Download PDF | The Kingdom of Priam_ Lesbos and the Troad Between Anatolia and the Aegean-Oxford University Press, USA (2019).
377 Pages
Acknowledgements
I have incurred many debts in the course of writing this book, and so it is a pleasure to finally be able to acknowledge them here. My supervisor Peter Thonemann has been an exemplary mentor to me ever since our first tutorial in Michaelmas 2007. Throughout the long process of researching and writing my doctoral thesis and then turning it into a book he has provided me with invaluable guidance at every stage while always encouraging me to go my own way. John Ma and Graham Shipley examined the thesis on which this book is based and provided me with valuable suggestions and corrections. I have subsequently had many more conversations with John about this book, some almost as lengthy as the viva itself, and I am enormously grateful to him for his constant willingness to be a sounding board for my ideas. I was lucky to have Simon Hornblower as a book adviser, who read everything I sent him in record time, made innumerable improvements to the manuscript both large and small, and suggested the title to me.
Ben Raynor, Thom Russell, and Alex Poots read and commented upon parts or all of the original thesis, and Paul Kosmin read both the original thesis and the finished book and on both occasions offered characteristically astute suggestions. It would have been difficult to write the section on late posthumous Lysimachi in Chapter 1 without the generous help of Constantin Marinescu, whose important monograph on the Lysimachi coinages is forthcoming. Ash Saka showed me round Antandros, shared her considerable knowledge of the Troad with me, and kindly read Chapter 2. Leah Lazar read Chapter 4 and helped me tighten up my argument in a number of places. Georgy Kantor and Martin Hallmannsecker both commented extensively on Chapter 6 and helped me navigate what at the time was a new field for me. For help with individual queries I am grateful to Brian Rose (Chapter 1), Reyhan Kérpe (Chapter 2), Robin Lane Fox (Chapter 3), Charles Crowther, William Mack, Yannis Kourtzellis, Volker Heuchert (Chapter 5), and Scott Scullion (Chapter 6).
Although Alex Dale, Guy Westwood, and George Artley have not, I think, read a word of this book, over the years their conversation, erudition, and insights have helped me improve it in any number of ways. On Lesbos, I was fortunate to be put in touch with Nikos Dais, who guided me and Lydia around the western half of the island in July 2015 and who has taught me a great deal about the island’s more recent history.
I likewise owe a debt of thanks to my friends Merve Kiittik and Nazh Alimen for their help with my Turkish and for answering all my questions about modern Turkey. Finally, I would like to acknowledge all the help I received from Georgina Leighton at OUP during the production process and to thank Timothy Beck for his sharp and sensitive copyediting of the text.
Only after completing the thesis did I really come to appreciate how fundamental numismatics should be to writing any kind of regional history, and as a result I began to collect the autonomous coinages of Lesbos, the Troad, Aiolis, and Mysia from the fifth-first century sc. This vast body of evidence, now numbering c.40,000 coins in my database, has proved to be an enormously rich source of material for writing regional history. At the same time, a huge amount of basic work still remains to be done on these coinages, and it has not been possible to complete all of this and get it into print in time for this book’s publication. While less than ideal, I have therefore decided to include this work in progress in summary form when it makes a substantial contribution to the argument of the chapter, but readers should treat these discussions as preliminary until the studies on which they are based are properly published. In coming late to numismatics, I was lucky to have patient teachers in Jack Kroll, Richard Ashton, and Jonathan Kagan. Subsequently, I have learned a tremendous amount from Peter van Alfen, Francois de Callatay, Philip Kinns, Frédérique Duyrat, Simon Glenn, and Ute Wartenberg. I am particularly grateful to Ute for the unstinting support which she and the ANS have provided to my research, and to Ute and Jon for their generous hospitality whenever I am in New York. For help with material in museum collections I would like to thank Amelia Dowler (London), Julien Oliver (Paris), Bernhard Weisser (Berlin), Klaus Vondrovec (Vienna), Helle Horsnaes (Copenhagen), Volker Heuchert (Oxford), and Aliye Erol-Ozdizbay (Istanbul).
As a graduate student I was lucky enough to be funded by grants from the AHRC. My travel to Lesbos and the Troad over the years has been generously funded by Balliol College, New College, The Queen’s College, and the Craven Fund. I am especially grateful to the Provost and Fellows of The Queen’s College for electing me to a Junior Research Fellowship in Classics. This provided me, above all, with the luxury of time—to think, to improve my languages, to broaden my interests, to sink weeks and months into projects which I knew would not immediately come to fruition. Funding from Queen’s also supported me during stays in Vienna and Berlin during which the first half of the thesis was completely re-drafted. For arranging library access and desk space for me and for making me feel welcome I would like to think Kaja Harter-Uibopuu and Thomas Corsten in Vienna and Philipp von Rummel in Berlin. Final revisions to the book were completed while I was holding stipendiary lectureships at Worcester College and at Brasenose and St Anne’s Colleges. It was not always easy to juggle work on the book with a full schedule of teaching, and I am indebted to both colleagues and students at all three colleges for their understanding and support. I owe a special thanks to Brasenose College for the financial support of the Jeffrey Bequest which covered the costs of securing image permissions for the book.
Throughout my studies, my wife Lydia Matthews has been a constant source of love, support, and companionship. She has put up with dusty museum storerooms, unairconditioned dolmusler, a “quick walk’ up to the site of Alexandreia Troas in the blazing midday heat, and a great deal of Greek history, Greek epigraphy, and Greek numismatics along the way. She is, without a doubt, the most patient Roman historian I know. In writing this book I have benefited enormously from her sharp intellect and in particular from her valiant attempts to curb my natural tendency towards prolix and poorly organized argumentation. Finally, my parents Tricia and Cynan have always been generous and unstinting in their support of all my academic endeavours, and so it is to Lydia and to them that I dedicate this book.
Introduction
0.1 UNTHINKING A SPACE
Spaces come with baggage—ideas about what a space ‘means’, what a space and its resources are ‘for’, which spaces ‘naturally’ belong together. Writing regional history thus requires us to unthink what we think we know about a space in order to see how else it could be configured—what other meanings it could be imbued with, what other uses it could be put to, what other spaces it could be a part of or divided up into. One of the purposes of regional history is therefore to recover these lost ways of seeing the world—to understand how they came about, what factors (both human and geographical) maintained these conceptions of space, and how they eventually collapsed and were reconfigured into fresh understandings of space. Within the region that is the subject of this book, the separation of Lesbos from Anatolia following the population exchanges of 1922-3 provides the most dramatic example of such a shift, and as a result a particularly clear illustration of why we need to unthink familiar spaces in order to understand how they have worked in the past.
On the Ist of September 1907, Vasilios Goutos sent his friend Georgios Sakkaris a present of twenty quails that he had shot just that morning. Vasilios was an olive oil merchant from Mytilene on Lesbos, Georgios the headmaster of a school in Kydonies (Ayvalik), the major town on the Anatolian coast opposite. That same day, Michael Strongylis, a factory owner in Kydonies and a correspondent of the Brothers Goutos export firm in the town, sent Vasilios a present—this time, two hundred cockles which he had gathered from the seabed earlier that day.’
The casual exchange of perishable foods between friends and business associates on opposite coasts is as clear an illustration as one could ask for of the remarkably close relationship which once existed between Lesbos and Anatolia. However, within fifteen years all this was gone—a process beginning with the independence of Lesbos from the Ottoman Empire in 1912 and culminating in the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-22 and the population exchanges of 1922-3 permanently severed the relationship between island and mainland. A space encompassing Lesbos and coastal Anatolia that had once been impossible to conceive of as anything other than an indivisible whole had suddenly been divided into two separate and disconnected spaces, a pair of binary opposites—Greek, Christian, European Lesbos vs. Turkish, Muslim, Oriental Anatolia. Shallow as its historical roots are, this conception of how the relationship between the offshore islands and the coast of Anatolia opposite ‘ought’ to work has had a significant impact on how ancient historians have approached the history of this region in antiquity.”
Since 1922, this sense of the ‘natural’ separateness of the island from the mainland and of the region as a frontier rather than a hub has been maintained through a panoply of institutions—legal prohibitions, military force, social taboos, and political culture—all of which have served to make the separation in some respects feel inevitable, almost natural. Yet the possibility that the geographical logic of this region as a connected and coherent whole might reassert itself has remained ever present. For example, a recent relaxation of visa requirements has allowed the many Turkish tourists who holiday annually on the coast opposite to replace the European tourists whose visits to Lesbos dwindled in the wake of the economic crash of 2008 and plummeted still further following the refugee crisis of 2015-16. Indeed, the refugee crisis itself has demonstrated the ease with which the carefully constructed separation of Lesbos from Anatolia can be dismantled and the status of Lesbos and the other east Aegean islands as major hubs for movement in the eastern Mediterranean reinstated. Both these recent developments recall the very different spatial configuration that prevailed in this region in one form or another from the Bronze Age through to 1922.
As Evridiki Sifnaiou has detailed, before the collapse of GrecoTurkish relations in 1922, the economies of Lesbos and the Anatolian coast opposite were profoundly interdependent.’ Indeed, this relationship with the mainland was thought to be so fundamental that in 1925 the Lesbian Chamber of Commerce published a report arguing that trade with the mainland would soon exceed pre-war levels and that new transhipment warehouses should therefore be built to accommodate the growth in trade with the Turkish Republic that was expected once the current political difficulties had been overcome.* With the benefit of hindsight this sounds impossibly optimistic.
However, to be more sympathetic, what this really illustrates is how inconceivable the idea of a Lesbos disconnected from Anatolia was to people who had experienced a time when the two places constituted a single, densely interconnected space. As Sifnaiou emphasizes, part of what made a Lesbos disconnected from the mainland so unimaginable to contemporaries was that these economic relationships were not just restricted to the realm of business, but brought in their wake social and cultural interconnections that bound island and mainland together into a single society.” The letters in the Brothers Goutos archive illustrate this in microcosm, showing us a pair of personal relationships where the economic, the social, and the cultural are inextricably enmeshed with one another. As one old man, who was from Eresos in western Lesbos and had been born in 1906, put it in an oral history about the population exchanges, ‘Our island suckled on Asia Minor’.®
Regrettably, no source from antiquity, never mind the period covered in this book (seventh century Bc-first century AD), is quite as rich and revealing as what is available in abundance to modern historians of this region. However, in deciding which questions to ask of the frequently rather intractable ancient evidence, it is often helpful to look at more recent and better attested periods to formulate our hypotheses. For example, the impact of 1922 on the relationship between island and mainland illustrates how the spatial organization of a region can change dramatically, how human factors can either promote or suppress connectivity, and how connectivity itself is far from being an immutable geographical ‘fact’.
This is an important consideration, for example, when looking at regional organizations such as the koinon of Athena Ilias in Chapter 1 or the Lesbian koinon in Chapter 5 which are all too easily assumed to be the inevitable consequence of the existence of ‘natural’ regions such as the Troad or Lesbos. Likewise, the regime of high connectivity that we see in this region before 1922 suggests that the scattered evidence we have for the ease and frequency of maritime connections between island and mainland in antiquity are typical rather than exceptional.
In turn, the fact that in the modern period these economic relationships quickly developed into social and cultural connections, and the way in which these were maintained as much by private individuals as by states, is a reminder of two things. Firstly, it shows the importance of these economic relationships to the social and cultural history of a region (a theme that runs through all the chapters of this book). Secondly, it highlights the state-centric bias of much of our ancient evidence, which allows us to say a great deal about the perspective of Mytilene qua state, but comparatively little about the perspectives of individual Mytilenaians. This is a problem particularly encountered in Chapters 4-6 in the context of Lesbos and which Chapter 2 attempts to overcome in the case of Mt Ida where we happen to have the evidence to recover non-state perspectives.
While there is no one term for the interrelated set of spaces that I study in this book, the closest approximation is to be found in the final book of the Iliad. The Trojan king Priam has slipped unnoticed into the Greek camp with the help of the god Hermes so that he can supplicate the hero Achilles and ask him to release the body of his son, Hektor. Confronted with the pitiable sight of this mourning father, Achilles relents in his anger towards Hektor for having killed Patroklos and the two men share in one another’s sorrow for the friends and family each has lost in the Trojan War. As Achilles considers the troubles that have come upon Priam and his own part in these, he reflects upon the Trojan king’s reversal of fortune:
And of you, old man, we hear that in former times you were happy, how of all the area that Lesbos, seat of Makar, bounds, and Phrygia in the uplands, and the boundless Hellespont—in these lands they say that you, old man, were pre-eminent in wealth and in sons.’
Since antiquity, commentators have recognized that Achilles is here describing the geographical extent of Priam’s kingdom. However, although the kingdom of Priam which Achilles describes overlaps with or abuts multiple ancient regional designations (the Troad and Lesbos respectively) or parts of these (northern Aiolis, western Mysia), it cannot be adequately described by any one of them.
While the modern geographic terms ‘north-east Aegean’ and ‘north-west Anatolia’ provide a much less cumbersome way to refer to this area, both encode the idea that this region is best understood as the periphery of somewhere else (the Aegean and therefore Greece; Anatolia and therefore the Near East). However, as we have seen, while this may conform to the current conception of Lesbos and Anatolia as two distinct spheres, it is a deeply misleading way of thinking about how this region has worked at almost any point in its history prior to 1922. Thus the title of this book—The Kingdom of Priam: Lesbos and the Troad between Anatolia and the Aegean—is an attempt to capture a way of thinking about this region which has come to seem alien: as a set of spaces which are quite naturally interrelated to one another, and as the centre of its own world.
MAKING A REGION
The foregoing discussion has implied the geographical extent of the region that I am interested in (the Troad, Lesbos—yes; Aiolis, Mysia—sometimes; Anatolia, the Aegean—in part) without committing to a precise territorial definition. This is a deliberate choice, but also one that needs to be defended. Over the last century, the trajectory of the debate about regions among geographers (particularly in anglophone scholarship) has been towards ever greater uncertainty about the possibility and usefulness of defining regions.* As George Kimble put it in his essay, “The inadequacy of the regional concept’: ‘Our suspicion is that regional geographers may perhaps be trying to put boundaries that do not exist around areas that do not matter.” A similar charge could thus be levelled against regional historians, and indeed under the influence of this debate among geographers some ancient historians have made precisely this argument.’
This scepticism is salutary but not necessarily warranted. For example, historians will not be impressed with the recurring claim made by critics of regionalism among geographers that, depending on the era of the scholar, industrialization or technological progress or globalization or the internet has done away with ‘the region’. Apart from the fact that arguments of this sort have time and again been proved wrong on their own terms (e.g. with the concept of glocalization, which reaffirms the importance of the local and the regional, emerging out of globalization, which was meant to have retired these issues), this view also tacitly treats past societies, for which these modern considerations are largely irrelevant, as unworthy of study.' Likewise, given the discipline of geography’s nomothetic impulse as a social science, the idea of regions as unique and unreplicable places is necessarily viewed with distrust. By contrast, this is hardly a problem for historians, who are invested in the explanation of the particular event, the specific circumstance, and thus, quite naturally, the unique region.
Similarly, the richly descriptive style of regional geography championed by Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918), which was fundamental to Louis Robert’s conception of the role historical geography should play in ancient history, has been criticized by anglophone geographers on the grounds that it produces little more than ‘pleasant cultural essays’, the implication being that this material is anecdote rather than data.’ However, as the French geographer Paul Claval has remarked, when done well this approach produces what Clifford Geertz termed a ‘thick description’, an approach to ethnography that does not just observe and classify the behaviour that the researcher is interested in, but also tries to explain the broader context in which that behaviour occurs and to make the web of signification in which that behaviour is embedded explicit to an outsider.'*
Most significantly, however, the assumption made by geographers who criticize the regional concept that regions should be static entities with stable and precise boundaries is seriously open to question. By contrast, in defining the Mediterranean Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell have gone out of their way to avoid this kind of precision: “To borrow an evocative term from mathematics, the Mediterranean is a “fuzzy set”. A certain vagueness should be of the essence in the way that it is conceived.’ As they explain in relating this notion of the ‘fuzzy set’ to individual regions within the Mediterranean: “They will be seen to have their foci and their margins; but these are always changing, can seldom be easily related to aspects of geography, and are at all times responsive to the pressures of a much larger setting.’!” If the regional phenomena that make up a region are to be of any interest to an historian, then they need to represent dynamic historical processes.
As a result, we should expect the spatial extent of these phenomena, and thus the region that they make up, to be in a constant state of flux. A precise and static definition of a region is therefore neither possible nor desirable.'° We are thus better off thinking of regions not as territorial entities, but rather as networks of relationships that flourish, persist, and collapse according to the principles which we are familiar with from network theory.'”
With this in mind, the chapters of this book do not attempt to give an exhaustive account of everything we know about this particular corner of the ancient world (the ‘tell all you know approach famously derided by Moses Finley), but rather focus on illustrating the factors that promoted regional integration and the politics that such processes of integration entailed.'* Thus, Chapters 1-3 look at the human and geographical factors which facilitated regional integration in the Troad and the winners and losers which this process produced, while Chapters 4-6 look at the extent to which Lesbos was integrated into the mainland and the impact which these connections to the mainland had on the internal dynamic of the island.
0.3 THE EXPERIENCE OF REGIONALISM
This dynamic definition of a region suggests that the experience of regionalism is, at its most basic level, one of encountering other members of one’s regional network with relatively greater frequency compared to members of other regional networks. While this is to be expected, the consequences of such encounters for the social, cultural, and political history of a region are far from being equally self-evident. As discussed in the introduction to Chapter 3, much contemporary political and economic theory assumes that greater economic integration of a region will foster a sense of solidarity among the inhabitants of that region, and that this greater willingness to cooperate will in turn lead to ever greater levels of political integration. This is, for example, the theory on which much EU policymaking is explicitly built, and in 2013, when I was completing the doctorate on which this book is based, it still seemed to be a relatively well-founded assumption.
In the interim, however, developments such as the Brexit vote in 2016 and, more generally, the increased popularity of nationalist parties in European politics have underlined the key point that processes of regional integration are as likely to foster resistance to integration and to fuel intra-regional rivalries as they are to encourage regional solidarity and yet further integration.’ While we might not consider indulging in intra-regional rivalries and adopting a recalcitrant attitude to co-operation to be constructive forms of regional interaction, they are nevertheless just as characteristic of the experience of regionalism as forms of interaction that we might consider rather more beneficial for all involved.
From this perspective, the key political questions in regional history becomes the tension between integration and particularism, the compromises that are struck to resolve this tension, and the particular circumstances in which the attractions of integration are able to win out over the default position of political particularism. This tension is explored in particular depth in Chapters 1 and 5 which look at two regional associations—the koinon of Athena Ilias in the Troad and the koinon of the Lesbians—in order to establish the circumstances in which the member states of these two organizations were willing to accept a trade-off of political sovereignty for the benefits of co-operation (e.g. economic profit, collective defence, and so on).
In addition, Chapters 1, 5, and 6 also explore how, depending on the circumstances, collective regional identities can function either as a source of intra-regional rivalries or alternatively as an argument for political solidarity. For example, festivals organized by regional associations such as the Panathenaia of Athena Ilias or the Lesbian koinon’s festival at Messon can seem crucial to creating a sense of regional solidarity—they express a collective identity, involve shared religious rites, and facilitate regional economic integration through the festival’s major market, the panegyris. Yet at the same time they also provided the ideal venue for fostering and indulging in intraregional rivalries, with member states contending to win the most competitions, to provide the most generous benefactors, and to achieve the most prominent position within these organizations.
Some of the reasons why states might resist regional integration are explored in Chapters 3 and 4, which consider the carving up of the middle Scamander valley by Ilion and Alexandreia Troas in the Hellenistic period (Chapter 3) and Mytilene’s control of its mainland peraia in the fifth century (Chapter 4). In both cases, regional integration delivered greater profitability for some (Ilion, Alexandreia, and Mytilene) at the expense of autonomy and political representation for others (the cities of the middle Scamander valley, the communities in the peraia). As a result, in these cases regional integration would not necessarily have been viewed as a positive development by those who were subjected to it, and it is revealing that when opportunities for autonomy arose these communities seized them.
This tension between centrifugal forces of integration and centripetal forces of particularism produced a pattern of expansion and contraction in the case of the territory and citizen body of Alexandreia Troas that Louis Robert poetically likened to the rhythm of respiration.”° As he noted, these regional dynamics intersected with and were amplified by the high politics of Greek history, a theme that will be discussed in the final section of this introduction.’ Finally, it is important to emphasize that this political fractiousness at the interstate level did not translate into or result from a poorly integrated regional economy. On the contrary, case studies such as the forests of Mt Ida (Chapter 2) and the discussions of coin circulation in this book (in particular Chapters 1.3 and 4.3.2) illustrate that strong economic relationships could exist within this region without necessarily developing into political co-operation.
0.4 THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL
In an essay written towards the end of his life, Moses Finley launched an attack on regional history on the grounds that, at least as he felt it was being practised by his contemporaries, it represented a theory-less approach to the ancient world that was therefore not really history but rather antiquarianism.”” His concern was that scholars were choosing to do regional history out of a misguided belief that collecting all the facts about a particular region is the same thing as understanding its history.”? A related criticism is that the focus of regional history is often too narrow and its intellectual concerns too parochial.
This results not just in regional history only being regional history (i.e. a book about Lesbos and the Troad only being of interest to people who want to know about those places), but also in regional history failing to take account of how ideas about the macroregional context of the Mediterranean should change how we think about the regional context of Lesbos and the Troad. As Cyprian Broodbank has put it: “Archaeology in the Mediterranean too easily finds itself in the position of a person at the bottom of a well, who can see a small patch of sky with perfect clarity, but misses the scope and constellations of the heavens.’**
These criticisms of how regional history can be done badly are of course well made. However, they also raise the question of what contribution regional history can make to our broader picture of the ancient Mediterranean beyond adding data, documenting regional diversity, and introducing nuance and complexity into grand synthetic narratives. One such contribution is to our understanding of ancient imperialism.
While empires in antiquity of course represented themselves as directing events from the centre with unquestioned obedience, in reality the ‘texture’ of imperial rule varied greatly depending on local conditions and on the priorities of the local actors through whom empires ruled.*° As a result, we see the internal problematics of a region—the view from the bottom of the well— interacting dialectically with the external problematics of empire, with each continuously shaping and re-shaping the other, thus giving ancient imperialism a distinctively regional character.”°
Chapters 1 and 5, which focus on the koinon of Athena Ilias and the koinon of the Lesbians, examine how periods of general political uncertainty in the eastern Mediterranean, such as the contests between Alexander’s successors 323-301, the chaos following the collapse of the Ptolemaic Empire in the Aegean c.205, and the period of the Mithridatic Wars, all had the effect of fundamentally altering regional dynamics by tipping the scales in favour of co-operation rather than rivalry.
Chapters 3, 4, and 6 consider how imperial priorities interact with regional priorities and to what extent empires consciously manipulated regional dynamics or were instead manipulated by regional actors. Chapter 3 looks at the case of a royal horse stud in the middle Scamander valley that was set up at the request of the Persian Empire to provide it with cavalry, but was implemented in such a way by local elites so as to further entrench an unequal power dynamic between the central Troad and the rest of the satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia.
Chapter 4 examines the manner in which the Athenian Empire dismantled the Mytilenaian peraia, arguing that the decision to treat all these communities as independent poleis was designed to disrupt Mytilenaian control of the mainland by creating new local elites who would be invested in maintaining a politically fragmented landscape of small, autonomous cities. Finally, Chapter 6 looks at how Mytilene’s sense of regional identity in the first century Bc and ap evolved in response to both the internal problematics of the region, in this case regional rivalries with cities in Aiolis, and the external problematics of empire, above all how Rome chose to administer the province of Asia and how loyalty was shown towards the emperor and his family.
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