The Grand Procession, Galatersieg, and Ptolemaic Kingship

95761_History:Layout 1 15/12/17 14:33 Page 181 9 THE GRAND PROCESSION, GALATERSIEG, AND PTOLEMAIC KINGSHIP Paul Johstono The Ptolemaic dynasty of Hellenistic Egypt has a reputation more for opulence, or τρυφή, than for any particularly praiseworthy quality of monarchs: wisdom, charity, stability, bravery, and the like. Athenaios, in his Deipnosophistae, could reliably dip into the Egyptian well for images of extravagance, producing accounts of super-ships that were all show, luxury barges that presaged the modern cruise ship, and a parade – the Grand Procession – with more gold, more exotic animals, and more laughably large phalli than anyone could scarcely have imagined. Austere Romans were appalled by Ptolemaic extravagance, and dour Polybios likewise found it both distasteful and deleterious to the fortunes of a state.1 For the Ptolemies, however, manifestations of wealth were performative politics, and enhanced the fortunes of their state. Ptolemy II Philadelphos was the most successful of the dynasty at converting wealth, through opulent display, into legitimacy and prestige, and was known as the most formidable, most lavish, and most magnificent of Hellenistic kings.2 Many studies have drawn attention to the second Ptolemy’s capital-intensive strategy for securing his personal rule over his father’s empire.3 His strategy worked well enough but marked a departure from traditionalist royal authority. His father and each of their contemporaries won acclamations from the soldiers on battlefields before their coronations or as confirmation to their accession. Philadelphos has thus gained a reputation as rather more a lover than a fighter. Yet this is not entirely correct.4 The trophies of a major military victory figured prominently in the Ptolemaic festival – probably the Ptolemaia – that featured Athenaios’ Grand Procession, a lengthy parade early in Philadelphos’ reign that has often occupied pride of place in the pantheon of gaudy displays. Recognizing the nature and purpose of these trophies requires adjusting the customary date for the Grand Procession and contributes to our understanding of Ptolemaic kingship. Ptolemy II ruled Egypt and far-flung Mediterranean domains from 282 to 246 BC. His father had been one of Alexander’s generals, and cultivated 181 95761_History:Layout 1 15/12/17 14:33 Page 182 Paul Johstono his association with the conqueror through the remainder of his life. Ptolemy I waged numerous campaigns against other Successors and gained several noteworthy victories, conforming to the rapidly developing and enduring model of Hellenistic kingship.5 Soldiers supported leaders who, through victories and conquests, were likely to gain them plunder and bring them home alive. His soldiers acclaimed him as king following his able defense of Egypt against Antigonos the One-Eyed – and the largest army assembled since Alexander’s Indian campaign – in 305. Considering the natural wealth and defenses of Egypt, Ptolemy I wisely avoided the aggressive, gambling campaigns that characterised the Successor Wars (321–281). For that reason, his son did not grow up in the saddle in the way the second and third generations of Seleukid and Antigonid kings did.6 When Ptolemy II became king, he had little to no military experience. Until some famous victory afforded itself to him, the best strategy Philadelphos could adopt was to emphasise his association with his father and to further his father’s ideological mission. Like his father, he cultivated the arts, and his patronage yielded numerous works that celebrated the budding dynasty and crafted multiple mythic associations between the Lagids and the divine. As Alexander had been deified following his death, Ptolemy II ensured his own father was deified soon after his passing. On the fourth anniversary of his father’s passing, and as a poignant expression of his filial piety, he established a festival called the Ptolemaia.7 It honoured his deified father and further forged the mythologies surrounding his family and their right to rule. The Ptolemaia was established as an athletic, dramatic, and equestrian competition (ἀγῶνα ἰσολύµπιον γυµνικὸν καὶ µουσικὸν καὶ ἱππικόν) held once per Olympiad, accompanying sacrifices to the deified Ptolemy I and Berenike I.8 With the wealth of Egypt at his disposal, Ptolemy developed the competition into a spectacle and event practically on par with the Olympics. The Ptolemaia incorporated features that reinforced Ptolemaic ideology: aspects of religious festival, royal cult, military review, and diplomatic embassy found places alongside the competitions. Embassies of theōroi from the Aegean world came to the Ptolemaia to enjoy the Ptolemies’ lavish hospitality and the Ptolemaia’s unmatched spectacle. Theōroi hailed, in particular, from those states that had benefited, or hoped to benefit, from royal patronage.9 From the beginning it featured a grand procession, or pompē, an elaborate parade through the city of Alexandria.10 The opulence of one of these parades surpassed all the others, and became, along with the banquet pavilion from the same festival, the subject of a lengthy description by Kallixeinos of Rhodes.11 Kallixeinos is not securely dated, but probably wrote about the middle of the second century BC.12 182 95761_History:Layout 1 15/12/17 14:33 Page 183 The grand procession, Galatersieg, and Ptolemaic kingship His chief source, as referenced in his text, was The Penteteric Records.13 His account of what is now generally known as the Grand Procession was quoted at length by Athenaios (5.196–203) as one of the chief examples of Ptolemaic wealth and display and is known only through those selections. The parade route covered approximately three and a half miles through the city, but the Procession was many miles greater in length. It featured hundreds of massive, elaborate floats, thousands of costumed actors, a host of exotic animals, a full military review, golden crowns, gold-plated and larger-than-life-sized armour, and symbolism in spades. Prominent were symbols of Ptolemaic authority across the Hellenic world, and associations between Ptolemy I and Zeus and between Ptolemy II and Dionysos, the conquering reveler were common. In addition to the procession, the royal pavilion, a banquet site on the palace grounds where the king hosted the most distinguished guests, was made up with similar pomp. Within the scarlet tent elite Greco-Macedonian diners relaxed on 130 couches, surrounded by the finest works of the day, served from dishes of gold and silver many talents in weight, as trophies overhead silently but powerfully, proclaimed the prowess of king Ptolemy. The Historiography of the Grand Procession Historians and Classicists have bickered for decades over the date of the Grand Procession and attendant Ptolemaia. The first Ptolemaia was indisputably celebrated in the winter of 279/8 BC.14 For nearly 100 years the preponderance of scholars have identified the Grand Procession with this first Ptolemaia. Others have leaned toward the second in 275/4, the third in 271/0, the fifth in 263/2, or questioned the association between the Procession and any Ptolemaia. Tarn reasoned that the absence of Arsinoe II in the Procession narrative could be resolved most easily with a date before her arrival in Egypt, and on the basis of this argument from silence associated the Grand Procession with the inaugural celebration of the event.15 The earliest date has remained the standard (although not necessarily fixed) date in most coverage of Ptolemaic or Hellenistic history.16 While Fraser, in his study of Alexandria, questioned the association between the Ptolemaia and the Procession, he nonetheless settled for a date between 280 and 275, for largely the same reasons Tarn preferred 279/8. Fraser’s pupil Rice, who composed the largest study to date of the Grand Procession, left both its association with the Ptolemaia and its date open questions, but preferred the same date range.17 Walbank, and more recently Thompson, have argued strongly – and to many, persuasively – for association with the Ptolemaia and for the 279/8 date.18 This paper will demonstrate that a date for Kallixeinos’ Grand Procession in 279/8 is impossible. 183 95761_History:Layout 1 15/12/17 14:33 Page 184 Paul Johstono Support for a later date has tended to settle around 275/4.19 While this date risks some entanglements with the absence of Arsinoe II, some have resolved the difficulty by locating the sibling marriage later than mid-winter 274.20 Foertmeyer offered the first determined proposal for dating the Grand Procession to 275/4, and specifically to December–February, on the basis of astronomical indications within the description.21 Foertmeyer’s hypothesis has received little support, but her date has received backing from two directions: from those who employ the positive evidence of Africans and African beasts in the Procession to date it subsequent to Ptolemy II’s Nubian War and from those who see the substantial military review as indicative of an imminent war, namely, the First Syrian War.22 Others have preferred to see the military review as celebration of Ptolemy’s (inflated) military victory in the same war and have dated the Procession to 271/0.23 The latest suggested date is that of Hazzard – January 262 – for whom the Grand Procession figures as a key component in a major ideological program Ptolemy II undertook that year to revitalise the monarchy.24 Unfortunately, Hazzard’s suggestion has not acquired much support. The date of the Procession remains open in large part for lack of testimony that provides more specific evidence. A woman, clad in scarlet costume, played the role Πεντετηρίς in the Grand Procession (198b), leaving little doubt the context was a Ptolemaia. The Arsinoe II question is rather complicated. Not only is it an argument from silence, Athenaios (or Kallixeinos) admits to describing only selected portions of a parade that featured many divisions (197d). Further, the second division was dedicated the parents of the kings (τοῖς τῶν βασιλέων γονεῦσι), where the plural could be construed as a reference Arsinoe II.25 The Nubian or Ethiopian details have limited utility, both because the date of Ptolemy’s campaign against Meroë is hardly set more firmly than the Procession and because the African elements in the Procession could have been accessible without a military campaign. Without a more specific date, any attempt to read the Procession for Ptolemaic royal ideology will be either faulty or, at minimum, generalised. Thus the details end up fitting a kingdom ramping up for war, and the Grand Procession resembles the autumn of 1914, or celebrating a victory after the war; the Procession can be the politics of a king newly-crowned, or of a king reinventing himself and his rule. I suggest we can do better, and in hopes of such, turn away from the Procession itself and toward the Royal Pavilion. The Royal Pavilion While the Procession was the grandest spectacle of the occasion Kallixeinos described, Ptolemy hosted his elite guests in a pavilion that was ‘beautiful 184 95761_History:Layout 1 15/12/17 14:33 Page 185 The grand procession, Galatersieg, and Ptolemaic kingship to extremes and worth hearing about’ (καλὴ εἰς ὑπερβολὴν ἀξία τε ἀκοῆς: 196a). The large structure he described shared some features with modernday athletic arenas, although on a smaller scale, and of less permanent construction.26 It was located within the palace neighbourhood, and almost certainly within gardens on the landward side of Lochias.27 The best guests were hosted on 130 couches in the middle of the tent, beneath a rectangular canopy, dyed in Tyrian purple with white fringe, suspended from ten fiftycubit-tall columns. Additional beams helped support the whole structure, which was enclosed by a covered, colonnaded peristyle on three sides. The peristyle may have been a permanent structure in the palace complex. Along the colonnade were a hundred marble sculptures of animals (ζῷα µαρµάρινα), beside each column, with Sikyonian paintings or curtains embroidered with dynastic and mythic images in the spaces between (196e–f ). Above the colonnade, the sculptures, and the artworks was the entablature, ‘covered the whole way round with shields alternating silver and gold’ (θυρεοὶ περιέκειντο ἐναλλὰξ ἀργυροῖ τε καὶ χρυσοὶ: 196f). The shields have not received the attention they merit. A recent description of the pavilion referred to the ‘beautifully elaborate cloaks, armor, and shields’ along its sides, when armour does not actually appear in the description.28 Shields were placed in public and celebratory spaces like this pavilion as trophies, monuments to victories won. Among the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean, victory brought honour and glory to the victor, but ‘there could be no honor without public proclamation; and there could be no publicity without the evidence of a trophy’.29 Trophies, often the shields and armour of the defeated army, occupied public spaces and silently proclaimed a legacy of triumph. Hellenistic monarchs, and even Roman generals operating in the Greek world, used the glory from military victories, sustained over time through trophies, to establish and buttress their legitimacy.30 Here is evidence, then, of Ptolemy II’s participation in contemporary monarchic culture, fulfilling conventional expectations by demonstrating martial prowess. The Menacing Trophies of King Ptolemy While it was not unusual that shields should appear prominently in a central location at a major royal festival, the type of shield, and the presence of a victory monument, merit remark. Kallixeinos recorded that the shields were θυρεοί. This particular detail is crucial, but technical, and so its significance has not often been appreciated. The Greeks used two types of shields traditionally: the ἀσπίς and the πέλτη, and the former in particular stood generically for shields. Both were concave, round shields. Greeks used exclusively those two shields well into the Hellenistic period.31 185