In the vast territories Alexander conquered, subsequently carved out into kingdoms by his royal Macedonian successors, old cities were reorganized to varying degrees along Greek lines, and entirely new cities were built. In Greece, the majority of cities continued in use with minor alterations, notably in personalized monumentality for ruler propaganda, and also to take account of major advances in siege warfare, but there were also new cities to reflect the grand schemes of Hellenistic dynasts (such as Demetrias and Halos in Thessaly, and Thessaloniki in Macedonia). The traditional royal residence at Aegai was replanned on a vast scale (Figure 14.1) to suit the rapid rise to Aegean dominance of the Macedonian state, whilst an entirely new capital was constructed by Archelaos ca. 400 BC in a more accessible position near the sea at Pella in the plain ofWestern Macedonia (Figure 13.3). The formal geometric grid-planning of these new towns was not new however, as we have seen from earlier periods.
In a small settlement-chamber on the Gulf of Volos in Thessaly there had arisen in the Archaic era a typical network of small towns. These were abruptly closed down at the end of the fourth century when the Antigonid dynasty decided to create a strategic
Figure 13.3 Pella: palace/acropolis to north, agora center, and wealthy mansions to its south. M. Lilimpaki-Akamati and I. M. Akamatis (eds.), Pella and Its Environs. Athens 2004, Figure 8.
Fortified city in North-Central Greece, Demetrias, as a base for the Macedonian fleet and as a second residence after northern Pella (Marzolff 1999). The giant proportions of the “megalopolis,” some 440 ha, were filled by forced migration into it from surrounding urban centers, hence by later Hellenistic times almost no surrounding settlements are recorded.
The fate of existing towns or new towns arising in late Classical to Hellenistic times was dependent both on earlier regional development trajectories (Bintliff 1997) and the favor or disfavor of the new powers of the Aegean, the monarchies and city leagues. Messene, for example, was founded as a giant new town with the freeing by Thebes of Messenia from Spartan domination in the early fourth century. Both town and country took off after centuries of repression, the city becoming highly ornamented with monuments gifted by local Hellenistic elites and later Roman patrons.
Alexander founded a series of cities to memorialize his reputation and consolidate a core Greek colonial presence throughout his vast empire, a custom continued by his successor rulers based in the Aegean and Asia. Additionally, in Hellenistic times cities everywhere became the focus of pronounced advertising for the great princes of the East Mediterranean and their leading wealthy supporters in each provincial city, who now held the key power, since the Successor Kings favored oligarchic rule. This contrasts with the major Classical building programs, which had been paid for by the city, the rich being allowed to gain public approbation by partfunding festivals, public monuments or warships. Those theaters and stadia which were still of earth and wood, could be recast in expensive cut-stone with architectural and sculptural embellishments at the cost of kings and dominant urban elites. The small, ambitious breakaway Pergamon kingdom in Western Anatolia fancied itself as a second Athens: to underline the comparison its kings embellished their own city with remarkable buildings but also decorated Athens with flashy monuments in eye-catching places. Eumenes II constructed a giant stoa along the southern slopes of the Acropolis in the early second century BC, whilst later in the same century Attalus II built the great stoa on the east side of the Agora (now reconstructed).
Older, Classical monuments of the Aegean cities were not immune from the new power politics and its local interventions emanating from the great Hellenistic rulers. Thus when in 306 BC Demetrios Poliorcetes drove out of Athens his rival Cassander’s puppet-ruler Demetrios of Phaleron, the Athenians showed no self-respect in their gratitude (Hurwit 1999). Poliorcetes and his father Antigonus were deified and awarded royal status while gold portraits were voted for public display. According to the ancient sources, as if Poliorcetes wished to degrade Athens yet further, he gained approval to occupy the west room of the Parthenon where he held orgies with his mistresses, deploying the temple plate for his dinner parties.
Despite the real subordination of almost all Aegean states to the great dynastic powers, cities continued to busy themselves with their internal affairs and tried to ensure their future by seeking the most promising patrons amongst the rival kings. Stone inscriptions thus remain very common amongst Hellenistic cities. With the help of external patrons and rich citizens these towns were often more splendid than in Classical times, adding in the second to first centuries BC innovative features such as arched gateways and colonnaded avenues to the uniform grid-plan favored in new or replanned infrastructures. But local investment in religious architecture, more vital to self-identity than the display-pavilions of foreign potentates, shows a widespread decline across the Hellenistic era (Shipley 2005). A vigorous growth area however was in the building of gymnasia, now usually in town centers than as previously on urban peripheries: with political activity marginal, wealthier citizens cultivated traditional civic identity in athletic and general body-culture, associated with higher education and anachronistic military exercises (Rizakis and Touratsoglou 2008). Their design with grand entrances, a large open space, and inspiring statues seems to replace the older community agora as the focus of elite culture (Kousser 2005).
A definite redirection of citizen activity from politics and cult toward commerce is marked by the new prominence of business premises in urban spaces. The immense agora at Pella (Figure 13.3) has a limited area devoted to public buildings, being dominated by shops and workshops dealing in pottery, terracottas, metal objects, and foodstuffs (Siganidou and Lilimpaki-Akamati 2003). Urban club-houses proliferated in Hellenistic and then Roman times, especially for particular professions, and increasingly as venues for foreign merchants and businessmen exploiting the wider economic horizons opened up by their empires. The Cycladic island of Delos offers several examples such as a large complex built for traders and shippers from Berytus (Beirut in Lebanon), combining warehouse, offices, assembly-rooms, accommodation, and a shrine (Stewart 2006). A decrease in city autonomy is also marked by a general opening up to allow foreigners to gain citizenship, marry into, and own land in previously closed polis communities, clearly a strategy to bring more wealth and counter demographic decline (Thompson 2006). Cities reoriented themselves around the power of their leading families and to an ethos where wealth creation was primary in a world of expanding commercial markets. The resulting more cosmopolitan connections opened up the Hellenistic city to other communities, new cults from the East, and allowed elite women a new and active role in communal affairs (Shipley and Hansen 2006).
The rise of female influence in the urban world seems to follow from the emergence to dominance during Hellenistic times of a class of wealthy landowners, who monopolize public office and deploy their wealth to subsidize public events and urban infrastructure. This power of leading families elevates the scope for their female members to share in distributing what was joint wealth, and hence encouraged towns to allow them a wider set of civic positions as well as the resultant rewards of honorary inscriptions and statues. However van Bremen (1983) considers that greater female power was not a result of a changed perception of gender equality, but the inevitable effect of changes in class structure and sheer wealth. Nonetheless one must consider that greater visibility and respect for at least elite females may have eventually shifted public opinion away from the official disrespect for women’s public potential characteristic of our Classical sources.
We are still some way off achieving an Aegean-wide overview of the state of cities across the Hellenistic era. Balancing the regions which appear to see an expansion in the size and number of towns, such as the kingdoms of Northern Greece, there is the combined testimony of epigraphic and historical texts and archaeology to a serious decline in urban life over large parts of Southern Greece and the Islands during the Late Hellenistic era (Bintliff 1997, Rizakis and Touratsoglou 2008). Overpopulation and land exhaustion, economic, military, and social crises all seem to be involved at different times and places in contributing to this phenomenon.
World History
