More than any other Hellenistic dynasty, the Attalids patronized city gymnasia. A much needed explanation for that curious philanthropic habit is provided, and it is argued that the Pergamenes helped transform the gymnasium into the “second agora” of the post-Classical polis. While the financial instability of the gymnasium and its agglomerative architectural ensemble made it an attractive target for royal donors, the ideological appeal was paramount. In the mid-second century BCE, the gymnasium may have represented itself as “the city writ small,” but this was a fiction, concocted by its elite membership and reinforced by the Attalids, ever anxious to present themselves as champions of the polis without ceding real power to the populace. The social distance of the gymnasium from other polis institutions was the critical factor for the entry of the Attalids, who partnered with towering civic benefactors to remake the space just as the royal capital reformed itself with a gymnasium as the anchor of the new urban plan.

A complete analysis of the fragmentary evidence for the Attalid fiscal system is presented, which aims to reveal those strategies of revenue seeking that were available to the kings after the territorial grant of the Settlement of Apameia. Generally, Pergamon’s direct taxes fell on communities, not landholders. The direct taxation of persons – poll taxes – seems to have been limited. The various forms of indirect taxation on movement, usage, and sale are analyzed, including the agoranomia of Toriaion. The personnel of tax collection in the Attalid kingdom are identified at two levels: the royal bureaucracy and the local tax farmers, who purchased tax contracts from polis authorities. Royal tax farmers as such did not exist. An assessment of taxation levels is offered. What becomes clear are the practical limits and enduring ideological framework within which the post-188 BCE Attalids attempted to expand revenues by deepening the incidence rather than the scope of taxation.

The ramified monetary system of the Attalid kingdom is described and its relationship to other monetary systems of the eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period explained. The character of the cistophoric coinage was neither fully royal nor civic, but should rather be understood as a “coordinated coinage” that required the cooperation of both polis and Attalid authorities. Local monetary needs could dictate the shape of the money supply, as in the signal case of Tralles. The burden and profits of epichoric coinage at regional scale were shared, while the kings ceded symbolic space on the coin types for representations of civic identity. Cooperation can also be glimpsed in countermarks and proxy coinages. Unlike Ptolemaic Egypt, the Attalid kingdom was not a closed currency zone, though the cistophori helped integrate vast new territories. Their reduced weight standard economized on silver, but Pergamene mines existed in Anatolia and should be factored into explanatory models.

Why Pergamon? Our story began with ten Roman commissioners, who in 188 BCE drew up a new map for cis-Tauric Asia after the defeat of Antiochos III at Magnesia-under-Sipylos. That map was an artifact of the Settlement of Apameia. A century-old Mediterranean interstate system had broken down at the end of the third century, and the Romans’ map proposed just two pieces of a new geopolitical order, the partition of the Anatolian peninsula between two allies, Rhodes and Pergamon. The failure of Rhodes to integrate or even retain control over its share along the south coast in Lycia and Caria is emblematic of the fact that enforcement of the settlement fell to the actors on the ground. The Romans withdrew and did not soon return, even as Pan-Anatolian wars between Pontos, Pergamon, Bithynia, and their respective allies embroiled the entire region for a decade. While a cunning and opportunistic diplomacy had helped put the Attalids in a position to win an empire, sovereignty over these vast new territories and peoples was never guaranteed. This was the basic assumption of an inquiry into the mechanics of imperial rule, rapid state formation, and the ideological tendencies of the Pergamene kings. My central argument was that the Attalids creatively employed noncoercive means to capture control of Greek cities and Anatolian rural communities, ultimately, making local civic culture depend on their tax revenues.

The budgetary earmark was a key feature of public finance in the expanded Attalid kingdom and contributed to the success of the Pergamene imperial project. The dynamics and meaning of this administrative technique are thus explored in depth. Earmarking not only increased the quantity of money available to royal bureaucrats; it also made money into a medium for messaging. In a pointedly transparent manner, specific royal taxes and other revenues were earmarked for specific public goods. A series of inscriptions record the neat and final arrangements, but it is possible and even illuminating to reconstruct the entanglements of the process of negotiation by which these earmarks came into existence. The creation of an earmark required an interlocking of royal and civic fiscal institutions that further entrenched Attalid rule. The earmarking process posed ideological risks, as kings delved into the domain of private property and devolved agency to local actors, while also providing an arena for the display of providential care (pronoia) for royal subjects.

An overview of the settlements of the Attalid kingdom is presented, and the impact of the Attalid state on rural Anatolia is assessed. In a countryside dominated by small-scale communities, villages, and towns, Pergamene officials interfaced with a wide variety of civic organizations. Unlike the other Hellenistic dynasties, the Attalids rarely undertook coercion-intensive urbanization projects or forced synoicism. Rather, the Attalids tended to leave communities in place and culturally autonomous, instead focusing their efforts on shaping the body politic and improving fiscal legibility by opportunistically fostering civic institutions of any type. As a result, soldier-settler towns with the status of katoikia ascended to polis-like prominence. Their representatives gained access to royal interlocuters without trading an indigenous Anatolian identity for the trappings of the Greek city, while the Attalids gained a host of new subjects in the countryside, including the emergent Mysians. Surgical interventions in the countryside after 188 BCE shored up select towns like Toriaion and Olbasa with polis institutions and territories.

Terentia was born around 98 bc and reportedly died aged 103, in ad 5 or 6.1 From her name, she must have come from an old and respectable family called the Terentii; one branch, the Terentii Varrones, traced itself back to a consul of 216 bc.2 The identity of her mother and father are not known, though her mother must have married twice as Terentia had a half-sister, Fabia (whose father must have been a Fabius), who was a Vestal Virgin. Terentia is best known by her male connection – she was the wife of the lawyer, philosopher, and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 bc) – it is impossible to write about her without also writing about him. The couple lived in the dangerous years of the twilight of the Roman Republic and were at the very heart of the conflicts and rivalries that tore it apart. This was the era when powerful Roman warlords were already emerging to challenge the status quo, of civil war, of Sulla, Pompey the Great, and the rise of Julius Caesar.

Once upon a time there was an Egyptian man, a priest, by the name of Wenamun.1 Wenamun was sent by his lord Herihor to fetch wood from Lebanon to build a sacred boat for the god Amon-Ra. Sailing north with his captain Mengebet, he landed at Dor and was entertained by Beder, its prince. His good fortune soon changed and after a series of misadventures, including being robbed by his own crew and attacking a ship belonging to the local Tjeker people of Dor to replace his lost wealth, he ended up at Byblos. Here prince Tjekerbaal felled the trees to provide Wenamun with the timber he wanted. Soon the Tjeker that Wenamun had robbed caught up with him. The prince of Byblos would not arrest Wenamun but instead asked him to depart so that the Tjeker could catch him at sea themselves. However, the wind blew him off course all the way to a coastal town on the island of Alashiya (Cyprus). The story continues thus, in Wenamun’s voice:

Eutychis’ name appears in a graffito on the entrance to the House of the Vettii at Pompeii, the ancient Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in August ad 79, along with a price; it reads: ‘Eutychis, a Greek lass with sweet ways, 2 asses’ (Figure 25).1 On the face of it, it looks like an advert for sex – a calling card for a female prostitute of Greek origin to attract, presumably, male punters.2 Over 11,000 inscriptions have been found at Pompeii and this one is not by any means the only one referencing sex and the sex industry.3 The sex trade was a normal part of the hustle and bustle of many ancient cities. More than 100 female prostitutes are known by name from Pompeii; ‘prostitutes were’, explains Robert Knapp, ‘quite literally, everywhere’.4

The Amazons are one of the best-known peoples of antiquity – though long thought to be mythical. They appear in book three of the Iliad, from the later eighth or seventh century bc, where they are given the epithet ‘a match for men’; the word ‘Amazon’ is still used to refer to fierce or powerful women. The Amazons were warrior women who legend had it would cut off a breast to enable them to better use their bows – the fifth-century bc Greek historian Hellanikos thought ‘Amazon’ could be read etymologically as ‘a’, ‘without’, ‘mazos’, ‘breasts’ (mastos in Greek).1 Others thought it could be read as without ‘barley’, ‘maza’, and referred to the fact that Amazons did not farm in the way that civilised settled people would. In Airs, Waters, Places, the physician Hippocrates recorded that Sarmatian women burnt the right breast of their baby girls to divert power into their right arms – making them stronger fighters. Such myths about these exotic women in a society where ‘proper’ gendered roles were reversed abounded amongst the Greeks and Romans, Amazon specialist Adrienne Mayor tells us. An alternative and possibly more likely origin for the name comes from old Iranian ‘ha-mazon’ – ‘warriors’. But it may be fruitless to search for meaning in the name – what would a future etymologist make of ‘American’?

Arranged marriages have been commonplace through history and, according to Kennon Rider and Ann Swallow, are still the norm for around half the population of the world.1 They can take several forms, for example, when parents and family select one or more potential marriage candidates, but the child can make a choice between them or refuse a particular individual. An arranged marriage can also be a forced marriage, in which one or both parties are given no choice in their marriage partner. In western culture, arranged marriages tend to be viewed negatively now because a cultural emphasis is placed on romantic love as the main factor in making a ‘proper’ or successful marriage; arranged marriages have, from a western perspective, been seen as primitive and inherently unhappy.2 However, ‘successful’ or at least enduring marriages are more common in arranged marriage cultures, although this may be due to the difficulty and stigma of divorce; love may also develop in arranged marriages and is not unimportant. Marriage in these terms can sometimes be thought of as a partnership and a joint project to be worked on. It can be a way of building and cementing alliances between individuals and families, controlling property and wealth, and of producing legitimate children.