THE GREAT KINGS OF ASIA

UNIVERSALISTIC TITULATURE IN THE SELEUKID AND

POST-SELEUKID EAST
Rolf Strootman

At the end of the Third Century BCE, Antiochos III assumed the epithet The
Great (Megas), and some years later became the first Seleukid emperor
known by the Greek title of basileus megas, Great King. Clearly, this titulature
was somehow connected with Antiochos many victories and his restoration
of Seleukid hegemony in Iran and Central Asia. Until his defeat by the Romans,
Antiochos was able to collect tribute in areas as far removed as Gandhara and
Thrace. He truly was a great king.
A century and a half later, around 50 BCE,1 a descendant of Antiochos the
Great, Antiochos I of Kommagene, styled himself basileus megas, too.2 This
Antiochos by contrast was the ruler of a relatively insignificant Seleukid
successor state located in the border lands between Syria and Anatolia. Had
he not left such grandiose monuments celebrating his kingship on Mount
Nemrut and elsewhere in his small kingdom, we would probably have thought
of Antiochos of Kommagene as just one of those regional rulers who rose to
power in the intermediate period between the collapse of the Seleukid Empire
and the integration of the Near East into the Roman Empire. What was it that
made him a different kind of monarch as compared to other post-Seleukid
dynasts such as Tarkondimotos, a local big man from the Amanus Mountains
whom the Romans accepted as king in 39? Why could the one claim to be Great
King while the other was just king?3 The answer is readily available in lines
2434 of the so-called Nomos Inscription at Nemrut Da, where Antiochos of
Kommagene himself helpfully states that his fortunate roots, his Seleukid and
Achaemenid ancestry, made the difference.4
All dates are BCE unless otherwise specified.
In the opening lines of the cultic inscription at the back of the throne of the gods on the
Eastern Terrace at Nemrut Da (OGIS 383), Antiochos calls himself: The Great King
Antiochos, the God, the Just, the (God) Manifest, Friend of the Romans and Friend of the
Greeks (lines 14); the sanctuary at Mount Nemrut was constructed between c. 69 and 36,
see B. Jacobs, Das Heiligtum auf dem Nemrud Da. Zur Baupolitik des Antiochos I. von
Kommagene und seines Sohnes Mithradates II., in: J. Wagner ed., Gottknige am Euphrat. Neue
Ausgrabungen und Forschungen in Kommagene (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000) 2736.
3 On the Tarkondimotid Dynasty (c. 70 BCE17 CE) see M. H. Sayar, Tarkondimotos. Seine
Dynastie, seine Politik und sein Reich, in . Jean, A. M. Dinol, S. Durugnl(eds.), La Cilicie.
Espaces et pouvoirs locaux (Paris 2001) 373375; N. L. Wright, Anazarbos and the
Tarkondimotid kings of Kilikia, Anatolian Studies 58 (2008) 115125, and The house of
Tarkondimotos: A late Hellenistic dynasty between Rome and the East, Anatolian Studies 62
(2012) 6988; and N. Andrade, Local authority and civic Hellenism: Tarcondimotus,
Hierapolis-Castabala and the cult of Perasia, Anatolian Studies 61 (2011) 123132.
4 OGIS 383; RIG 735. For the accompanying ancestor galleries on Mount Nemrut see
generally W. Messerschmidt, Die Ahnengalerie des Antiochos I. von Kommagene: Ein Zeugnis
fr die Geschichte des stlichen Hellenismus, in: J. Wagner ed., Gottknige am Euphrat. Neue
1
2

The subject of this article is universalistic ideology. It takes issue with the
presumption that Great King was mutatis mutandis an official title, used only
in specific circumstances, as well as with the resultant idea that kings for
whom that title has not been attested therefore must have had more modest
aspirations. Perhaps they did. But in this line of argument, the irregularity of
attestations of imperial titulature in the preserved (cuneiform and epigraphic)
sources is equated to an irregularity of imperial claims by the Seleukid kings
in actual practice. Not only is this an argumentum e silentio, it moreover
anachronistically ascribes to the Hellenistic world a quality of formalized
Staatsrecht, and to the Seleukid Empire the features of a modern state. But like
most premodern Eurasian empires (the Roman Empire may be a notable exception), the Seleukid Empire was an ever-changing heterogeneous patchwork of polities bound in multifarious ways, and with varying degrees of dependence, to the itinerant dynastic household.5 To be sure, the relative abundant evidence for Antiochos IIIs use of the titles megas and basileus megas
suggests that these titles were employed in particular in this reign, and it is
true also that Antiochos was the first Seleukid emperor to use Greek forms of
imperial titulature. But as we will see in what follows, the universalistic claims
that were communicated through this titulature were more generic and
characterized also the reigns of his predecessors and several of his successors.
I argue that at least until the reign of Antiochos VII (139129) the Seleukids
thought of themselves, and were thought of by others, as Great Kings. And that

Ausgrabungen und Forschungen in Kommagene (Mainz 2000) 3744, and the detailed
discussion by J. H. Young, Sculpture and inscription catalogue, in: D. H. Sanders ed., Nemrud
Da: The Hierothesion of Antiochos I of Commagene. Results of the American Excavations
Directed By Theresa B. Goell (Winona Lake 1996); and B. Jacobs, Die Galerien der Ahnen des
Knigs I. von Kommagene auf dem Nemrud Da, in: J. M. Hjte ed., Images of Ancestors
(Aarhus 2002) 7588.
5 It is perhaps significant that modern historians do not even agree whether or not the
polis should be termed a state, for if any organization in the Ancient World would qualify as
such, the Classical polis must be the prime candidate. Many definitions of state as a political
system abound in the social sciences, but most include at least two basic characteristics: a
unitary policy based on territorial sovereignty and a specialized governmental body with a
monopoly of legitimate force, cf. M. Abls, State, in: A. Barnard and J. Spencer eds.,
Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (3rd edn; London and New York 2003) 527
529. The Seleukid Empire does not meet these requirement, being a supranational system of
control and exploitation, characterized by diversity, and organized around the dynasty (but
lacking formalized borders and a single territorial core), cf. R. Strootman, Seleucids, in: R. S.
Bagnall et al. eds., The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (Malden, MA, Oxford, New York 2012)
61196125, and my 2008 entry on the Seleucid Empire for the Encyclopaedia Iranica (online
at www.iranicaonline.org). For a slightly different view of Seleukid territoriality see now P. J.
Kosmins The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire
(Cambridge, MA, 2014), which appeared after the completion of the present article. The
exceptionalism of the Roman Empire follows from that empires republican origin and
subsequent application of civic institutionslaw, citizenship, and most of all a concept of res
publica that exists independently from the ruling dynastyto a supranational, imperial level.
For definitions of empire see note 67, below. For the pivotal role of the mobile court for elite
integration in the Hellenistic Near East see R. Strootman, Courts and Elites in the Hellenistic
Empires: The Near East After the Achaemenids, 330-30 BCE (Edinburgh 2014).

they behaved accordingly, even when this specific imperial title was not explicitly employed. Some of them are known to have actually used that title
(Antiochos I in Babylon, Antiochos III in the Greek cities), while others used
the comparable title King of Asia (Seleukos II, Antiochos IV) or the epithet
Great (Antiochos III and Antiochos VII). All these titles had basically the same
universalistic meaning, defying territorial limits to their power.
The present article furthermore takes issue with the perceived idea that
Hellenistic uses of the title of Great King are references to the Achaemenids.6
There is no evidence in support of this belief until the very late Hellenistic
period, when fictive Achaemenid genealogies were indeed put forward to reinforce existing claims to the Seleukid heritage after the collapse of the empire.
But that more likely was a Hellenistic invention of Achaemenid cultural
memory in the context of later Seleukid developments, in particular the
growing importance of Iranian vassal rulers under Seleukid suzerainty during
the later empire. In fact, it rather seems that even the Seleukids themselves,
for all their cooperation with other Iranian houses, shunned associations with
the Achaemenid family. For instance the fact that they did not re-use the
palaces of Pasargadai and Persepolis in the former Achaemenid heartland as
royal residence can be contrasted to the fact that they had no problem with reusing the non-Persid capital cities Sardis, Mopsuestia, Susa, Ekbatana, and
Baktra. And the famous Antiochos Cylinder from Borsippa reaches back directly to the language and policy of the Neo-Babylonian Empire of
Nebuchadnezzar, as if Achaemenid rule over Babylonia was no more than an
unhappy interlude between two periods of Babylonian greatness.
I argue instead that the use of the title Great King by late Hellenistic rulers
such as Mithradates I of Parthia, Mithradates VI of Pontos, Tigranes I of
Armenia, Artavasdes I of Atropatene, and Antiochos I of Kommagene was not
the symptom of an Achaemenid revival but that this referred first of all to the
Seleukid Dynasty. In fact, it was not until the rise of the Sasanians in the second
century CE that the Achaemenids perhaps became a point of reference for later
imperial rulers in Iran itself.7 Recently, Rahim Shayegan argued against the established view that the Parthian use of the titles of Great King was part of an
For instance J. G. Griffiths, : Remarks on the history of a title,
Classical Philology 48 (1953) 145154; W. Hu, Der Knig der Knige und der Herr der
Knige, ZDPV 93 (1977) 131140; G. Hlbl, Zum Titel Herrscher der Herrscher des
rmischen Kaisers, Gttinger Miszellen zur gyptologischen Diskussion 127 (1992) 4952.
7 See M. P. Canepa, Technologies of memory in early Sasanian Iran: Achaemenid sites and
Sasanian identity, AJA 114 (2010) 563596. How far the Sasanians saw their empire as a
recreation of the Achaemenid Empire is a highly debated question: see the excellent recent
summary of the discussion in R. Payne, Cosmology and the expansion of the Iranian Empire,
502-628 CE, Past & Present 220 (2013) 333, with further literature, and the contributions in
the Sasanian section of the forthcoming volume Persianism in Antiquity, edited by M. J.
Versluys and myself. Also see the fundamental discussion of the sources by P. Huyse, Die
sasanidische Knigtitulatur: eine Gegenberstellung der Quellen, in: P. Huyse and J.
Wiesehfer eds., rn und Anrn. Studien zu den Beziehungen zwischen dem Sasanidenreich
und der Mittelmeerwelt. Oriens et Occidens 13 (Stuttgart 2006) 181201, questioning the
6

anti-Seleukid, Achaemenid program carried out by the early Arsakids.8

Shayegan argued instead that if an Achaemenid revival indeed took place
among the early Parthians, this was a response to Roman propaganda that
equated the Parthians with the Persians who had invaded Greece in the Fourth
Century BCE.9
The aim of this paper, then, is to show that the title of Great King as it was
used by Antiochos the Great was a contemporaneous Seleukid title and not a
reference to the Achaemenid past. In other words, I hope to challenge more
generally the common assumption that everything that the Seleukids borrowed from the Achaemenids or had in common with the Achaemenids must
have been a reference to the Achaemenids. From the reign of Seleukos Nikator,
the Seleukids had taken on them the role of universal emperors just as the
Achaemenids had done before them, even if the dynasty rarely used the title
of Great King explicitly in its imperial propaganda (instead the Seleukids
simply referred to themselves as basileis without any territorial or ethnic restrictions). The Seleukid familys self-identification as an imperial dynasty
means that the post-Seleukid use of the title Great King by several other
Hellenistic dynasties, particularly in the time of Seleukid breakdown after c.
150 (the Ptolemies, the Arsakids, the Mithradatids of Pontos, the dynasty of
Tigranes, and the rulers of Kommagene), can only be understood from a
Seleukid perspective. To substantiate this contention, I discuss the significance
of universalistic claims for the Seleukids in the context of the increase in the
number of vassal dynasties in the Near East that took place in the Hellenistic
historicity of Sasanian neo-Achaemenid ideology and titulature when based on Roman
sources without confirmation by contemporaneous Sasanian evidence; however, there is a
distinct possibility that the view of the Sasanian Empire as a recreation of the Achaemenid
Empire is genuine in the context of interactions between the Roman and Sasanian empires,
and an Achaemenid legacy can have developed in the Sasanian east through the agency of
western, viz., Greco-Roman, cultural memory of the Persians as derived from Herodotos,
Xenophon, and the fourth-century BCE Persika literature. For these exchanges see M. P.
Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship Between Rome and Sasanian Iran
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 2009), and cf. note 9 below.
8 So e.g. J. Wolski, Le titre de Rois des Rois dans lidologie monarchique des Arsacides,
in: J. Harmatta ed., From Alexander to Kl Tegin: Studies in Bactrian, Pahlavi, Sanskrit, Arabic,
Aramaic, Armenian, Chinese, Trk, Greek and Latin Sources for the history of Pre-Islamic Central
Asia (Budapest 1990) 1118; J. Wiesehfer, Iranische Ansprche an Rom auf ehemals
achmenidische Territorien, Archologische Mitteilungen aus Iran 19 (1986) 177186; id.,
King of Kings and Philhelln: Kingship in Arsacid Iran, in: P. Bilde et al. eds., Aspects of
Hellenistic Kingship (Aarhus 1996) 5566. A nuanced view is expressed by R. Fowler, Most
fortunate roots: Tradition and legitimacy in Parthian royal ideology, in: O. Hekster and R.
Fowler eds, Imaginary Kings: Royal Images in the Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome. Oriens
et Occidens 11 (Stuttgart 2005) 125156.
9 M. R. Shayegan, Arsacids and Sasanians: Political Ideology in Post-Hellenistic and Late
Antique Persia (Cambridge and New York 2011), esp. 334349. The Achaemenid revival of
the early Sasanians according to Shayegan can in a comparable manner be connected with a
revival of Alexander symbolism under the Severan emperors of Rome: It was the
identification of the emperors (Caracalla and Severus Alexander) with Alexander that []
prompted the parity between Sasanians and Achaemenids, [] yet the unexpected strength of
the Sasanian war machine produced the opposite effect (p. 369).

Period, especially in the reign of Antiochos the Great. More importantly, I argue that universality is a defining feature of premodern imperial polities in
general and that it had a very practical function. I do not aim, in other words,
to make a case for continuitya concept without explicative relevance, as I
have consistently put forward in past publications. Still, to outline the context,
I shall begin by briefly reviewing the development of the concept of universal
empire and universalistic titulature prior to the Seleukid period. After subsequently discussing the Seleukids use of the titles Great King and King of Asia,
my final argument will be that Great King does not designate a specific, welldefined office but is the most popular of several generic expressions of the
universalistic pretension characteristic of virtually all premodern land empires in Afro-Eurasian history. Great King has been attested in several Near
Eastern languages (Sumerian, Akkadian, Elamite, Persian, Hittite, Greek) as a
super-king who is placed above other kings and has the right to appoint subkings. I will conclude my contribution with a brief discussion of the use of universalistic titles by monarchs who sought after acceptance as successors of the
Seleukids. Here it will be argued that rulers such as Mithradates VI of Pontos,
Antiochos I of Kommagene or Kleopatra VII based their assumption of imperial titulature on their Seleukid ancestry. The Parthian title Great King, introduced by the conqueror Mithradates I (171138/7 or 165/4132 BCE),
was connected with the Seleukids too, as Mithradates took this title by right of
victory over the Seleukids.

UNIVERSAL EMPIRE IN THE PRE-HELLENISTIC NEAR EAST

The idea that the whole wide worldor, more aptly, the entire civilized world
or oikoumenwas somehow a unity was consistently conveyed in Middle
Eastern royal propaganda since the late third millennium. It was essentially a
religious concept. Monarchical representation propagated the image of a divinely ordained order in which at the center of civilization there was a single
world ruler: an intermediary between humankind and the gods who safeguarded peace and prosperity for all. This was the rulers own propaganda, of
course, but so consistent and prominently was this idea conveyed
universality remained a pivotal concept of empire until the First World War
put an end to the universalistic pretensions of the Ottoman padishah and
Caliph (only to be revived a century later as the self-proclaimed world
Caliphate of ISIL)that it must have been a highly effective slogan that somehow appealed to a commonly-held, ontological belief in cosmic order; lots of
people must have really believed that there ought to be a strong and benevolent great king at the heart of civilization lest the world should fall apart.

In what Mario Liverani has called the siege complex, Mesopotamian cosmology divided the world into a civilized, peaceful core surrounded by barbaric, chaotic outside regions.10 In this matrix of human culture versus
barbaric disorder, the civilized world is presented as a single empire protected
from the surrounding forces of Chaos by a world ruler who is himself protected by the gods.11 Hence the reassuring use of well-known Mesopotamian
titles such as King of the Fourth Corners, or King from the Upper Sea to the
Lower Sea.12 Rulers used such titles even when in reality they were not so
powerful and had to acknowledge, in diplomatic correspondence or peace
treaties, the equality of other monarchs; this essential inconsistency of simultaneously accepting and denying the existence of equals, was characteristic of
the concert of nations of the Late Bronze Age Near East.13
An early example is the self-praise of the Sumerian king ulgi (c. 2029
1982), the second ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur, who called himself king of
the four corners of the Universe, herdsman, shepherd of the blackheads, the
trustworthy, the god of all the lands (WB 171). Tukulti-ninurta I (12441208
or 12331197) much later was lauded as he who [rules] the extremities of the
four winds; all kings without exception live in dread of him.14 Many more examples abound. This ideology of course compelled rulers to actually expand
their realms to the extremities of the earth. In the First Millennium BCE, for
the Neo-Assyrian kings going to war against neighboring peoples was a divinely ordained commandment and had distinct ritual and symbolic dimensions.15 The extent of a kings military reach could be demarcated by means of
steles, altars or statues, set up at symbolic borders that qualitate qua constituted the final frontier beyond these borders, there was only emptiness.16 In
10 M. Liverani, Kitru, kataru, Mesopotamia 17 (1981) 4366; also see B. Pongratz-Leisten,
The other and the enemy in the Mesopotamian conception of the world, in: R. M. Whiting ed.,
Mythology and Mythologies: Methodological Approaches to Intercultural Influences (Helsinki
2001) 195231.
11 M. Liverani, The ideology of the Assyrian Empire, in: M. T. Larsen ed., Power and
Propaganda. A Symposium on Ancient Empires (Copenhagen 1979) 297317.
12 For conceptions of the sea as the edge of world and empire see F. Miltner, Der Okeanos
in der persischen Weltreichsidee, Saeculum 3 (1952) 542554; K. Yamada, From the Upper
Sea to the Lower Sea: The development of the names of seas in the Assyrian royal
inscriptions, Orient 40 (2005) 3155; J. Haubold, The Achaemenid Empire and the sea,
Mediterranean Historical Review 27.1 (2012) 524.
13 On this paradox see M. Liverani, Prestige and Interest. International Relations in the Near
East ca. 16001100 (Padova 1990).
14 W. G. Lambert in Archiv fr Orientforschung 18 (1957/8) 4849, cited from A. Kuhrt,
The Ancient Near East, c. 3000-330 BC (London and New York 1995) I 356.
15 H. Tadmor, World dominion: The expanding horizon of the Assyrian Empire, in: L.
Milano et. al. eds., Landscapes: Territories, Frontiers and Horizons in the Ancient Near East
(Padova 1999) I 5562; P. Garelli, L'tat et la lgitimit royale sous l'empire assyrien, in: M.
T. Larsen ed., Power and Propaganda. A Symposium on Ancient Empires (Copenhagen 1979)
319328, esp. 319320.
16 A. T. Shafer, The Carving of an Empire: Neo-Assyrian Monuments on the Periphery (PhD
dissertation Harvard University, 1998); Liverani 1979. K. Radner, The stele of Sargon II of
Assyria at Kition: A focus for an emerging Cypriot identity?, in: R. Rollinger et al., eds.,
Interkulturalitt in der Alten Welt. Vorderasien, Hellas gypten und die vielfltigen Ebenen des

an inscription of Shalmaneser III, the kings boasts to have set up a statue of

himself at the source of the river Saluara, at the foot of the Amanus
Mountains, and to have made offerings at the Mediterranean coast after
having washed my weapons in the Great Sea (ANET 277): in other words,
Shalmaneser had reached the edge of the world and established peace
everywhere.17
It was in this context that the title Great King and its twin brother, King of
Kings, developed. Both titles are best known from the context of the
Achaemenid Empire but they had much older roots. Their meaning is generic
rather than specific. Both titles have been recorded in the official languages
of various Near Eastern monarchies: Sumerian (lugal gal and lugal lugal),
Babylonian (arru rab and ar arrni), Elamite (sunki-ir--ir-ra and sunki
sunkipina), Old Persian (xyaiya vazraka and xyaiya xyaiynm),
Middle Persian (vazka ah and hn ah), and Greek (basileus megas and
basileus basiles).
In the Achaemenid Empire, Great King and King of Kings were at the core
of the Achaemenid complex of royal titulature. There seems not to have been
any formal difference between the two titles, which could be combined, and
carried a similar connotation of limitless power: rule over all lands and all
peoples. In an inscription of Darius I, the king is lauded as The Great King, King
of Kings, King of Lands in Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian.18
It is unlikely that these titles were combined because they had different
meanings; rather, the theme of universality probably was so huge, that
Kontakts (Wiesbaden 2010) 429450, is an interesting case study of a basalt stele of Sargon
IIKing of the Universe, King of Assyria, Governor of Babylon, King of Sumer and Akkad, King
of the Four Corners (lines II.2-3)marking the western periphery of what Liverani (1990, 59)
aptly called the officially existing world.
17 An additional means to convey universalistic ideology was what may be called the
symbolic attainment of the world [border], i.e. the accumulation of images, objects, flora,
fauna and even human beings in the imperial center, as well as the accumulation of knowledge
(Liverani 1979). This is what happened also in Alexandria, and in the Museum and Library of
Alexandria, under the early Ptolemies; see R. Strootman, The Hellenistic Royal Courts: Court
Culture, Ceremonial and Ideology in Greece, Egypt and the Near East, 336-30 BCE (PhD
dissertation; University of Utrecht, 2007) 214 (for the library) and 314325 (on the Grand
Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphos); cf. id., Alexandri, een wereldstad, Lampas 44.4 (2011)
292310, and The Birdcage of the Muses: Royal Patronage of the Arts and Science at the Early
Ptolemaic Court, 305-222 BCE (Leuven, in press). On similar processes of universalistic
accumulation to indicate imperial power in the Achaemenid Empire see Wiesehfer 2005,
100101. Most recently S. Mller, Alexanders indischer Schnee, Achaimenidische
Wassersouvenirs und mental mind mapping, Anabasis: Studia Classica et Orientalia 5 (2014)
4752, with further literature.
18 Wiesehfer 1996, 5566, suggesting respectively Urartean and Babylonian origins for
the Persian titles King of Kings and Great King, and explaining the simultaneous use of both
titles from these disparate origins; but they were also sometimes employed simultaneously in
Babylonian texts, where they could furthermore be combined with typically Mesopotamian
titles such as Kings of Lands, King of the Four Quarters, or King of Peoples. For the iconography
of universalism at Persepolis and other palaces see M. Cool Root, The King and Kingship in
Achaemenid Art: Essays on the Creation of an Iconography of Empire (Leiden 1979), cf. A. Kuhrt,
The Achaemenid concept of kingship, Iran 22 (1984) 156160.

repetition was employed to ingrain the message more strongly in the recipients minds. It was only in the later Hellenistic Period that rulers, perhaps deliberately, preferred one title over the other, as we will see in the last section
of this paper.

FROM ALEXANDER TO THE SELEUKIDS

In between the Battle of Issos (333) and the Battle of Gaugamela (331), Darius
III sent an embassy to Alexander to negotiate peace.19 The Persian king offered
Alexander all the territory to the west of the Euphrates, an enormous amount
of silver bullion, and marriage with Darius eldest daughter. Clearly this was
not a proposal to partition the Achaemenid Empire. If the peace proposal is
indeed historical, as it probably was in one form or other,20 Darius offered
Alexander the status of vassal ruler, viceroy at best, and the inferior status of
son-in-law. However great the concessions may have been, Darius would still
have been the superior Great King. By declining the offer Alexander made clear
what his ultimate aim was. Just as the universe (kosmos) will not hold together
when there are two suns, he allegedly replied, the inhabited world
(oikoumen) cannot be ruled by two kings; and he bade the envoys to tell
Darius that battle would decide which of them would have sole and universal
rule (Diod. 17.54.5; cf. Just. 11.12.15).
To pacify and unite his newly conquered empire, Alexander adopted
oriental universalistic ideology and propaganda, together with the appropriate court ceremonial. There was no other way. It was either that or being
someone elses vassal. Alexander had to position himself vis--vis various nations and polities and to somehow accommodate the former imperial elite that
still to a substantial degree controlled access to manpower and military resources. For lack of Persian sources we cannot say if Alexander styled himself
(or was styled) Great King or King of Kings by Iranians. It is hard to imagine,
however, that in his dealings with the Iranian nobility Alexander would have
presented himself as a lesser king than Darius had been. What we do know
however, is that in the Babylonian astronomical diaries Alexander is King of
the World and King of Countries (Sachs & Hunger I, nos. 330 and 329). 21 In his
19 The embassy is mentioned in all ancient Alexander biographies: Arr., Anab. 11.25; Diod.
17.54.15; Plut., Alex. 29.78; Curt. 4.11.122; Just. 11.12.915. They embassy is usually dated
to shortly before the Battle of Gaugamela (Summer 331); only Arrian dates the embassy to the
siege of Tyre in 332.
20 A. B. Bosworth, A Historical Commentary on Arrian's History of Alexander. Volume I:
Commentary on Books IIII (Oxford 1980) 228229.
21 A. Kuhrt, Alexander in Babylon, in: H. W. A. M. Sancisi-Weerdenburg and J. W. Drijvers
eds., Achaemenid History 5: The Roots of the European Tradition. Proceedings of the 1987
Groningen Achaemenid History Workshop (Leiden and Boston 1990) 121130. The hypothesis
of A. B. Bosworth, Philip III Arrhidaeus and the chronology of the Successors, Chiron 22
(1992) 5581, that while Alexander was king of the empire in Babylonian documents (ar
matt, King of Countries) his half-brother Arrhidaios was made King of Babylon (ar Bbili,

dealings with the Greeks, Alexander adopted a newly invented Hellenic title,
King of Asia, as several of his biographers later claimed (Arr., Anab. 2.14.8-9;
Curt. 4.1-14; Plut., Alex. 34.1). Whether it was indeed Alexander, or one of his
Successors, who first adopted this title, it presumably was a Greek adaptation
of the Oriental title of Great King, and it was introduced to mark the advent of
a new imperial age.22 And if it was indeed Alexander who first began to wear
the diadem, this probably took place at the same time and for the same reason
Alexander began to wear a diadem. The old Macedonian monarchy had no distinct regalia. As I have argued elsewhere, following Smith, Alexander may have
based the form of the diadem on a variety of modelsthe Greek victory
wreath, the Dionysian bind, and the fillet that Persian kings wore under their
royal tiarasbut the result was an altogether new emblem, introduced to signal the foundation of a new monarchy.23 For all his autocracy and magnificence, Alexander was wary of being seen by the Greeks and the Macedonians
as a Persian despot and the diadem surely did not refer to the Achaemenids,
whose principal emblem of royalty had been a tiara.24
The title King of Asia must have been carefully created not to antagonize
the inhabitants of mainland Greece and Macedonia, who were formally excluded from its pretensions. Asiaa Greek concept that had formerly been
associated with the Achaemenid kingscould however include Egypt. The
not actually attested in cuneiform sources) in the last year of Alexanders reign (324/3), is
rejected by T. Boiy, Royal titulature in Hellenistic Babylonia, Zeitschrift fr Assyriologie 92
(2002) 241257, who points to the fact that the title King of Babylon was abandoned by the
Achaemenids in the fifth century only to reappear once in the Seleukid Period (on the
Antiochos Cylinder, see below); it is therefore unlikely that the title King of Babylon was
still in use in 324/3 (p. 248249).
22 E. A. Fredricksmeyer, Alexander the Great and the Kingdom of Asia, in: A. B. Bosworth
and E. J. Baynham eds., Alexander the Great in Fact and Fiction (Oxford 2000) 96135,
establishes the Greek nature of the title and claims that Alexander used it in order not to be
seen as the successor of Darius but as the creator of a new empire; cf. M. Brosius, Alexander
and the Persians, in J. Roisman ed., Brills Companion to Alexander the Great (Leiden 2003)
173176. The contrary view, that Alexander should be seen as the last Achaemenid, was most
influentially expressed by P. Briant, Alexandre le Grand (Paris 1974); in 2010 a translation of
this book by Amlie Kuhrt was published by Princeton University Press as Alexander the Great
and his Empire. I was not able to consult F. Muccioli, Il re dellAsia: ideologia e propaganda
da Alessandro Magno a Mitridate VI, in: L. Criscuolo, G. Geraci, C. Salvaterra eds., Simblos.
Scritta di storia antica 4 (Bologna 2004) 146151, and R. Sciandra, Il Re dei Re e il Satrapo
dei Satrapi: note sulla successione tra Mitradate II e Gotarze I a Babilonia (ca. 9480 a.e.v.),
in: B. Virgilio ed., Studi Ellenistici 20 (Pisa and Rome 2008) 471488.
23 Strootman 2007, 367373; R. R. R. Smith, Kings and philosophers, in: A. W. Bulloch et
al. eds., Images and Ideologies: Self-Definition in the Hellenistic World (Berkeley and Los
Angeles 1993) 202211; see Hellenistic Royal Portraits (Oxford 1988) 3536, for an overview
of possible (Greek) antecedents.
24 Contra the influential hypothesis defended by H. W. Ritter, Diadem und
Knigsherrschaft. Untersuchungen zu Zeremonien und Rechtsgrundlagen des Herrschaftsantritt
bei den Persern, bei Alexander dem Groen und im Hellenismus (Munich and Berlin 1965), esp.
105108; Die Bedeutung des Diadems, Historia 36.3 (1987) 290301. For a comprehensive
overview of the (iconographical) evidence for Persian crowns see W. F,. M. Henkelman, The
royal Achaemenid crown, AMI 28 (1995/6) 175193, arguing against the influential thesis of
H. von Gall, Die Kopfbedeckung des persischen Ornats bei den Achmeniden, AMI 7 (1974)
145161, that Achaemenid kings wore individualized crowns.

title reappears when according to Diodoros (19.48.1) the Persians accepted

Antigonos Monophthalmos as King of Asia upon his arrival in the Persis in 316.
Since Antigonos allegedly received the honor from the Persians (he was not
yet a Greek basileus), but Asia was a Greek concept, this passage probably
means that Antigonos had been proclaimed vazka ah in Iran.25 The Seleukid
dynasty later adopted the title King of Asia, too, and we will return to it shortly.
Classical historiography has preserved several other attestations of the
universalistic claims made by Antigonos and his son Demetrios, as well as by
Ptolemy I and II (whose aspirations were no less ambitious than those of their
Antigonid adversaries).26 Thus, Plutarch (Demetr. 25.4) says that Demetrios
Poliorketes used to scorn people who gave the title of basileus to anyone but
his father and himself; his friends thereupon drank toasts to Demetrios the
King, Seleukos the elephantarch, Ptolemy the admiral, Lysimachos the
treasurer, and Agathokles the governor of Sicily as if his royal rivals were no
real monarchs but officials in the service of the universal kings Antigonos and
Demetrios. In a now classic article on this royal toast, Hans Hauben argued
that Antigonos basileia signified his ambition to become the sole ruler of the
entire empire: the other Diadochi would have to subject themselves to him
lest they be regarded as usurpers or rebels and run the risk of having their
territories taken by force of arms.27 It follows that when Ptolemy, Seleukos,
and Lysimachos became kings in reaction to Antigonos assumption of the
basileus-title, their basileia had the same universalistic connotations lest they
would have openly accepted the status of vassals subordinate to Antigonos. As
Erich Gruen showed with regard to the Year of the Kings, the title of basileus
as it was used by the Successors in 306/5 had neither territorial nor national
restrictions.28 A crucial detail is the fact that the assumption of basileia by the
Diadochs in 306/5 was accompanied by the assumption of the diadem. If the
A. B. Bosworth, The campaign in Iran: Turbulent satraps and frozen elephants, in: id.,
The Legacy of Alexander: Politics, Warfare, and Propaganda under the Successors (Oxford 2002)
162 with n. 221; cf. Brosius 2003, 174 n. 9.
26 R. Strootman, Men to whose rapacity neither sea nor mountain sets a limit: The aims
of the Diadochs, in: H. Hauben and A. Meeus eds., The Age of the Successors and the Creation of
the Hellenistic Kingdoms (323276 B.C). Studia Hellenistica 53 (Leuven 2014) 307322.
27 H. Hauben, 'A royal toast in 302 B.C.' AncSoc 5 (1974) 105117, at 105; cf. O. Mller,
Antigonos Monophthalmos und 'Das Jahr des Knige'. Untersuchungen zur Begrndung der
Hellenistischen Monarchien, 306-304 v.Chr. (Bonn 1973) 88-93. R.A. Billows, Antigonos the OneEyed and the Creation of the Hellenistic State (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1990; 2nd edn.
1997), 158160, on the other hand presumes that Antigonos assumption of kingship was first
of all an attempt to institutionalize his power in such a way as to provide for the succession
of Demetrios to that power (158) and therefore should not be understood as a claim
specifically to supreme power over all of Alexanders empire (159).
28 E. S. Gruen, 'The coronation of the Diadochoi', in: J. W. Eadie and J. Ober eds., The Craft
of the Ancient Historian. Essays in Honor of G. C. Starr (Lanham 1985) 253271. The first to
note the unlimited claims of the Diadochs basileia perhaps was G. H. Macurdy, Roxane and
Alexander IV in Epirus, JHS 52.2 (1932) 256261, at 258: The word basileia with almost no
exception in Diodorus and elsewhere means royal power, not the country ruled over; cf. id.,
Note on , JHS 52.2 (1932) 261, and A. Aymard, 'Le protocole royal
Grec', in: id., Etudes d'histoire anciennes (Paris 1967) 7399.
25

10

diadem was indeed introduced by Alexander as an exclusive symbol of his status as King of Asia, the fillet that the Successors bound around their skulls in
306/5 can only have signified a claim to rule over the whole of Alexanders
Kingdom of Asia. But the strongest claim to universal empire eventually was
made, not by Antigonos and Demetrios, but by Seleukos.

THE SELEUKIDS AND THE TITLE KING OF ASIA

After his victory at Ipsos, Seleukos Nikator became the master of Asia from
Phrygia to India and the successor of Alexander as King of Asia (App., Syr. 55).
Seleukos heirs, too, were known in later Greek and Roman historiography as
the kings of Asia. According to Appian (Syr. 1 and 12), Antiochos III reclaimed
possession of Ionia and Aiolis because these regions had in the past belonged
to the kings of Asia; Malalas (8.209), too, calls Antiochos III the King of Asia.
That this has a genuine Seleukid background becomes clear from OGIS 253, a
Greek inscription of unknown provenance and controversial substance, but
dateable to the reign of Antiochos IV Epiphanes, who is lauded as the Savior
of Asia.29
The association of Asia with the Seleukids is indirectly apparent from the
fact that some sources differentiate between Asia and Syria.30 Andrea Primo
has argued that this tradition was derived from Ptolemaic propaganda and
existed in Hellenistic historiography alongside the rival notion, upheld by the
Seleukid court and preserved i.a. in Appian, that Syria belonged to Asia.31 After
Ipsos, the Ptolemies occupied Koile Syria but the ultimate goal of their imperial
policy in the Third Century was to control all harbors surrounding the Eastern
Mediterranean basin and to deny the Seleukids access to the sea. Polybios

29 At first, a Babylonian provenance of the inscription was

presumed, but this was rejected

already by U. Khler, Zwei Inschriften aus der Zeit Antiochos IV. Epifanes, Sitzungsberichte
der Akademie der Wissenschafte Berlin 51 (1900) 11001108, and again by S. M. SherwinWhite, A Greek ostrakon from Babylon of the early third century B.C., ZPE 47 (1982) 5170;
R. J. van der Spek, Grondbezit in het Seleucidische Rijk (PhD diss. University of Leiden, 1986)
72, holds that a Babylonian origin cannot be excluded. For the text consult M. Zambelli,
Lascesa al trono di Antioco IV Epifane di Siria, Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica 88
(1960) 378; a more free restoration was made by F. Piejko, Antiochus Epiphanes Savior of
Asia, Rivista di Filologia e di Istruzione Classica 114 (1986) 425436. J. G. Bunge, Die Feiern
Antiochus IV. Epiphanes in Daphne 166 v.Chr., Chiron 6 (1976) 5371, esp. 63 n. 60, plausibly
associates the inscription with Antiochos eastern campaign, which began in 165/4.
30 Preserved for instance in Eusebius (Chron. P. 126 and 130 ed. Helm) who describes the
Seleukid Empire as Syriae et Asiae regnum, and Strabo (11.9.2), describing the Seleukids as
the kings of Syria and Media; an earlier reading of the latter designation as pertaining
respectively to the rival kings Antiochos Hierax and Seleukos II by i.a. D. Musti Syria and the
East, in: F. W. Walbank ed., The Cambridge Ancient History. Volume 7.1: The Hellenistic World
(Cambridge 1984) 175220, esp. 219-220, is no longer tenable: see K. Brodersen, The date of
the secession of Parthia from the Seleucid kingdom, Historia 35 (1986) 378381, esp. 380.
31 A. Primo, La battaglia di Ipso e la storiografia sui Seleucidi, Tyche 24 (2009) 99102.

11

(5.67) sets against Antiochos IIIs claim that Koile Syria is rightfully his because of Seleukos Nikators victory at Ipsos the assertion of the Ptolemaic envoys that Asia belonged to Seleukos but that Phoenicia and Koile Syria are not
part of (the interior of) Asia and therefore do not belong to the Seleukids.32 An
interesting passage in this context is furthermore found in the first book of
Maccabees: when Ptolemy VI invaded the Seleukid Empire in 145, he bound
round his head two royal diadems, one of Asia and one of Egypt (1 Macc.
11.13). With this act, Ptolemy claimed the Seleukid Empire by right of victory
over Demetrios II, whom he had deposed, and presumably also by right of inheritance (Ptolemy VI was the grandson of Antiochos III through matrilineal
descent). He moreover reaffirmed a specific Ptolemaic notion that Egypt (perhaps including Syria) was excluded from the pretensions of the kingship of
Asia.
The Ptolemies provide more confirmation of the interconnectedness of the
titles Great King and King of Asia. The Ptolemies bore the title twicethey
were actually the first to use a Greek rendering of Great King basileus megas
even before Antiochos the Great did soand in both cases they clearly associated the title with the Seleukids and with Asia. The first instance is Ptolemy III,
who styled himself Great King in the Adulis Inscription (OGIS 54; Austin 221).
This proclamation belongs to the context of Ptolemy IIIs invasion of Asia
during the Third Syrian War (246-241), and his claim to have conquered the
entire Seleukid Empire as far as Baktria. The second instance is Ptolemy IV,
who was lauded as Great King on the Raphia Decree, a trilingual (Greek,
Demotic, Hieroglyphic Egyptian) decree issued by a priestly synod at Memphis
of which three fragmentary stelae are still extant. The Raphia Decree is dated
to 15 November 217 and celebrates Ptolemys return from war with Antiochos
III in Koile Syria, and his victory in the Battle of Raphia (22 June 217).33
King of Asia may not be exactly the same as king of world, but it comes
close. Asia is not a country or region. It is a rather vague designation of the
entire eastern land mass comprising a variety of countries. Asia moreover
was a specifically Greek notion. As we have seen, Alexander had assumed the
title as a variant of Great King for his dealings with Greeks only. Unlike Great
King, the title King of Asia does not figure in the Babylonian cuneiform record
of the Seleukid and Parthian periods, and neither does it ever reappear in the
Sasanian Empire in Middle Persian translation. This too suggests that for the
Seleukids King of Asia had the same supranational connotation as Great King.
The interconnectedness of the two titles is made clear in the first book of
32 Compare the diplomatic exchanges in Polyb. 28.20.68; cf. Primo 2009, 101, and
Walbank, Polybius I, p. 592-3 ad locum, and Polybius II, p. 356 ad locum.
33 G. Hlbl, A History of the Ptolemaic Empire (London and New York 2001) 162164 with
n. 23; cf. p. 81. The stele in the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo shows Ptolemy in
pharaonic regal attire but fighting like a Macedonian king from horseback with a sarissa. An
Egyptian equivalent of King of Kings (nswt nswjw) existed as a title for Osiris; this title has only
been attested for Ptolemaios XII in Philai (see Hlbl 2001, p. 292, with further literature).

12

Maccabees where Antiochos III is called the Great King of Asia (1 Macc. 8.6).
That surely is no slip of the pen.34

GREAT KING / THE GREAT IN THE SELEUKID EMPIRE

It looks as if the first Seleukid kings were wary of identifying themselves as
Great Kings in Greek propaganda. Antiochos IIIs assumption of the title
basileus megas after 205 is distinctively presented as an innovation in the epigraphical record (see below). The first Seleukids presumably styled themselves (or at least were seen as) the Kings of Asiaan equivalent title but without overtly Persian connotations. In the early Hellenistic Age, the title of
basileus taken by the Diadochs in 306/5 carried universalistic claims, as we
saw above.
The sheer size of the multi-ethnic Seleukid world empire meanwhile meant
that the Seleukids had no other option than to present themselves as
emperors. Seleukid universalistic propaganda resonates in the account Appian
(Syr. 55) gives of the of the conquests of Seleukos:
He conquered Mesopotamia, Armenia, Anatolia, the Persians, the Parthians,
the Baktrians, the Arabs, the Tapyri, the Sogdians, the Arachosians, the
Hyrkanians, and all the other peoples that had before been conquered by
Alexander, as far as the river Indus.35

In the 280s, a Seleukid general, Demodamas of Miletos, campaigned across the

river Jaxartes (Syr Darya). Pliny (NH 6.18) states that when Demodamas returned he set up altars (i.e. instituted cults) dedicated to the Seleukid tutelary
deity Apollo along the river, thus demarcating the border of empire at the very
same place where previously Herakles, Dionysos, Cyrus and Alexander had
constructed altars too. Thus it was suggested that Seleukid hegemony extended as far as the eastern edge of the inhabited world. Pliny moreover
specifies the deity honored by Demodamas as Apollo of Didyma, which linked
this (from a western point of view) peripheral region in Central Asia to one of
the principal shrines favored and patronized by the Seleukids at that time: the
Sanctuary of Apollo at Didyma, in the very heart of the Greek world. 36 About
the same time, the admiral Patrokles, formerly the Seleukid governor of
Compare Liv. 35.17.4: Antiocho maximo Asiae regum.
For the influence of Seleukid court historians on Ancient historiography see A. Primo,
La storiografia sui Seleucidi: da Megastene a Eusebio di Cesarea. Studi ellenistici 10 (Pisa and
Rome 2009) 1952.
36 For the concept of frontier sanctuaries linked to a central sanctuary as a means to define
and claim territory see F. de Polignac, La naissance de la cit grecque: cultes, espace et socit
VIIIe-VIIe sicles avant J.-C. (Paris 1984); an English translation appeared as City, Territory, and
the Origin of the Greek City-State (Chicago 1995). For the contemporaneous (208)
conceptualization of Sogdia and Baktria as militarized frontier zones between the Seleukid
Empire and the nomadic hordes on the steppes of Inner Asia see Polyb. 11.39.45.
34
35

13

Babylonia, explored the northern reaches of the Caspian Sea. When he returned, he duly reported what everyone had already expected: that in
accordance with pre-existing Greek world views the Caspian Sea was a
southerly inlet of Okeanos, the river that encompasses the world so that it
could now be legitimately claimed that the northern boundary of the empire,
like the southern, was the Ocean.37
In Babylonian documents, the early Seleukids are sometimes called Great
Kings. Antiochos I Soter and Antiochos II Theos both carry the title of lugal
gal in the Babylonian king list BM 35603 (Austin 138).38 But the best known
example is the opening formula of the Cylinder of Antiochos I Soter, a building
inscription dated to 268 found in situ in the temple of Nab (who was identified with the Seleukid tutelary deity Apollo) in Borsippa, near Babylon:
Antiochos the Great King, the Mighty King, King of the World, King of Babylon,
King of Countries, caretaker of Esagila and Ezida, first son of King Seleukos,
the Macedonian, King of Babylon, am I. (ANET 317; Austin 189).

Of course, this titulature is here being used in a local context, and Great King
is combined with local Babylonian titles. But new studies of the Antiochos
Cylinder suggest that the text may be much less traditional than has always
been assumed in mainstream historiography: the text can also be interpreted
as the product of a two-way interaction between Babylonian priesthood and
imperial court (instead of it being indicative of continuity, and a presumed
wish on the part of the Seleukids to be seen as the new Achaemenids).39 Quite
on the contrary: by referring back to the golden age of the Neo-Babylonian
37 Memn. ap. Phot. Bibl. 224, p. 227a. Compare Alexanders desire to reach the Indian
Ocean an urge that, like his celebrated pothos in general, can perhaps be better understood
in terms of imperialist ideology than as resulting from the singularity of Alexanders personal
psychology, as I have argued in Het verlangen van Alexander de Grote: pothos of
propaganda?, Groniek 186 (2010) 515, and id., Koning van Azi: Alexander de Grote en het
Oosterse koningschap, in: D. Burgersdijk, W. F. M. Henkelman, W. Waal eds, Alexander en
Darius: De Macedonir in de spiegel van het Nabije Oosten (Hilversum 2013) 101114. For
Patrokles and Demodamas journeys of exploration as ritualized demarcations of Seleukid
territory see R. Strootman, Hellenistic imperialism and the idea of world unity, in: C. Rapp
and H. Drake eds., The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power
and Identity (Cambridge and New York 2014) 3861. Also see note 12 above.
38 A. J. Sachs and D. J. Wiseman, A Babylonian King List of the Hellenistic Period, Iraq 16
(1954) 202212; G. F. Del Monte, Testi dalla Babilonia Ellenistica. Studi Ellenistica 9 (Pisa and
Rome 1997) 208.
39 For the innovative aspects of the text, viz., the manipulation of (invented) tradition to
convey an imperial rather than a local message, see now K. Erickson, Apollo-Nab: The
Babylonian policy of Antiochus I, in: K. Erickson and G. Ramsey eds., Seleucid Dissolution: The
Sinking of the Anchor. Philippika 50 (Wiesbaden 2011) 5166; R. Strootman, Babylonian,
Macedonian, King of the World: The Antiochos Cylinder from Borsippa and Seleukid imperial
integration, in: E. Stavrianopoulou ed., Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic Period:
Narrations, Practices, and Images (Leiden and Boston 2013) 6797; and P.-A. Beaulieu, Nab
and Apollo: The two faces of Seleucid religious policy, in: F. Hoffmann and K. S. Schmidt eds.,
Orient und Okzident in hellenistischer Zeit. Beitrge zur Tagung Orient und Okzident
Antagonismus oder Konstrukt? Machtstrukturen, Ideologien und Kulturtransfer in
hellenistischer Zeit (Wrzburg 10.13. April 2008) (Vaterstetten 2014) 1330.

14

Empire under the Chaldean Dynasty (625-539) in various ways, and by cautiously identifying Marduk, his wife Era, and their son Nab with the early
Seleukid Reigning Triad of king/father, queen/mother, and heir/foremost
son (viz. co-basileus),40 the Cylinder rather seems to aim at erasing
Achaemenid rule from history. At best, the Borsippa Cylinder may refer to the
Cyrus Cylinderbut Cyrus was no Achaemenid and the positive Cyrus image
also was a Greek tradition, best known to Hellenistic rulers from Xenophons
Cyropaedia. (Compare how Alexander could simultaneously honor the tomb of
Cyrus at Pasargadai and destroy Persepolis, the symbolic heart of the
Achaemenid dynasty in the age of Xerxes.)
At the crux of this matter is the fact that the imperial court cannot but have
had a hand, too, in the presentation of the king as Great King on de Borsippa
Cylinder, which must therefore reflect also imperial policy (rather than this
being merely the outcome of a more passive adoption of local custom). In sum:
notwithstanding the probable agency of the Babylonian priesthood in creating
the text, the Antiochos Cylinder is also Seleukid self-presentation.

THE VASSALIZATION OF THE SELEUKID EAST

From c. 250 the Seleukid Empire gradually developed into a hegemonial
power loosely uniting multiple autonomous vassal monarchies and small subsidiary princedoms around a more or less directly controlled imperial core
that comprised Media, Babylonia, Mesopotamia and Syria. Antiochos IIIs title
of basileus megas is directly connected with this process of vassalizationor
feudalization, as David Engels called it in a recent article in which he suggested a strong undercurrent of political fragmentation running through the
longue dure history of the Middle East from the Achaemenids through the
Seleukids to the Arsakids.41 Because Antiochos III appointed more kings than
any other ruler before him, he also had more need to articulate his own
superior status.
The growing number of local kings in the Hellenistic east has of course
often been noticed. It has however always been understood as the attainment

40 The term Reigning Triad was coined by A. J. P. McAuley, The Genealogy of the Seleucids:
Seleucid Marriage, Succession, and Descent Revisited (MA thesis: University of Edinburgh,
2011) 1823.
41 Engels 2011, op. cit. below. I use vassalization rather than feudalization not because I
do not endorse the main thrust of Engels argument (I do) but because of the latter terms
Medieval connotation, viz. its association with the granting of estates rather than the creation
of kingdoms. The term client kingdoms, preferred by Roman historians, looks at the Near
East from a Roman instead of a Near Easter perspective, suggesting a Roman origin where
there is none; from a post-Seleukid Near Eastern perspective, the relations between vassal
states and the Roman Empire will have been structured by philia rather than amicitia.

15

of full autonomy by rulers breaking away from the empire, and thus as a symptom of Seleukid decline.42 This zero-sum, and anachronistic, logic is no longer
feasible. In accordance with the current tendency in the study of empire in
general to think about imperial histories not in teleological terms of rise-andfall but in terms of change,43 the vassalization of the Hellenistic Near East will
probably be better understood when seen as a sign of Seleukid resilience
rather than as a symptom of Seleukid decline.
Scholars of Middle East history have only recently begun to appreciate
Seleukid agency in this transformation and its formative significance for both
the Parthian world of kings and the system of client kingdoms that made up
the Roman Near East. The first to point out the vassalization of the Hellenistic
Middle east as an essentially Seleukid phenomenon, albeit indirectly, was to
my best knowledge Maria Brosius in her short book The Persians, in which she
hypothesized that the urge to become king was caused by the lack of prestige
that the office of satrap experienced under Seleukid rule.44
There had already been instances of rulers who were simultaneously kings
and satraps in the Achaemenid Period, and satrapal office had in some cases
become an hereditary prerogative.45 It is perhaps significant that these
See for this view e.g. M. Sartre, The Middle East Under Rome (Cambridge and London
2005) 530; cf. 7074 for a strikingly contrasting view of Roman acceptance of indigenous
princes, a process that is described as a deliberately created network of client states [which]
allowed Rome to rule at less cost (p. 70 and 73).
43 Cf. T. N. DAltroy, Empires in a wider world, in S.E. Alcock et al. eds., Empires:
Perspectives From Archaeology and History (Cambridge 2001) 125127, esp. p. 125: The
outstanding feature of preindustrial empires was the continually metamorphosing nature of
relations between the central powers and the societies drawn under the imperial aegis.
Particularly the hyper-teleological view that after the Classical Age (c. 14001600) the
Ottoman Empire went into a 300-year period of steady decline has been reinterpreted in this
light, see e.g. K. Barkey, Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective
(Cambridge 2008), and K Barkey and R. Batzell, Comparisons across empires: The critical
social structures of the Ottomans, Russians and Habsburgs during the Seventeenth Century,
in: P. Fibiger Bang and C. Bayly eds., Tributary Empires in Global History (Cambridge and New
York 2011) 227261. On the emergence of a new Ottoman history see V.H. Aksan, Theoretical
Ottomans, History and Theory 47 (2008) 114.
44 M. Brosius, The Persians: An Introduction. Peoples of the Ancient World 5 (London and
New York 2006) 114117. See further R. Strootman, Queen of Kings: Cleopatra VII and the
Donations of Alexandria, in: M. Facella and T. Kaizer eds., Kingdoms and Principalities in the
Roman Near East. Occidens et Oriens 19 (Stuttgart 2010) 139158; id., Hellenistic court
society: The Seleukid imperial court under Antiochos the Great, 223187 BCE, in: J. Duindam,
M. Kunt, T. Artan eds., Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective. Rulers
and Elites 1 (Leiden and Boston 2011) 6389; D. Engels, Middle Eastern Feudalism and
Seleukid dissolution, in: K. Erickson and G. Ramsey eds., Seleucid Dissolution: The Sinking of
the Anchor (Wiesbaden 2011) 1936. Also see L. Capdetrey, Le pouvoir sleucide. Territoire,
administration, finances d'un royaume hellnistique (312129 avant J.C.) (Rennes 2007) 112
133, providing the fullest overview of the kingdoms and principalities within the Seleukid
sphere of influence, distinguishing different forms of dependence in a perhaps too formalized
view of the empire.
45 As an alternative to the perhaps too strict view of B. Jacobs, Die Satrapienverwaltung im
Perserreich zur Zeit Darius' III (Wiesbaden 1994) that the Achaemenid system of satrapies was
a formalized and hierarchical system of administration see H. Klinkott, Der Satrap. Ein
achaimenidischer Amtstrger und seine Handlungsspielrume (Berlin 2005), arguing for a
42

16

Achaemenid governor-kings turn up mainly in the fourth-century Aegean. The

best known examples are the Hekatomnid kings of Karia.46 But much more
subsidiary dynasties came into being in the Hellenistic period: during the upheavals of the wars of Alexander and the Diadochs (e.g. Bithynia, Pontos,
Atropatene), in the context of Seleukid imperialism (e.g. Kappadokia, Sophene,
Adiabene, Baktria, Parthia, Persis, Judea, Kommagene), or in the wake of
Seleukid collapse in the 140s and 130s (Elymais, Osrhoene, Charakene, Emesa,
etc.).47
Already Seleukos I and Antiochos I needed to find ways to deal with the
growing independence of local dynasties, particularly in Anatolia and Greater
Armenia. Thus the Bithynian kings were vassals of the Seleukids until
Nikomedes I (280-250) broke loose from Seleukid suzerainty after he defeated
a Seleukid army and killed its general, Hermogenes, in 279; this certainly did
not entail an official Seleukid acceptance of the Bithynian kings equal status:
as the kings of Bithynia (and not Great Kings) they remained nominally subordinated to the Seleukids. The kings of Pontos by contrast never renounced
their bonds with the imperial center and remained connected with the
Seleukid family through dynastic marriage and bonds of loyalty.48 The Attalid
rulers of Pergamon (kings since 263) were Seleukid vassals until Attalos I took
the diadem on the battlefield in 238/7 in defiance of Seleukid overlordship. 49
The kingdom of Kappadokia (since 255) too was connected by kinship with
the Seleukid House (App., Syr. 5).
ANTIOCHOS III AS KINGMAKER
The most prolific king-maker among the Seleukids was Antiochos III the Great.
At the beginning of his reign he was confronted with growing regional
autonomy, particularly along the edges of the empire (Anatolia, Armenia,

more open and irregular complex. But see now also M. Waters, Applied royal directive:
Pissouthnes and Samos, in: B. Jacobs and R. Rollinger eds., Der Achmenidenhof. Akten des 2.
Internationalen Kolloquiums zum Thema "Vorderasien im Spannungsfeld klassischer und
altorientalischer berlieferungen", Landgut Castelen bei Basel, 23.25. Mai 2007. Classica et
orientalia 2 (Wiesbaden 2010) 817828, making a case for direct influence of the imperial
center on the policies of local rulers.
46 S. Hornblower, Mausolus (Oxford 1982); S. Ruzicka, Politics of a Persian Dynasty: The
Hecatomnids in the Fourth Century B.C. (Norman 1992).
47 See for an overview Capdetrey 2007, 112133.
48 Even after the Treaty of Apameia, Pharnakes I of Pontos (185-159) used the Seleukid
Era on his coinage, cf. B. C. McGing, The kings of Pontus: Some problems of identity and date,
RhM 129 (1986) 248259. Mithradates VI Eupator as an empire-builder exploited his
connection to the Seleukid House, too, as we will see below.
49 Polyb. 18.41.78; Strabo 13.4.12; Paus. 1.8.2; on this event see R. E. Allen, The Attalid
Kingdom. A Constitutional History (Oxford 1983) 31 and Appendix II at pp. 195199; R.
Strootman, Kings against Celts: Deliverance from barbarians as a theme in Hellenistic royal
propaganda, in: K. A. E. Enenkel and I. L. Pfeijffer eds., The Manipulative Mode: Political
Propaganda in Antiquity (Leiden 2005) 101141. From 216 to 213 however Attalos fought
Achaios in alliance with Antiochos III.

17

Khorasan, Baktria, Sogdia), and with a severe military crisis in the center: the
revolt of the eastern satraps under Molon and their invasion of Babylonia.
Antiochos thereafter spent much of his reign subduing unruly local dynasts
and then making them kings by his own grace: the Armenian rulers
Artabazanes (c. 220; Polyb. 5.55.10), Orontes IV (212), and Xerxes (212; Polyb.
8.23.15); Arsakes II of Parthia (209; Polyb. 10.31); Euthydemos I of Baktria
and Sogdia (206 BCE; Polyb. 11.39.9); the Indian king Sophagasenos (206;
Polyb. 11.39.12);50 and others.51
Polybios (8.23.5) epitomizes the procedure with regard to the
Armenian prince Xerxes, who ruled independently from the Seleukids after his
father had earlier stopped paying regular tribute (phoros); Antiochos III
arrived with his army, laid siege Xerxes royal city Arsamosata, and forced him
to surrender:
Remitting the greater part of the sum which his father still owed him as tribute
[and] receiving from him a present payment of three hundred talents, a
thousand horses, and a thousand mules with their trappings, [Antiochos]
restored all his dominions to him and by giving his daughter Antiochis in
marriage conciliated and attached to himself all the inhabitants of the district,
who considered that he had acted in a truly royal and magnanimous
manner.52

The fact that the new arrangement of the empire evidently was a reaction to
growing regional independence does not in itself mean that the empire was
weakened. The revolts of Molon and Achaios had demonstrated how arduous
it could be to replace governors once appointed and in control of a provinces
resources and armed forces. Affirmation of the autonomy of local monarchies
was a means to bring rebellious provinces back into the empire. Local rulers
gained legitimacy through imperial recognition of their royal status in return
for their acceptance of Seleukid suzerainty and incidental military support.
For instance Ariarathes IV of Kappadokia came to the aid of Antiochos III
His Indian name may have been Subhagasena; see R. Thapar, A History of India
(Harmondsworth 1966) I 94. According to W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India
(Cambridge 1938) 130, Sophagasenos was not a local ruler but a king of the Mauryan Dynasty.
51 For a detailed discussion of the king-making activities of Antiochos III see D. Engels,
Antiochos III. der Groe und sein Reich. berlegungen zur Feudalisierung der
seleukidischen Peripherie, in: F. Hoffmann and K. S. Schmidt eds., Orient und Okzident in
hellenistischer Zeit. Beitrge zur Tagung Orient und Okzident Antagonismus oder Konstrukt?
Machtstrukturen, Ideologien und Kulturtransfer in hellenistischer Zeit, Wrzburg 10.13. April
2008 (Vaterstetten 2014) 3176. Antiochos may also have been personally responsible for the
assumption of the title of basileus by the fratarak ruler Ardaxhr (Artaxerxes) when he
visited Persis in 205.
52 Compare Diod. 31.17a, where an Armenian vassal ruler called Artaxes (presumably to
be identified with Artaxias I, who was king from 190 to 159) broke away from Antiochos IV
in c. 165: Antiochos [] marched against him, was victorious, and reduced him to submission.
On Armenian vassal kings in the Seleukid Empire see A. Kuhrt and S. M Sherwin-White, From
Samarkhand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire (London 1993) 190197; cf. 89
90 for the satrapal tiaras worn by the Parthian rulers (not all of whom had the title of basileus)
until Mithradates the Great on their coins.
50

18

against the Romans and Attalids during the war in Asia Minor of 190-189 (Liv.
37.31.4). The relation between empire and vassal kingdom was moreover often cemented by dynastic marriage. Marriage created stronger bonds of
loyalty and obligation than the philia and xenia ties by which Seleukid kings
had previously sought to bring powerful men into their orbit.53 Indeed, the
claim to be related to the Seleukid Dynasty by blood increasingly became a
legitimization of kingship, particularly in Asia Minor.54
Creating (marriage) alliances with local, often indigenous (Iranian) dynasties in the periphery of the Fertile Crescent moreover was an attempt to bypass the imperial elite of Macedonian nobles and Greek philoi, who by the late
Third Century BCE had developed into a landed aristocracy defending its own
prerogatives and privileges.55 The promotion of these non-Greek dynasts in
other words may have been an attempt of the monarchy to find new allies
beyond the established court circles.
It all seems to have worked out rather well for the Seleukids, at least initially. Antiochos III returned from his anabasis strong enough to destroy the
Ptolemaic Empire in the Mediterranean between 202 and 198, effectively reducing the Ptolemies to the status of local kings of Egypt. The loss of prestige
suffered by Antiochos due to his defeat in the Battle of Magnesia in 189 may
have nullified much of the rearrangements. Still, as late as 140/39, Demetrios
II could successfully call upon the local rulers of Persis, Elam and even Baktria
for military support during his campaign against the Parthians (Just. 36.1.4; cf.
Jos., AJ 13.185). According to Justin (38.10.5), Antiochos VII, too, summoned
troops from multi orientales reges when he marched against the Parthians in
131/0.56

For the instrumentality of philia and especially xenia for the recruitment of courtiers
and for their attachment to the royal house see G. Herman, Ritualised Friendship and the Greek
City (Cambridge 1987) 208.
54 O. G. Gabelko, The dynastic history of the Hellenistic monarchies of Asia Minor
according to the Chronology of George Synkellos, in: J. M. Hjte ed., Mithridates VI and the
Pontic Kingdom. Black Sea Studies 9 (Aarhus 2009). On these kings in the Seleukid period see
further J. Kobes, Kleine Knige. Untersuchungen zu der Lokaldynasten im hellenistischen
Kleinasien (323188) (Saint Katharinen 1996).
55 R. Strootman, Hellenistic court society: The Seleukid imperial court under Antiochos
the Great, 223187 BCE, in: J. Duindam, M. Kunt, T. Artan eds., Royal Courts in Dynastic States
and Empires: A Global Perspective (Leiden and Boston 2011) 6389; id., Eunuchs, renegades
and concubines: The paradox of power and the promotion of favorites in the Hellenistic
empires, in: A. Erskine, L. Llewellyn-Jones, S. Wallace eds., The Hellenistic Royal Court
(Swansea and Oxford; in press).
56 For an even greater extent of Seleukid prestige in this period see now D. Engels, Ein
syrisches Sizilien? Seleukidische Aspekte des ersten sizilischen Sklavenkriegs und der
Herrschaft des Eunus-Antiochos, Polifemo 11 (2011) 233251.
53

19

ANTIOCHOS THE GREAT (KING)

Antiochos III presumably took the Greek title the Great when in 205 he returned from his eastern anabasis (App., Syr. 11.3.15; cf. Polyb. 4.2.7),57 a campaign that was as much a military and political affair as it was a ritualized tour
of his eastern empire by which he symbolically demarcated Seleukid territory.
He later became the first Seleukid emperor to also be called Great King in
Greek inscriptions found in various places.58 Indeed, the inscriptions calling
the king Basileus Antiochos Megas or Basileus Megas come from so diverse
sourcesincluding Delos, Teos, Iasos, Amyzon, Xanthos, Seleukeia in Pieria,
and Skythopolisthat a centrally ordained use of these titles is very likely, and
the epigraphical evidence shows that the title of megas came some years before basileus megas.59 It is of course no coincidence that Antiochos III was the
first to use the epithet Megas and be called basileus megas. Both titles clearly
were connected.60 Interestingly, the passage in 1 Maccabees, discussed above,
in which Antiochos III is called Antiochos the Great King of Asia, can also be
read as Antiochos the Great, King of Asia.61
It is tempting to think that the epithet referred not to Antiochos status as
Great King but to his great deeds, or even to the deeds of Alexander the Great.
But this is not what the sources actually tell us. What we know from Polybios
is that Antiochos called himself Antiochos Megas after his tour through the
eastern empire. This means that the designation (King) Antiochos Megas referred to no one but Antiochos himself, and that therefore not the deeds of the
king are great but that the king himself is Great. Appian (Syr. 11.3.15) too
links the kings reputation exclusively to the extent and nature of his empire:
So great was the dominion of Antiochos, who was ruler of many powerful nations of Upper Asia and of all but a few on the sea-coast and who now invaded
Europe; so formidable was his reputation and so considerable his resources,
so many and so famous his exploits against other peoples, from which he had
earned the title The Great.

Spranger, P. P., Der Groe. Untersuchungen zur Entstehung des historischen

Beinamens in der Antike, Saeculum 9 (1958) 2258, esp. 3031; H. H. Schmitt,
Untersuchungen zur Geschichte Antiochos des Groen und seiner Zeit. Historia Einzelschriften
6 (Stuttgart 1964).
58 For an list and discussion of the epigraphical evidence for both megas and basileus
megas see J. Ma, and , in: id., Antiochos III and the Cities of Western Asia
Minor (Oxford 2000) 271276, suggesting distinct periods for the use of first megas (from c.
205) and basileus megas (after the Battle of Panion in 200).
59 Ma 2000, 276.
60 The first to suggest that The Great was an expression of Antiochos status as Great King
was W. W. Tarn, Antiochus III and his title Great King, JHS 22 (1902) 241244. The fact that
Megas predated basileus megas does not exclude a connection with the status of Great King as
these are both Greek renderings of an Oriental concept.
61 Some nomad rulers in First Century BCE Baktria, Maues and Azes I, styled themselves
basileus basiles megas, King of Kings, the Great or Great King of Kings (see below).
57

20

There is nothing to suggest that Antiochos use of megas was a reference to

Alexander or, for that matter, that Antiochos eastern anabasis was an attempt
to imitate Alexander. The first attested reference to Alexander as 'Great' (magnum) is in a Latin text from the age of the Scipiones, Plautus Mostellaria 775,
written somewhere between 205 and 184.62 As there is no evidence for
Alexanders title of honor predating Plautus, the earliest comparandum is
Antiochos IIIs epithet, which he assumed around 205. A Seleukid origin, unrelated to Alexander, is therefore more likely. If Alexanders epithet was indeed accorded to him in retrospect by the Romans, this would be consistent
with the Roman practice of reaching directly back to Alexander, by-passing the
Hellenistic monarchies as if they were an irrelevant interlude in the process of
translatio imperii from Macedon to Rome. By giving the epithet of Great to
Alexander, Antiochos III, an enemy of Rome and a contemporary of Plautus,
was no longer the Great King. In other words: it may well be that Alexander
first became Alexander the Great as an anti-Seleukid, Roman propagandistic
response to Antiochos IIIs own assumption of that titleit was after all the
title he bore when he moved his armies against the Ptolemies and towards
Asia Minor and Greece, where in due time he would confront the Roman legions. Also, an anti-Seleukid motivation for the elevation of Alexander to the
status Great would be consistent with the perception of the Seleukids as the
New Persians in Ptolemaic and subsequently Roman propaganda.63
The second Seleukid ruler known to have assumed the epithet Megas was
Antiochos VII Sidetes. This later Antiochos the Great took his title in the context of an eastern campaign, too, but he did not do so afterwards but already
in the Spring of 131 after his first successes in Babylonia: Victorious in three
battles, Antiochos captured Babylon and began to be called the Great (Just.
38.10.6). Antiochos Sidetes issued golden victory coins with the legend Megas
Euergetesi.e. Antiochos the Great, the Benefactor rather than Antiochos,
the Great Benefactorand an image of Nike standing in a horse-drawn
chariot (SC II, Nr. 2134). Arthur Houghton has interpreted this coin (a unique
gold stater struck in Antioch) as a celebration of Antiochos reconquest of
Babylonia and Media in 131/130;64 Kay Ehling however has suggested an as-

62 Because the passage in Plautus may suggest that the audience was by then familiar with
the epithet. I. Worthington, 'How Great was Alexander?', The Ancient History Bulletin 31.2
(1999) 3959, has suggested that Ptolemy I Soter invented Alexanders epithet when he
kidnapped the kings dead body and brought it to Egypt in the Autumn of 320.
63 For Ancient views of the Seleukids as the new Persians see B. Funck, Knig
Perserfreund: die Seleukiden in der Sicht ihrer Nachbarn (Beobachtungen zu einigen
ptolemischen Zeugnissen des 4. und 3. Jh.s v. Chr.), in: B. Funck ed., Hellenismus (Tbingen
1996) 195-215; G. Flamerie de Lachapelle, L'image des rois hellnistiques dans l'uvre de
Florus, Arctos 44 (2010) 109-22, and id., Les prises de parole d'Antiochus III dans l'uvre de
Tite Live, Paideia 67 (2012) 123133; cf. Primo 2009, 122, speaking of the deliberate deHellenization of the Seleukids in the work of the Hellenistic historian Phylargos.
64 A. Houghton, A victory coin and the Parthian Wars of Antiochus VII, in: Proceedings of
the 10th International Congress of Numismatics (London 1986) 65; cf. SEG 19 904, an

21

sociation of this coinage with the defeat of the usurper Tryphon in 134, following doubts later expressed by Houghton himself.65 Be that as it may, Sidetes
Megas title can at any rate not have been a celebration of his restoration of the
empire as that task was not quite finished when he died in 129. This means
that Antiochos Sidetes expected the title to induce the eastern rulers to rally
around his standard, and to win the support of the Babylonian cities. There
can be little doubt that his claim to be the only legitimate Great King was a
reaction to the Arsakid claim to have taken over that status from the Seleukids
some time earlier. Indeed, Justin (38.10.6) states that after some initial victories and the reconquest of Babylon, but well before Seleukid forces reached
Iran, all the peoples went over to him and the Parthians were left with nothing
but their ancestral land (sc. Parthyene and/or Hyrkania).
Antiochos VII Sidetes was the last able Seleukid king. His death on the
battlefield in 129, and the subsequent destruction of his field army by the
Parthians, effectively terminated the existence of the Seleukid monarchy as a
great power. Before concluding this paper with a brief overview of the uses of
the title of Great King by the Seleukid successor states, we will first place what
we have seen in a broader context of the practice of empire in general. What
exactly was it that made universalistic titulature so very important for
imperial rulers?

UNIVERSALISTIC TITULATURE AND THE PRACTICE OF EMPIRE

One of the most enduring legacies of the Seleukids was their further development and transmission of the already centuries-old understanding of the
world as one unified empire under a single rulera notion that in the
Christian and Islamic empires of Late Antiquity would eventually culminate in
an understanding of the world as an ordered unity under a single god
represented by a single emperor or caliph.
After the reign of Antiochos III, the Seleukids gradually lost their hegemony
over the Middle East, Iran and Central Asia, despite attempts at repeating that
kings grand tour of the Upper Satrapies by Antiochos IV, Demetrios II, and
Antiochos VII. This failure however had other causes than the increase in the
number of autonomous sub-kings. The increasing vassalization of the Middle
East, and the intricate system of marriage ties that bound Iranicate dynasties
inscription from Akko-Ptolemais recording a dedication by a Seleukid official
(archigrammateus of the army) and one of the prti philoi for the benefit of Antiochos VII,
basileus megas, his wife Kleopatra Thea, and their children; for a discussion see J. Whitehorne,
Cleopatras (London and New York 1994) 149-163.
65 K. Ehling, Probleme der seleukidische Chronologie und Geschichte der Jahre zwischen
139 und 131 v. Chr, in: U. Peter ed., Stephanos Nomismatikos. Edith Schanert Geiss zum 65
Geburtstag (Berlin 1998), esp. 238; cf. A. Houghton, C. C. Lorber, O. D. Hoover, Seleucid Coins:
A Comprehensive Catalogue. Part 2: Seleucus IV through Antiochus XIII (New York and
Lancaster 2008) 396.

22

to the imperial house, can perhaps better be seen as a sign of Seleukid resilience. Indeed, the conceptualization of the empire as a complex network of
provinces, vassal kingdoms, petty princedoms, and autonomous city states
unified by the charisma of an imperial ruler persisted in both the Parthian and
Roman empires. Rome, even when represented in the East by strong and
successful generals like Pompey or Marc Antony, preferred to slightly reorganize the eastern vassal king system rather than to replace it by direct rule
although that option was available to them, as the creation of the Roman
provinces of Syria and Kilikia show.
In the section on the vassalization of the Seleukid Empire we saw that
Antiochos IIIs explicit use of basileus megas, as well as his self-presentation as
Megas, likely was a pronunciation of his being such a prolific kingmaker, emphasizing his own elevated position above lesser kings. In this paper I have
argued that the fact that only Antiochos III is known to have done so unequivocally does not mean that the other kings were not emperors. They too
were considered rulers of an empire stretching from the Aegean to the Hindu
Kush, with even bigger, universalistic claims made in their propaganda.
Universalistic claims had been at the core of Near Eastern imperial ideologies
from the Third Millennium BCE and they would continue to do so until the fall
of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.66 The Seleukids were no exception.
Many historians have in the past thought about universalism as a defining
aspect of virtually all premodern land empires, from China to the Americas.67
In a recent article, Peter Fibiger Bang made a case for understanding universalistic ideology as a practical instrument of powera means to unite the multiple polities and heterogeneous cultures of which empires are by definition
66 A complete overview of Middle East imperialism from Late Antiquity to the Modern Age
is provided by E. Karsh, Islamic Imperialism: A History (New Haven and London 2007); in his
eager to show that Islam has retained its imperialist ambition to this day (p. 7), Karsh
wrongly thinks of the ideal of universal conquest as typically Islamic.
67 For the similarities and differences between preindustrial empires consult C. M
Sinopoli, The Archaeology of Empires, Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994); K. D.
Morrison, Sources, Approaches, Definitions, in: S. Alcock, et al., eds., Empires: Perspectives
from Archaeology and History (Cambridge 2001) 19; H. Mnkler, Imperien. Die Logik der
Weltherrschaft: vom Alten Rom bis zu den Vereinigten Staaten (Bonn 2005); I. Morris and W.
Scheidel eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires: State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford
2009). For the universalism of the theme of universal empire see F. Bosbach, Monarchia
Universalis. Ein politischer Leitbegriff der frhen Neuzeit (Munich 1985), A. Pagden, Lords of all
the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c.1500c.1800 (New Haven 1995),
and P. F. Bang, Lords of all the world: The state, heterogeneous power and hegemony in the
Roman and Mughal empires, in: P. F. Bang and C. A. Bayley eds., Tributary Empires in Global
History (New York 2011) 171192; I disagree with G. A. Lehmann, Expansionspolitik im
Zeitalter des Hochhellenismus: Die Anfangphase des Laodike-Krieges 246/5 v.Chr., in: T.
Hantos and G. A. Lehmann eds., Festschrift Jochen Bleicken (Stuttgart 1998) 81101, who
understands universalistic tendencies in the Hellenistic world as imitatio Alexandri. J. H.
Marks, Visions of One World: Legacy of Alexander (Guildford 1985), too, sees neither Near
Eastern antecedents nor a generic feature of empire, but claims instead that the ideal of world
union began with Alexanders dream of universal dominion, and maintains that Alexanders
ecumenical ideal (p. 69) was lost in the Hellenistic kingdoms but survived in Stoic philosophy
in the Greek poleis to be finally transmitted to Christianity.

23

composed, arguing that because premodern agrarian empires claimed unity

but were never in a position to really homogenize their realms, they accentuated the paradox, emphasizing universality to make sense of diversity: The
claim to universal hegemony enabled expansionist imperial powers to comprise and manage very diverse territories and, in terms of political
organization, composite and heterogeneous realms.68
Indeed, it seems as if the Middle East suddenly was teeming with claimants
to the status of Great King after the collapse of the Seleukid Empire, which
effectively took place with Antiochos VIIs death in Media in 129. What is
striking about these claims, is that they all seem to be some way or other
connected with the Seleukid Dynasty.

POSTSCRIPT: GREAT KINGS AFTER THE SELEUKIDS

The first Parthian monarch to take the title of Great King was Mithradates
(Mihrdd) I, who was largely responsible for the creation of the Parthian
Empire in Iran and Mesopotamia. His reign is conventionally dated to c. 171
138/7, but recently Farhad Assar proposed a revised chronology of 165/4132.69 Mithradates apparently took the Greek imperial title,70 in the context of
his conquest of Babylonia around 141/0 and his victory over his Seleukid adversary Demetrios II Soter about one year later.71 Before the military triumphs
Bang 2011, 173; also see Strootman 2010, on Kleopatra VIIs title Queen of Kings as a
means to give coherence to the complex of vassal states that came under her rule during
Donations of Alexandria ritual, and to rally support for Antonys campaigns among the
subjects of the Arsakid kings (see below). See now also the case studies collected in P. F. Bang
and D. Koodziejczyk eds., Universal Empire: A Comparative Approach to Imperial Culture and
Representation in Eurasian History (Cambridge and New York 2012). For the composite nature
of empires compare e.g. the general definitions in Sinopoli 1994, 159 (politically expansive
polities, composed of a diversity of localized communities and ethnic groups), S. Howe,
Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2002) 15 (Diversity [] is their essence), and
Barkey 2008, 9 (large composite and differentiated polities linked to a central power by a
variety of direct and indirect relations); cf. the claim in P. Turchin, War and Peace and War:
The Rise and Fall of Empires (London 2007) 3, that given the difficulties of communication in
pre-industrial times, large states had to come up with a variety of ad hoc ways to bind farflung territories to the center. One of the typical expedients was to incorporate smaller
neighbors as self-contained units [] leaving their internal functioning alone. In popular
accounts of empires this diversity is sometimes anachronistically interpreted as tolerance,
see e.g. A. Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance And Why They
Fall (New York 2009).
69 G. R. F. Assar, Genealogy and coinage of the early Parthian rulers I, Parthica 6 (2004)
6993, and 7 (2005) 29-63; id. A revised Parthian chronology of the period 165-91 BC,
Electrum 11 (2006) 87158.
70 D. G. Sellwood, An Introduction to the Coinage of Parthia (London 1971; 2nd edn 1980)
type 10. For sources and secondary literature for Arsakid royal titulature see also Table II in
Shayegan 2011, 228240; Mithradates successors, Phraates II (Frahd, c. 138/7128) and
Artabanos I (Ardawn, c. 128/7124/3), too, styled themselves basileus megas (Shayegan
2011, 230231 and 231232).
71 That it was Mithradates II who captured Demetrios is suggested by both Appian (Syr.
67) and Justin (38.9.3), and is confirmed by an astronomical diary dated to 174 SE (= 138
68

24

of Mithradates, the rulers of the Arsakid Dynasty had been compelled to accept
the status of sub-kings.72 Now the Parthian king not only had conquered
several of the core regions of the Seleukid Empire and defeated its king in
battle, he had also captured the Seleukid emperor alive. Demetrios II was given
a daughter of Mithradates the Great in marriage, and in 129 was released by
Mithradates successor, Phraates II, to reclaim his throne in the west, where
he struck coins depicting himself with a Parthian-style beard.73 This amounted
to a complete reversal of the relation between Seleukid king and Arsakid king,
as the first had now become the vassal of the latter, perhaps also symbolized
by his becoming Phraates son-in-law. Demetrios successor, Antiochos
Sidetes, disagreed. He propagated his own assumption of the title of Megas and
set out for the east to reverse the situation, but was killed in 129.74
Military success had allowed Mithradates I to take over the status of
imperial overlord from the Seleukids by right of victory, precisely as Alexander
had done two centuries before when he defeated Darius and thereby inaugurated the bicentennial era of Macedonian dominance.75 Another indication that the Arsakids newfound status was connected with the Seleukids, and
BCE): H. Hunger and A. J. Sachs, Astronomical Diaries and Related Texts from Babylonia III.
Diaries from 164 B.C. to 61 B.C. sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophischhistorische Klasse 247 (Vienna 1996) No. 137 A rev. lines 811; cf. M. R. Shayegan, On
Demetrius II Nicator's Arsacid captivity and second rule, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 17
(2007) 83103, and id. 2011, 6877. In anticipation of his own victory and status as restitutor
orbis, Demetrios had in 139 taken the titles Theos and Nikator; see K. Ehling, Wer war der
lteste Sohn des Demetrios I.?, Historia 50.3 (2001) 374378, esp. p. 375 with n. 13; the
numismatic evidence probably is from Nisibis, located along the road from Syria to
Mesopotamia, and is collected by W. Moore, The divine couple of Demetrius II, Nicator, and
his coinage at Nisibis, MNANS 31 (1986) 125128. On Demetrios campaign in general see E.
Dbrowa, Lexpdition de Dmtrios II Nicator contre les Parthes (139138 avanat J.-C.), in:
id., Studia Graeco-Parthica: Political and Cultural Relations Between Greeks and Parthians
(Wiesbaden 2011) 4958, and especially Shayegan 2011, 6872 and 7477, with full
discussion of both Greek and Babylonian sources.
72 For the initial status of the Parthian kingdom as a Seleukid satellite see R. Strootman,
The coming of the Parthians: Crisis and resilience in Seleukid Iran in the reign of Seleukos II,
in: K. Erickson ed., War Within the Family: The First Century of Seleucid Rule. Proceedings of a
Panel at the Celtic Conference of Classics (Bordeaux Sept. 2012) (Swansea and Oxford,
forthcoming).
73 Justin 39.1.3 rebukes Demetrios for his barbaric Parthian habits; see P. F. Mittag, Beim
Barte des Demetrios. berlegungen zur partischen Gefangenschaft Demetrios II, Klio 84.2
(2002) 37399. Admittedly, Demetrios beard may also have been a reference to Zeus, and
thus a symbol of power and victory, as was argued most recently by L.-M,. Gnther, Herrscher
als Gtter Gtter als Herrscher? Zur Ambivalenz hellenistischer Mnzbilder, in: L.-M.
Gnther and S. Plischke eds., Studien zum vorhellenistischen und hellenistischen Herrscherkult:
Verdichtung und Erweiterung von Traditionsgeflechten (Berlin 2011) 89113; E. Dbrowa,
Knige Syriens in der Gefangenschaft der Parther: zwei Episoden aus der Geschichte der
Beziehungen der Seleukiden zu den Arsakiden, Tyche 7 (1992) 4554, explains the release of
Demetrios as an attempt to control Syria in a legitimate manner, i.e. without military force.
74 For this campaign consult K. Ehling, Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der spten
Seleukiden (16463 v. Chr.). Vom Tode des Antiochos IV. bis zur Einrichtung der Provinz Syria
unter Pompeius. Historia Einzelschriften 196 (Stuttgart 2008) 200205.
75 Tacitus (Ann. 6.31) claims that in 35 CE the Parthian king Artabanus (II or III) sent an
embassy to Rome to announce that he would recapture all the lands that Cyrus and Alexander
once ruled and restore the frontiers of the Persian and Macedonian empires; Fowler 2005,

25

not the sign of some Achaemenid revival, was the fact that Mithradates used
the Seleukid title of basileus megas.76 Some decades after the death of
Mithradates I, perhaps first in 111/0,77 the Arsakids began to prefer the title
of King of Kings rather than Great King. The new title apparently was used for
the first time consistently by Mithradates II (123-87), who styled himself
basileus basiles megas on his coins,78 but it was not before the early 50s that
the title became institutionalized as standard royal style;79 Since the Seleukids
never used King of Kings, and were not even named so in Babylonian texts, the
Parthian title King of Kings may have been introduced by Mithradates II to accentuate the beginning of a new imperial era, either in opposition to his dynastic predecessors, or in response to the establishment of the Romans
hegemony in the western parts of the former Seleukid realm.80
In the same period of political change and uncertainty, Tigranes of Armenia
likely had similar pretensions when he called himself the Great and King of
Kings after his conquest of Syria. By this conquest he put an end to the existence of the Seleukid kingdom (temporarily, as it would turn out).

125127, rightly notes that although equating Parthia with Persia is commonplace in Roman
literature (p. 126) the Parthian claim to the territory of the former Macedonian (viz. Seleukid)
Empire probably is genuine.
76 W. W. Tarn, Queen Ptolemais and Apama, CQ 23.3/4 (1929) 138141, postulated that
the Arsakids later traced their descent to the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II because they
were stepping into the shoes of the Seleucids, who really were descended from Artaxerxes II
(p. 140); but Tarns hypothesis that the Seleukids descended from Artaxerxes II through
Apama, daughter of Spitamenes, lacks supporting evidence (though a late Hellenistic belief
that they did may be historical).
77 Fowler 2005, 142. There is some evidence that already Mithradates I sporadically used
King of Kings: on a Parthian relief at Hung-I Nauruzi near Susa, which has an Aramaic
inscription presumably reading mtrdt MLKYN MLK = Mithradates King of Kings (Fowler
2005, 146 with n. 64).
78 Sellwood 1971, type 27; Shayegan 2011, 4145 with the table at 232233. On
Babylonian documents, Mithradates II is given the Akkadian title ar arrni: Sachs & Hunger
1996, No. 110, rev. l. 1 (111/0), and No. 108, upper edge l. 1 (109/8), cf. Fowler 2005, 142;
one of the main theses of Shayegans study, is that the Parthian title basileus basiles was an
Achaemenid title that had been preserved by Babylonian scribes and was consciously reintroduced in the reign of Mithradates II to mark the emergence of a new Iranian dynasty in
accordance with the predictions in the so-called Dynastic Prophecy (see esp. pp. 4559);
Shayegan does not discuss the use of the titles basilissa basiles and basileus basiles by
Kleopatra VII and Ptolemy XV.
79 Fowler 2005, 142 with n. 53.
80 Mithradates II in addition introduced on his coins a new type of tiara (see Sellwood
1990, type 28), though this regalia was not used universally: see Fowler 2005, 146 n. 66,
noting that it is doubtless significant that, at the old Seleucid capital of Seleucia Tigris, the
Seleucid-style diadem is retained. On the nature of the Parthian Empire as a system of vassal
states see R. Fowler, King, bigger king, king of kings: Structuring power in the Parthian world,
in: M. Facella and T. Kaizer eds., Kingdoms and Principalities in the Roman Near East. Occidens
et Oriens 19 (Stuttgart 2010) 5779. On the title King of Kings as a break with the (Seleukid)
past see now D. Engels, Je veux tre calife la place du calife? berlegungen zur Funktion
der Titel Groknig, Knig der Knige vom 3. zum 1. Jht. V. Chr., in: V. Cojocaru, A. Cokun,
D. Mdlina eds., Interconnectivity in the Mediterranean and Pontic World During the
Hellenistic and Roman Periods (Cluj-Napoca 2014) 333-362.

26

Mithradates VI Eupator of Pontos, too, styled himself the Great to create coherence in his heterogeneous Black Sea empire, but he could do so legitimately, being able to trace his ancestry to Seleukos Nikator.81 Mithradates son
Pharnakes II, King of the Bosporus only (from 63 to 47), called himself King of
Kings (CIRB 28 and 29).82 Kleopatra VII in the so-called Donations of
Alexandria in 34 claimed the titles of Queen of Kings and King of Kings for herself and her son Ptolemy XV (Caesarion). The Donations were a public ceremony that celebrated the creation of a new empire and a new imperial era: an
amalgamation of the former Ptolemaic and Seleukid empires under the aegis
of Rome, viz. Marc Antony.83
At the beginning of this article reference was made to Antiochos I of
Kommagene and this not so very powerful dynasts peculiar assumption of the
title of Great King.84 We will now return to him to see that this claim was not
that eccentric at all. Antiochos called himself Great King first of all on the basis
of ancestry. As a direct matrilineal descendant of the disappeared imperial
house (his mother was a Seleukid), Antiochos of Kommagene and his successors could assert to have legitimate claims to the imperial title. For all we
know, Antiochos of Kommagene may have hoped to revive the old empire by
winning the support of cities and other kings through his claim to be the new
emperor and a philhellene, i.e. a protector of cities. His inherited legitimacy
is emphasized at the great sanctuary on Nemrut Da, where the two platforms
with statues of the deified Antiochos and the gods are on both terraces flanked
by genealogical portrait galleries representing respectively Antiochos
Seleukid and Achaemenid ancestors; an accompanying cultic inscription calls
him Antiochos the Great King.85 Antiochos described his dual MacedonianPersian descent as the fortunate roots of my ancestry in the great inscription
of Mount Nemrut (IGLS I No. 1, lines 2425; OGIS 383). The last king of
Kommagene, Antiochos IV Epiphanes, whose territory was extended to include Kappadokia and Kilikia by Caligula, still styled himself basileus megas on
his coins.
Why it was so important for later Hellenistic dynasties like those of Pontos
and Kommagene to claim Achaemenid descent in addition to their more firmly
established Seleukid ancestry must at present remain an open question: it may
have been the result of the fact that a Seleukid identity could only be claimed
through matrilineal descent while the Achaemenid ancestry could be attached
81 For the title of King of Kings as used by Tigranes I and Mithradates VI see R. D. Sullivan,
Near Eastern Royalty and Rome, 100-30 BC (Toronto, Buffalo, London 1990) 44 and 61.
82 On Pharnakes title see Sullivan 1990, 156.
83 Strootman 2007, 286-8, cf. id. 2014, 230232; for the political and ideological
significance of the Donations see more extensively T. Schrapel, Das Reich der Kleopatra.
Quellenkritische Untersuchungen zu den "Landschenkungen" Mark Antons (Trier 1996); and
Strootman 2010.
84 See M. Facella, La dinastia degli Orontidi nella Commagene ellenistico-romana. Studi
ellenistici 16 (Pisa and Rome 2006) esp. 137198.
85 Above, n. 2.

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to the patriline.86 The equal importance of the Seleukid and Achaemenid ancestor galleries at Mount Nemrut attest to the significance of the Seleukid line,
as does the example of Kleopatra VII, who never claimed Achaemenid ancestry
but styled herself Queen of Kings nonetheless.
To be sure, new great kings not only sprung up in the Seleukid successor
states in the west. Eukratides, who created an empire in Baktria and India from
ca. 170 to145, also took the title. The exact date and circumstances are unknown but it clearly took place in the context of the disappearance of the
Seleukids from Central Asia after the death of Antiochos III.87 Later GrecoBaktrian rulers like the rather insignificant ruler Thrason (c. 9680), and some
Indo-Greek kings like Apollodotos II and Hippostrates, thereupon saw no
problem in claiming the title of basileus megas fort themselves. Like Antiochos
I of Kommagene, they may have been claimants to the Seleukid ancestry, or
perhaps they did so in response to newcomers in the Central Asian power
struggles of the late Hellenistic Age: the nomad kings Maues and Azes I, who
had assumed the extravagant title of basileus basilen megas.88 From the
Kushan Empire in Baktria moreover come a large number of coins of a ruler
who called himself str megas, The Great Savior or The Savior, the Great,
and probably can be identified with Vima Taktu, grandfather of the wellknown Kushan emperor Kanishka.89

No descendants of the Seleukid house in the patriline seem to have survived after c. 50.
A priestess of Artemis at Laodikeia by the Sea claimed descent from Seleukos I in the Second
Century CE (CIG 4471), but there is no way to know via which branch of the family (O. D.
Hoover at the Seleukids discussion group at www.yahoogroups.com). Interestingly, the
inscriptions on the bases of the Ahnengalerie call Alexander Megas (but not the other
Seleukids), as well as Antiochos father Mithradates I Kallinikos (who had married a Seleukid
princess and for whom Achaemenid ancestry was claimed). On the importance of Seleukid
ancestry for Antiochos claim to universal kingship see my article The heroic company of my
forebears: The Seleukid and Achaemenid ancestor galleries of Antiochos I of Kommagene at
Nemrut Da and the role of royal women in the transmission of Hellenistic kingship,
forthcoming in: A. Cokun and A. McAuley eds., Seleucid Royal Women: Roles and
Representation (Swansea and Oxford, in press). On Antiochos of Kommagenes title Great King
also see M. P. Schipperheijn, Gewoner dan gedacht. De Hellenistische heersercultus van
Antiochos I van Commagene (PhD dissertation, University of Groningen, 2011) 99103, citing
all other inscriptions presenting Antiochos as a basileus megas; Antiochos is not called basileus
megas on the few coins known from this king, see O. A. Tayrek, Die Mnzprgung der Knige
von Kommagene, AW 6 (1975) 4243.
87 If Justin (38.10.5) is correct in saying that the Baktrians answered the call of Demetrios
II to send him troops for his campaign against the Parthians in Iran, Demetrios defeat and
capture in 139 by the Parthians provides a terminus post quem for Eukratides assumption of
the imperial title, which may then have been a reaction to the Parthian kings assumption of
the title of Great King.
88 R. Bracey, Alexanders lost kingdom: From Diodotus to Strato III, in: D. T. Potts and H.
P. Ray eds., Memory as History: The Legacy of Alexander in India (New Delhi 2007) 142156,
esp. 149; cf. O. Bopearachichi, Monnaies grco-bactriennes et indo-grecques et indo-grecques
(Paris 1991).
89 R. N. Frye, The Heritage of Central Asia: From Antiquity to the Turkish Expansion
(Princeton 1996) 135.
86

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CONCLUSION
Great King was more than just a cool traditional title that somehow survived
through the ages. It was the formal expression of a very practical instrument
of power: universalistic ideology. The purpose of universalism was creating
coherence in politically and culturally heterogeneous empires by providing
dispersed elites with a common value system. Although associated with the
Middle East in many respects, the 4,000 years endurance of the titles Great
King and King of Kings in various languages shows that these titles were
culturally a-specific titles. These were labels designating a certain status, comparable to Huangdi, Khagan, Augustus, or Kaiser. Since the kings of the NeoAssyrian Empire had ingrained in Middle Eastern cultures the notion that
there could be only one universal king, who was also obliged to actually try
and conquer the known world, the status of Great King in the Middle East was
transmitted through inheritance or usurped by right of victory. Not all
Seleukid kings are known to have used that title but until the reign of
Antiochos III they used the title of basileus in much the same way that most
Byzantine dynasties did: as what we would now call emperor. Only with the
sudden increase in the number of subsidiary ruler in Antiochos IIIs reign did
it become more important to stress ones status of superking.
Sporadic employment of the titles Great King and Megas by the Seleukids,
by their descendants in the Iranian-speaking north and north-western fringes
of the former empire (Armenia and Anatolia), and by the Parthians, ought not
to be understood as claims to be the heirs of the Achaemenids, though that
claim eventually turned up too in the royal houses of Pontos and Kommagene.
It rather was the other way round: the claims to an Achaemenid ancestry were
used to reinforce existing claims to universal rulership based on Seleukid descent. We see this most clearly in the self-presentation of Mithradates VI of
Pontos and Antiochos I of Kommagene.90 In the case of Kleopatra VII there was
no reference to the Achaemenids at all: in her case a Seleukid ancestry sufficed
to claim the imperial title.

90

On these identities see the forthcoming volume Persianism in Antiquity (above, n. 7).

29