Papers in this seminar series will present current research on the transition from Hellenistic to Roman Asia Minor and Aegean Greece. Peter Thonemann has recently drawn attention to the importance of the ‘short second century BC’ (c. 188–133 BC in Asia Minor, perhaps 196–146 BC in mainland Greece) as a period of transition, neither straightforwardly Hellenistic nor straightforwardly Roman. This series will consider this transition in the broader perspective of the ‘long second century BC’, studying second-century developments together with their older roots and later after-effects. Continuities with the third century and earlier were accompanied in the second century by significant changes, some of which anticipated the Roman Imperial period; others pointed to alternative possible futures not eventually realised, as F. Gerardin and others have recently emphasised. Well-established charismatic, militaristic Hellenistic monarchy co-existed with moves towards more ‘bourgeois’ and bureaucratic monarchical government, including new practices of city foundation and regulation. Similarly, the traditional egalitarian, law-bound, exclusive polis model thrived (in some regions revived) alongside moves towards more hierarchy and even ‘depoliticisation’ or ‘privatisation’ of civic life and service; this complex mix went hand in hand with the evolution of new forms of civic interaction which cut across traditional divisions of ethnicity, status and sometimes gender, a process also evident in federal systems and in local voluntary associations. Changes in politics and society will also be brought into connection with developments in culture and intellectual life.
Jan 23 Court Room Aneurin Ellis-Evans (Oxford) : The rise and fall of the civic library
Jan. 30 Room STB03, Andreas Victor Walser (Zürich) : After the war – Pergamon in
Stewart House the first century BC: A new inscription concerning Diodoros Pasparos
Feb. 13 Court Room François Gerardin (Yale/Freiburg): Polis formation in the Attalid
and Ptolemaic kingdoms in the second century BC
Feb. 27 Court Room Paul Ernst (Paris-Nanterre): Formes et chronologie du cosmopolitisme délien de la troisième
guerre de Macédoine aux guerres mithridatiques
March 5 Court Room Matthias Haake (Münster): Old matters in new words? Philosophy
between traditional elitist practice and innovative public discourse in the ‘long second century
BC’
March 12 Court Room Christel Müller (Paris/Nanterre): Death of the Union: what really
happened to the Boeotian koinon in 172/171 BC?
March 19 Room G22 Myrto Hatzimichali (Cambridge): Posidonius and the end of
Hellenistic philosophy
