In the unique milieu of the Hellenistic world the court and the army were perhaps the two most prominent loci of power in which the fates of empires, dynasties and peoples were decided. But amidst abundant scholarship on both institutions there remains a tendency towards compartmentalisation: the army, unsurprisingly, is analysed while at war through a mechanical approach emphasising equipment, structure and tactics; the court, for its part, is treated as a political arena of per-sonal competition for prestige and influence through largely pacific means. In other words, a sharp divide tends to be drawn between ‘the political’ on the one hand and ‘the military’ on the other. Scholarship of the Roman Republic has long over-come this divide with an underlying awareness of the intrinsic connection between these spheres of influence and the dynamic interplay between military and political affairs. The domestic battlefield of aristocratic competition shaped, and in turn was shaped by, the campaigns waged against Rome's foreign and domestic enemies; success or failure in one field determined success or failure in the other. The study of the Hellenistic world has come to this realisation only more recently, thanks in no small part to Angelos Chaniotis’ 2005 War in the Hellenistic World, which treated its topic not through the lens of kit or strategy but through that of society and culture. Despite a recent revival of interest in the enigmatic Seleucid Dynasty, however, the old dichotomy of military and political, of the army and the court, continues to persist: the mechanics of the former have been thoroughly studied since the 1970s with Bezalel Bar-Kochva's pioneering study of the Seleucid army, and the past two decades have produced abundant research on the latter, notably thanks to Laurent Capdetrey's 2007 study of Seleucid administration and Rolf Strootman's 2014 mon-ograph Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic Empires.

In the context of the present volume, the figure of the Seleucid general provides us with an ideal unit of analysis with which to straddle the traditional dichotomy between ‘the political’ and ‘the military’. Particularly in the early generations of the dynasty, the military and political structures of the empire were intertwined to the point of being inseparable.