In comparison with the poleis, the Hellenistic kingdoms in Greek eyes embodied two new principles in the organization of a state: they were territorial states comprising the areas of several cities and peoples, and they were monarchies. The territories were to a lesser or higher degree patchworks of cities, regions, and ethnic groups, often with diverse political and juridical statuses. They were held together by the person of the king. The monarchies thus lent these states their raison d’etre, for without the kings they would disintegrate. The authority with which the king ruled was not offered to him in any form “from below,”
But rested on the simple right of the conqueror. The Macedonians and Greeks spoke of “with the spear acquired” land and meant by this that the sovereignty over the lands in western Asia and Egypt had fallen to the victor: to Alexander the Great at first, and then to the diadochoi, his successor. In this view, all authority flowed automatically from the conqueror-king downward, and all inhabitants of his lands were by definition his subjects, part of the booty that had been won by his victory or the victory of his forbears. Greek political theoreticians could declare, therefore, that all legislation in these kingdoms was purely a matter of the royal will, for the king was “the law incarnate” and lower functionaries derived their authority from him. This, however, was the political theory. In practice, the Antigonids and the Seleucids especially had to reckon with all sorts of existing power centers and were often forced to cede considerable independent powers to their satraps and governors. In fact, these kings lacked the bureaucracy and the apparatus of a state that would enable them to rule as the absolute monarchs that they claimed to be. Greek cities within their realms retained much of their internal autonomy; temple-states in Asia Minor and elsewhere, such as in Judea around the temple at Jerusalem, were practically small autonomous states within the boundaries of the great Seleucid kingdom. Egypt, in contrast, was much more homogeneous; the regulation of economic life from above was deeply rooted there, so that the Ptolemies could build on pre-existing traditions. They succeeded in creating the most extensive and for the peasant population the most repressive bureaucracy in antiquity.
The central position of the Hellenistic kings also explains the phenomenon of the ruler cult. It was mainly a Greek notion, this official identification of the ruling king with a godhead. In the Greek cities, this cult initially was a largely spontaneous expression of gratitude for the benefits granted by the monarch; that was, so to say, the religious part of it. The political part was added a little later. After his return to Babylon in 324 BC and shortly before his death, Alexander had ordered the cities in the Greek motherland to officially pay him divine honors. It made his position nearly unassailable and gave him an authority above any other secular power. Such an official cult of the living ruler thereafter became normal in the kingdoms of the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, and later in Pergamon. Political calculation thus certainly played a role in this, for the divinization of the kings was part of the propaganda aimed at making the rule of these monarchs acceptable to their Greco-Macedonian and Hellenized subjects (what the native Egyptian and Asian populations thought of it mattered less).
World History
