1 Kingship, not monarchy. Some new directions in the study of Hellenistic kingship J.G. Manning FORTHCOMING, from the Tombros Conference on Hellenistic Monarchies, Ed. Mark Munn, Donald Redford and Susan Redford. Much has been written about Hellenistic kings, and rightly so. 1 They were a central political institution of the period. In places like Egypt and western Asia, where monarchy had been the central institution of governance for millennia, the new kings of the Hellenistic world adapted to local expectations, although there were new elements- Alexander was always in the background, and Macedonian kingship more generally, and there was, perhaps, even a tinge of Homeric kingship. 2 But there were new features in part driven by ideological adaptation and in part driven by the new realities of the age including the attitude toward the divinity of kings as expressed in royal cult. In the world of the Greek city-states, in places like Athens, accommodation to the new political world after Alexander was the rule. Kings and royal administration were the dominant power in the Mediterranean world after Alexander, and it is right to emphasize that we are dealing with a “Hellenistic” phenomenon that unites the Ptolemies, the Seleukids with kings like Hiero II in Sicily (Walbank 1984). But we cannot, of course, discount entirely ancient political relationships between priesthoods and kings, and the Demotic Egyptian text known as the Demotic Chronicle is an important illustration that in fact the institutions of kingship was encapsulated by written rules of good and bad behavior, with consequences. 3 Nevertheless Ptolemaic kings stood on the periphery of the Egyptian world and were far less important to Egypt than were the temples. 4 And temples we know, as with the Greek cities, were major centers of social power in their own right. We need not look much beyond the trilingual priestly decrees from Egypt, or events of the Maccabean revolt, to understand this. The world of kings has been one of the richest veins in scholarship across pre- modern societies over many decades. Studies have tended to concentrate on two general 1 See the overviews by Mooren (1983); Ma (2003). On the divinity of Hellenistic kings and ruler cult, see inter alia Walbank (1984: 87-96); Chaniotis (2003). 2 Samuel (1993: 181) with emphasis on Theocrit. Idyll 17, for which see Hunter (2003). 3 Johnson (1983) on the text as expressing a “theory of kingship,” and the literature cited below, n. xxx. For a Biblical perspective on Kingship, see Miller (2011). 4 Baines (1995).