The Attalids of Pergamon and Anatolia
Money, Culture, and State Power

Reveals how the empire of Attalid Pergamon dominated the Hellenistic world by controlling culture and identity through its fiscal system.

Noah Kaye (Author)

9781316510599, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 May 2022

464 pages, 30 b/w illus. 5 maps
25.1 x 17.5 x 3.1 cm, 0.963 kg

'This brilliant study is a very rare bird that combines the study of economic and administrative history with the history of culture and identity. … this is a highly stimulating book, which deserves to be read attentively by very many different audiences.' Kostas Vlassopoulos, Greece and Rome

Historians have long wondered at the improbable rise of the Attalids of Pergamon after 188 BCE. The Roman-brokered Settlement of Apameia offered a new map – a brittle framework for sovereignty in Anatolia and the eastern Aegean. What allowed the Attalids to make this map a reality and leave their indelible Pergamene imprint on our Classical imagination? In this uniquely comprehensive study of the political economy of the kingdom, Noah Kaye rethinks the impact of Attalid imperialism on the Greek polis and the multicultural character of the dynasty's notorious propaganda. By synthesizing new findings in epigraphy, archaeology, and numismatics, he shows the kingdom for the first time from the inside. The Pergamene way of ruling was a distinctively non-coercive and efficient means of taxing and winning loyalty. Royal tax collectors collaborated with city and village officials on budgets and minting, while the kings utterly transformed the civic space of the gymnasium.

Introduction
1. Eating with the tax-collectors
2. The skeleton of the state
3. The king's money
4. Cities and other civic organisms
5. Hastening to the gymnasium
6. Pergamene panhellenism
Conclusion
Appendix of Epigraphical Documents.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]