Attalid Kingdom · History Explorer

Overview

Rulers: Founderr. 282–263 BC
Philetaerus
Peak-era rulerr. 197–159 BC
Eumenes II
Last rulerr. 138–133 BC
Attalus III
282 BCReigns on the polity’s span133 BC
Capitals: PergamonΠέργαμονfrom 282 BC
How it ended: Gradual absorption133 BCAllen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
Languages of administration: Greek
Writing system: Greek
Core region: Western Asia Minor, from the Troad to Pamphylia after 188

How it was governed

4 of 4 coded

Army raised byHow the fighting force was recruited, not how it fought.: mercenaryHired for pay, with no standing obligation either way
land grantService in return for assigned revenue — iqta', timar, jagir
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
Revenue fromWhat the state lived on. The values are unranked: the field cannot express which mattered most.: land taxTax on agricultural production and land
tributeRevenue received from another polity
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
Succession byThe rule in force, not the outcome. A rule repeatedly violated is still the rule.: nominationA designated heir
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
Right to rule fromThe ground publicly asserted — on coins, in the khutba, in titles.: descentDescent from a house or lineage, publicly invoked
conquestThe right of the sword, asserted as such
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)

Each line is drawn from a source that addresses the question directly. A line reads No cited figure where no source consulted does — never because the answer seemed obvious.

Turning points

4 hinges

238 BC
The GalatiansBattle
Attalus I refused the tribute the Galatians had been extracting from the cities of Asia Minor, beat them, and took the royal title on the strength of it — the first Attalid to call himself king, in a dynasty that had been running Pergamon for forty-four years without doing so. It set the kingdom's public argument for the rest of its life and produced the sculpture the argument is remembered through.
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
190 BC
MagnesiaBattle
Eumenes II brought the Pergamene forces to the Roman side against Antiochus III and commanded the right wing that decided the battle. It removed Seleucid power from Asia Minor permanently — the Seleucids themselves date their own decline from here — and it made a middling kingdom into the Roman republic's indispensable ally in the east.
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
188 BC
ApameaTreaty
The settlement after Magnesia handed the Attalids most of Seleucid Asia Minor: Phrygia, Lydia, Mysia, Lycaonia, Pisidia and the Chersonese, more than tripling the kingdom. Every acre of it was a Roman gift, and the forty-five years that follow are a demonstration of what that means. When Eumenes II was suspected of dealing with Perseus of Macedon in the 160s, Rome simply began cultivating his brother, and the senate refused to receive him.
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)
133 BC
Attalus III's willTreaty
Dying childless, Attalus III bequeathed his kingdom to the Roman people, and the senate accepted it - a transfer with no good word for what it was: not a conquest, not a fragmentation, not a dynastic replacement and not an absorption. Aristonicus, claiming to be an illegitimate son of Eumenes II, took the name Eumenes III and held the interior for four years, but he was a pretender rather than a successor: the kingdom had already ended at the reading of a document, before his war against Rome ever began.
Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983)

Chapters

8 in order · about 17 minutes

formationThe treasurer
expansionEnough and to spare
peak ·3A gift and a leash
contractionNo king was to visit Rome
endThe will
afterlifeTwo hundred thousand volumes

These chapters cover the whole arc. A phase with no chapter is not a gap: the arc is a way of reading, not a shape every polity had.

What the phases mean

formation: How it came to exist
expansion: While it was still taking
peak: At its greatest extent or reach
contraction: Losing what it had held
end: How it stopped
afterlife: What outlasted it
aside: Outside the arc altogether: one object, document or institution rather than a stretch of the polity’s existence

The treasurer

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

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.

A marble portrait bust on a squared herm shaft against a dark blue ground: a heavy-jawed man with a thick neck, fleshy cheeks, short wavy hair and a slight frown, turned a little to one side. — Philetaerus, in a Roman copy of a Greek original. The herm is inscribed, which makes it the one secure likeness of him — and it shows a treasurer rather than a conqueror.

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.

An Attalid tetradrachm. Every king of the house went on striking Philetaerus's head for a century and a half, so a coin issued by Eumenes or Attalus still shows the man who kept the money.

Münzkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin · Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983) · Photograph: Reinhard Saczewski · Public domain

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.

A marble figure of a naked wounded man propped on one arm on his shield, head bowed, hair in thick stiffened locks, a heavy twisted torc around his neck and a sword lying beside him. — The Dying Gaul — a Roman marble copy of a bronze the Attalids set up at Pergamon. The torc and the stiffened hair are how a Greek sculptor signalled that the man on the ground was not Greek.

A marble group of a standing man driving a blade down into his own collarbone while supporting with his other hand a woman collapsing at his side. — The same dedication's other figure, also in Roman copy: a Gaul killing his wife and then himself rather than be taken. The dynasty paid for sculpture that made its enemies formidable, because that is what made the victory worth a crown.

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.

A deeply carved marble frieze of a helmeted goddess striding right and dragging a winged giant by the hair, a winged victory flying in at one side, and a woman's head and shoulders rising out of the ground below. — Athena dragging the giant Alkyoneus, with the earth herself rising to beg for him. Gods against giants, put up by a dynasty whose whole claim was that it stood between Greek Asia and what lay beyond it.

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.

A wide flight of marble steps rising between projecting wings into a colonnade, with a carved frieze running along the podium on either side, set up inside a museum hall. — The Great Altar as it stands in Berlin, excavated from 1878 and rebuilt there in the 1880s. The marble is Pergamene; the staircase a reader sees is a nineteenth-century reconstruction inside a twentieth-century building.

Enough and to spare

expansionDrafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)

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.

A rocky headland above a blue sea carrying a walled acropolis, with a line of re-erected columns standing along a terrace inside medieval curtain walls. — Lindos on Rhodes. The Rhodians did not want a large Attalid kingdom opposite them and said so to the Senate, arguing it in Eumenes' own interest. The visible walls are the later Knights' work.

A colour historical atlas plate of Asia Minor with territories washed in different tints, the Taurus range marked and city names printed across the interior. — Asia Minor after the settlement, as an atlas of 1923 reconstructs it. The tints are a modern reading of a list read out in a room at Rome, not a frontier anyone surveyed.

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.

A temple platform with two tall Ionic columns still standing and a wide field of fallen drums and bases around them, an acropolis ridge rising behind. — Sardis in Lydia, one of the names on the list. Not one of the provinces assigned that afternoon had been taken by an Attalid army.

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

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

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.

Antiochus III, whose left wing Eumenes broke at Magnesia. Unlike the Attalid coinage this carries the reigning king's own face, and the empire behind it never recovered from that afternoon.

Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

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.

A tetradrachm of Eumenes II — and the head on it is Philetaerus, dead eighty years. The kingdom at its greatest extent was still putting the treasurer's face on its money.

Cabinet des Médailles, Bibliothèque nationale de France · Allen, The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History (1983) · Bibliothèque nationale de France · Public domain

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.

A tall marble slab carrying several closely spaced paragraphs of Greek capitals cut in regular lines, displayed against a plain museum wall. — Letters of the last two Attalid kings, cut on stone at Pergamon. Cities were handled by negotiated grant and correspondence rather than by decree, and this is what that administration looks like when it survives.

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.

An extremely steep fan of stone seating cut into a hillside, dropping away to a long narrow terrace below, with hills receding into haze beyond. — The theatre on the Pergamon acropolis, the steepest in the ancient world and part of the building programme the Roman subsidy paid for. The brothers who built it did not kill each other, which among Hellenistic dynasties is close to unique.

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

peakDrafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)

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.

A large inscribed marble block in a museum case, carrying a single line of deeply cut monumental Greek capitals across its face. — Monumental Greek on a block from Priene in Ionia. This is the register a city and a king dealt in — and what the commissioners changed was not the assessment but the name of who collected it.

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.

A colonnaded street running downhill between column stumps and re-erected fragments, almost empty of people, in low raking light. — Ephesus, photographed in 1992. It appears twice on the commissioners' list — given back its sacred district, and assigned to Eumenes. The standing remains are Roman and later.

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.

A wide panorama of a steep hilltop carrying terraces of ruined masonry at several levels, with a valley and further hills stretching away behind. — The acropolis at Pergamon. Everything the dynasty held at this moment it held because ten Romans had written it down, and where the boundary ran was a matter for their interpretation.

The library

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

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.

Low foundation walls of squared grey blocks enclosing a rectangular room on a terrace, dry grass and scattered blocks over the floor, scaffolding visible at the top of the slope behind. — The room on the Pergamon acropolis traditionally identified as the library. The identification is an inference from the plan rather than anything found in it, and the foundations are all that stands.

An engraved excavation plate showing a measured ground plan of a colonnade with a row of rooms behind it, and beneath it a cross-section through the same structure, hatched and dimensioned. — The excavators' plan and section of the same range, published in 1885. This is why the room is read as a library: the size and arrangement fit nothing else on the terrace.

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.

A colossal draped female marble figure, head and upper body intact, the peplos falling in deep vertical folds, standing in gallery lighting. — The Athena that stood in the library room, herself a Hellenistic copy of Pheidias's statue at Athens. A dynasty proving it was the patron of Greek learning put a copy of Athens in the 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.

A broad papyrus sheet with ragged edges and visible fibres, carrying two columns of Greek written in a practised book hand. — Homer on papyrus, second century AD. Pergamon and Alexandria argued about the text of poems that circulated like this, and the habit of recording that two copies disagree begins in that argument.

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

contractionDrafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)

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.

A fresco of a tiered semicircle of seated men in white robes in a classical hall, with one figure sitting alone on a bench apart from the rest and another standing to address them. — The Roman Senate as a painter of about 1880 imagined it, semicircular seating and all — a convention rather than a record. What it published in 167 was a general rule about kings that applied to one king.

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.

A tall marble column with a carved capital standing at the head of a flight of steps above harbour water, the stump of a second column beside it and town buildings behind. — The harbour at Brundisium, where the Appian Way ends. A quaestor came down here to read the decree to a king who had already landed, and ask whether he wanted anything. The columns are Roman imperial and later than the scene.

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

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

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.

A manuscript page with a painted plant — root, stem and leaves — set beside several lines of Greek text. — A page from an illuminated Greek herbal. The hostile tradition has the last Attalid neglecting government for gardening, metalwork and poisonous plants; the inscriptions show an administration working 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 single coin face filling the frame: two snakes entwined around a bow-case, with a small thunderbolt and other devices in the field. — A cistophorus struck in Lydia during the rising of Aristonicus, who claimed to be a son of Eumenes II and took the name Eumenes III. It carries no portrait, and no likeness of him exists.

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.

The two faces of a silver coin: a lidded basket with a snake emerging from under the half-open lid, and two snakes entwined around a bow-case. — The same coinage struck at Pergamon in 85 BC, by then under a Roman commander. The kingdom ended at the reading of a document, and the money carried on unchanged with a different authority behind it.

Two hundred thousand volumes

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

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.

Antony and Cleopatra on one denarius, struck in 34 BC. Two years later his will was read aloud in Rome, and the library of Pergamon entered the record as an allegation about a gift to her.

Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Photograph: Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

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.

A large theatre seen from the top of its seating, the tiers dropping away to a stage building, with a straight colonnaded street running from it towards a plain. — The theatre at Ephesus. Among the charges read out against Antony was that he had let the Ephesians salute her as their queen — filed in the same list as rubbing her feet at dinner.

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.

A marble statue of a man in an ornamented cuirass and draped cloak, standing barefoot with his right arm raised and extended. — The man who read the will out. What the Attalids finally left was the province of Asia — the richest in the empire, and the one whose tax-farming contracts did most to corrupt Roman politics.

Succession

What led here

282 BCAttalid Kingdomseceded fromthe kingdom of Lysimachus
Lysimachus, one of Alexander's officers, held Thrace and western Asia Minor and kept a war chest of nine thousand talents in the fortress of Pergamum under an officer named Philetaerus. In 282 Philetaerus went over to Seleucus, taking the fortress and the money with him, and Lysimachus was dead within a year. The kingdom did not survive its founder; the treasurer's family did, and built a state on what had been in the vault.

Attalid Kingdom

282–133 BC

What led away

133 BCRoman Empireabsorbed remnants ofAttalid Kingdom
Attalus III died childless and left his kingdom to the Roman people in his will. Aristonicus claimed the throne as Eumenes III and held much of it until 129, after which Rome organised the province of Asia.

Contemporaries

30 overlapping

The shaded band is this polity’s span; the dark part of each bar is the stretch the two shared.

The 12 that overlapped longest, in date order.

Show the remaining 14

Possibly, depending on which dates you accept

The shaded band is this polity’s span; the dark part of each bar is the stretch the two shared.

Derived from cited spans, not from a separate source. Where both spans are ranges and they meet only on the widest reading of each, the pair is listed as possible rather than resolved to one answer. Unlinked entries are here for scale and are not written up.

Extent

The historical-basemaps snapshots are world maps at fixed years, and none of the ones falling inside this polity's lifetime names it among the polities it draws.

Four axes, all computed from cited numbers and never from editorial judgement. Percentiles are against every polity written up here — 419 of them — plus 49 more included for scale. Absolute figures. A missing axis is excluded from the total rather than counted as zero.

Reach

No cited figure

Longevity

149 years

37th percentile

Demographic weight