Passages From Antiquity to Feudalism - Perry Anderson World History Series

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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, pp. 274–300; there is an analytic survey of the various forms of labour usage in Lagid Egypt in K. K. Zel’in, M. K. Trofimova, Formy Zavisimosti v Vostochnom Sredizemnomor’e Ellenisticheskovo Perioda, Moscow 1969, pp. 57–102.

      8. Rostovtsev, The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Vol. II, pp. 806, 1106, 1158, 1161. Slaves were also widely employed in the royal mines and industries of Pergamum. Rostovtsev thought that there continued to be an abundance of slaves in the Greek homelands themselves during the Hellenistic epoch (op. cit., pp. 625–6, 1127).

      9. Alexander’s own cosmopolitanism has often been exaggerated, on slender evidence; for an effective critique of the claims made for it, see E. Badian, ‘Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind’, in G. T. Griffith, Alexander the Great: the Main Problems, Cambridge 1966, pp. 287–306.

      10. Iranians may have outnumbered Greeks and Macedonians in the Seleucid State institutions, in fact; C. Bradford Welles, Alexander and the Hellenistic World, Toronto 1970, p. 87.

      11. P. Petit, La Civilisation Hellénistique, Paris 1962, p. 9; V. Ehrenburg, The Greek State, pp. 214–17.

      12. The syncretism of the Hellenistic States scarcely warrants the dithyrambs of Heichelheim, for whom they represent ‘miracles of economic and administrative organization’ whose unconscionable destruction by a barbarian Rome arrested history for the next millennium and a half. See An Ancient Economic History, Vol. III, pp. 185–6, 206–7. Rostovtsev is somewhat more temperate, but he too ventured the judgment that Roman conquest of the Eastern Mediterranean was a regrettable disaster which disintegrated and ‘de-hellenized’ it, while ‘unnaturally’ compromising the integrity of Roman civilization itself: The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World, Vol. II, pp. 70–3. The remote ancestry of such attitudes goes back, of course, as far as Winckelmann and the Graecian cult of the German Enlightenment, when they were of some intellectual importance.

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       Rome

      The rise of Rome marked a new cycle of urban–imperial expansion, which represented not just a geographical shift in the centre of gravity of the Ancient world to Italy, but a socio-economic development of the mode of production which had been pioneered in Greece that rendered possible a far greater and more lasting dynamism than that which had produced the Hellenistic epoch. The early growth of the Roman Republic followed the normal course of any ascendant classical city-state: local wars with rival cities, annexation of land, subjection of

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