attalids most of Seleucid Asia Minor — Phrygia, Lydia, Mysia, Lycaonia, Pisidia, the Chersonese — and turned a city-state with a hinterland into the largest kingdom in Anatolia. The dynasty's peak, by any measure, is a Roman gift.

What a gift is

Allen's constitutional history is built from inscriptions rather than from narrative sources, and the picture that comes out of it is of a state that governed its new territory competently: royal land let to tenants, cities handled through negotiated grants and letters rather than by decree, a working bureaucracy, a considerable building programme, the library.

What it could not do was act independently, and the demonstration came within twenty years. In the 160s Rome suspected Eumenes II of dealing with Perseus of Macedon during the Third Macedonian War — the war the Antigonid record beside this one ends in. Nothing was proved. Rome did not accuse him, invade him or depose him. It began cultivating his younger brother Attalus, encouraged the Galatians against him, and when Eumenes travelled to Italy to explain himself the senate passed a resolution that no king should be received at Rome, and he was turned back at Brundisium.

A kingdom that exists because of a treaty can be reduced by a procedural decision. That is the whole content of Attalid foreign policy after 188, and it is why the record's second and third turning points are a battle Rome won and a treaty Rome wrote.

The brothers

The one thing about this dynasty that everybody remarks on is that its family did not kill each other, which among Hellenistic dynasties is close to unique.

When Eumenes II was ambushed near Delphi in 172 and reported dead, Attalus took the diadem and married the queen. Eumenes turned out to be alive. Attalus gave both back. He later ruled twenty-one years as king and regent for his nephew, Attalus III, and handed over at the end of it.

The rule, such as it was, was designation inside the family, and it was honoured five times running. Set that against the Ptolemies, whose dynastic history is largely a list of who murdered whom, or against the Hasmoneans, who ended in a civil war between two brothers who both invited Rome in, and the Attalids look less like a dynasty than like a firm.

Which may be what a state founded by a eunuch on somebody else's treasury was always going to be. The succession had to be designed rather than assumed from the beginning, and once a family has designed one it appears to be able to keep using it.

What the commissioners did

Drafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)peak

The settlement of Apamea is usually summarised as Rome giving Asia Minor to Pergamon. Polybius was close enough to the Roman senate to describe what the ten commissioners actually did in the room, and the detail is more instructive than the summary.

They began with the cities, and they sorted them by conduct. Autonomous cities that had paid tribute to Antiochus and stayed loyal to Rome were relieved of tribute altogether. Cities that had been paying tribute to Attalus were ordered to go on paying the same tribute to his successor Eumenes. And cities that had abandoned the Roman friendship and joined Antiochus were ordered to pay Eumenes the amount of tribute Antiochus had imposed on them.

That third clause is the whole system. A city that backed the losing side did not have its tribute cancelled or increased; it had the payee changed. The Seleucid assessment was kept, the Seleucid collector was replaced by an Attalid one, and the penalty for disloyalty to Rome was to fund Rome's friend at the rate the enemy had set.

Then the rewards, individually. Colophon, Notium, Cyme and Mylae freed from tribute. Clazomenae given the island of Drymussa as well. Ephesus given back the sacred district it had been made to evacuate. Chios, Smyrna and Erythrae given whatever territory each of them had asked for at the time and claimed was theirs by right, on account of the loyalty and zeal they had shown during the war. Phocaea restored to its ancestral city and its old land. Rhodes given Lycia and Caria as far as the Maeander, except Telmessus.

And then Eumenes, who was not content with what the treaty with Antiochus had already given him. The commissioners added the Chersonese, Lysimacheia and the forts on those borders, and everything Antiochus had held in Europe; and in Asia, Hellespontine Phrygia, Great Phrygia, as much of Mysia as he had previously subdued, Lycaonia, Milyas, Lydia, Tralles, Ephesus and Telmessus.

Polybius then records the detail that says most about the new kingdom. Over Pamphylia there was a dispute, and Eumenes argued the case himself — his contention being that Pamphylia lay on this side of the Taurus, and therefore inside the zone the treaty had assigned to him rather than to Antiochus.

A king who has just been handed the largest territory in Anatolia is standing in front of a Roman commission arguing about which side of a mountain range a province is on, because the commission is the only body that can decide it. That is the Attalid position exactly, at the moment of its greatest extent: everything the dynasty now held it held because ten Romans had written it down, and the boundaries of it were a matter for their interpretation rather than his.

The library

Drafted from Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)peak

Pergamon's library was the second of the Hellenistic world and the only serious rival to Alexandria's, which is to say it was the second of two. The figure usually repeated for it is two hundred thousand rolls, and it comes from an allegation made in Rome a century after the kingdom ended.

The two libraries are the clearest case in this region of what Hellenistic monarchy was for. Neither the Ptolemies nor the Attalids were Greek in any sense their subjects would have recognised as central; both spent enormous sums establishing that they were the patrons of Greek learning; and the competition between them over books, scholars and editions of Homer is a proxy war about legitimacy conducted in a reading room.

Parchment

The famous story is Pliny's. The Ptolemies, alarmed at the rival collection, embargoed the export of papyrus; Pergamon, unable to get writing material, was forced to develop treated animal skin; and the material took its name from the city — charta pergamena, and so parchment, pergamena, pergamino, Pergament.

The story is almost certainly not true in the form Pliny tells it. Skins had been written on in the Near East for centuries before the Attalids existed — the Persian chancery was issuing Aramaic documents on leather long before. What Pergamon plausibly did was improve the preparation enough to make a superior product, at a moment when a rival's supply was constrained.

What the library did instead

It produced Crates of Mallos and a school of Homeric scholarship that argued with Alexandria for a century. It produced the practice of comparing manuscripts and noting variants — the habit of recording that different copies disagree, which is the beginning of textual criticism. And its holdings, wherever they physically ended up, went into the stream that became the classical canon.

None of that is measurable. A small Anatolian kingdom that spent a Roman subsidy on scholars leaves no territory, no descendants and no successor state, and the only reason anybody knows what its library was worth is that the books outlived the argument about who owned them.

No king was to visit Rome

Drafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)contraction

In the winter of 167 Eumenes II sailed for Italy to put his case to the Senate, and the Senate went to some trouble to avoid hearing it.

Rome had cooled on him. He was suspected of having played both sides during the war with Perseus, and the senators were, in Polybius's words, thoroughly incensed with him and entirely fixed in their sentiments. What they were not willing to do was say so.

The difficulty was one of their own making. They had proclaimed to all the world that this king was their foremost and most esteemed friend. If they now admitted him and let him plead, they had two options and disliked both. Answer honestly, and they advertised their own folly in having singled such a man out for special honour. Answer politely, and they betrayed the truth and their own interests.

So they found a third way. On the general ground that they disliked visits from kings, they published a decree that no king was to visit Rome.

The quaestor at Brundisium

Then they learned that Eumenes had already landed at Brundisium, and sent a quaestor down to read him the decree — with instructions to ask whether he wanted anything from the Senate, and if not, to tell him to leave Italy as soon as possible.

Polybius records the whole of the king's reply. He understood perfectly what was being done to him, said not one word beyond that he wanted nothing, and went home.

What the decree was for

It was not a snub for its own sake, and Polybius says so plainly: the Senate's object was to humiliate him in every possible way.

At that moment the Gauls were making war on his kingdom. The visible repulse did exactly what it was designed to do — his allies were greatly depressed, and the Gauls were doubly encouraged to press the war.

And there is a final detail that makes the year legible. Every city, prince and king in the Greek world had sent an embassy to congratulate Rome on the victory at Pydna, and to all of them the Senate returned a gracious and friendly answer. It was a general rule about kings, and it applied to one king.

The shape of the reign after it

The Attalid kingdom had been assembled twenty years earlier out of territory Rome assigned to Eumenes because he was useful. It was never conquered and never lost a decisive battle. What happened to it instead was that the power which had given it the territory stopped wanting it to be large, and began — without a war, without a treaty and without ever putting anything in writing beyond a decree about royal visitors — arranging for it to be less so.

Eumenes reigned another eight years. His brother succeeded him and governed carefully. And his brother's son, twenty-five years after the quaestor came down to Brundisium, wrote a will leaving the kingdom to the Roman people.

The will

Drafted from Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)end

Attalus III reigned five years, had no children, and died in 133 BC leaving a will in which he bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman people.

The ancient sources are unkind to him — Justin has him neglecting government for gardening, metalwork and poisonous plants, murdering his relatives, and going about in mourning — and modern accounts are more cautious, because the man who inherits a kingdom nobody else wants and hands it to the only power capable of holding it is not obviously mad. The inscriptions show a functioning administration to the end.

What is not in doubt is the document. The senate accepted it. Aristonicus, claiming to be an illegitimate son of Eumenes II, took the dynastic name Eumenes III and raised much of the interior; Rome fought him for four years, killed him in Rome in 129, and organised the province of Asia.

A value the list does not have, and no request to add one

There is no good word for what happened. A kingdom transferred by testamentary bequest is not a conquest, not a fragmentation, not a dynastic replacement and not an absorption. The war against Aristonicus was a war against a pretender: the kingdom had already ended, at the reading of a document, before it started.

Aristonicus

Aristonicus claimed to be an illegitimate son of Eumenes II. He took the dynastic name, struck coins as Eumenes III, and held a substantial part of the interior for four years against a Roman army — and later sources have him promising freedom to slaves and calling his followers Heliopolitai, citizens of the city of the sun, which has attracted a good deal of speculation about a utopian programme that the evidence will not really carry.

What he was doing is worth naming precisely, because it is not what a successor does. A successor says: I inherit the legitimacy of the house that was here. A pretender says: I am the house. Aristonicus made the second claim, at the moment of the dynasty's extinction, and it failed — he was taken to Rome and killed there in 129.

Nothing afterwards claimed descent from the Attalids or invoked them. The kingdom that had spent a century and a half arguing in marble that it was the defender of Greek Asia left no one at all who wanted to be its heir, because what it had to leave was a province, and Rome already had it.

Two hundred thousand volumes

Drafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)afterlife

The most famous thing that ever happened to the library of Pergamum is a story told in Rome, by a political operative, as part of a campaign to destroy a man's reputation — and the biographer who preserves it says in the next paragraph that the teller invented most of what he alleged.

It is worth setting out properly, because the Attalid afterlife is largely a matter of what other people did with Attalid property and said about it.

Calvisius reads out the charges

In 32 BC, with the break between Octavian and Antony now open, Octavian obtained Antony's will and read it publicly to the Senate. Many people were scandalised — by the reading, not the will — thinking it neither reasonable nor decent to call a man to account for what would not happen until after his death.

Then a dependent of Octavian's named Calvisius brought forward further charges about Antony and Cleopatra, and Plutarch lists them in order. That Antony had given her the library of Pergamum, containing two hundred thousand distinct volumes. That at a great banquet, in front of many guests, he had got up and rubbed her feet, to settle some wager. That he had let the Ephesians salute her as their queen. That at public audiences of kings and princes he took amorous notes written on tablets of onyx and crystal and read them out from the tribunal. That when a Roman of great authority was pleading a case, Cleopatra passed by in her chair and Antony walked out in the middle of the argument to escort her home.

Calvisius, however, was looked upon as the inventor of most of these stories.

What that leaves

So the transfer of the Pergamene library to Alexandria — one of the best-known facts about ancient libraries — enters the record as item one on a list whose other items are foot-rubbing and love notes, produced by a partisan in a propaganda war, and flagged by Plutarch himself as probably fabricated.

Which does not make it false. It makes it unverified, and it makes the reason anybody repeats it worth noticing: the story was useful because everyone believed the Attalid library was the kind of thing a Roman might give away to please a foreign queen. That belief is itself the Attalid legacy. The kingdom had spent a century and a half making Pergamum the intellectual rival of Alexandria — the parchment, the collection, the sculpture, the argument that the Attalids were the defenders of Greek civilisation in Asia — and by the 30s BC its library was a byword: a possession so celebrated that alleging its misappropriation could be part of an indictment.

The rest of the estate

The kingdom itself had gone the same way, by testament rather than by conquest. Attalus III left it to the Roman people in 133, Rome accepted, and after suppressing the rising of Aristonicus made it the province of Asia — which became the richest and most systematically exploited province in the empire, and the one whose tax-farming contracts did more than anything else to corrupt Roman politics in the following century.

That is a strange thing for a kingdom to leave behind. Not a successor, not a claim, not a dynasty in exile: a revenue stream, and a story about a library.