ANOTHER CENTURY OF GODS? A RE-EVALUATION OF SELEUCID RULER CULT.
This paper proposes that living Seleucid kings were recognized as divine by the royal court before the reign of Antiochus III despite lacking an established centralized ruler cult like their fellow kings, the Ptolemies. Owing to the nature of the surviving evidence, we are forced to rely heavily on...
| Publicado en: | Classical Quarterly Vol. 68; no. 1; pp. 97 - 112 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Cambridge University Press
May2018
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=136611846&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 136611846 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00098388 CQU jtl: Classical Quarterly issn: 00098388 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: May2018 vid: 68 iid: 1 pid: 15979 pub: Cambridge University Press artinfo: ui: 136611846 10.1017/S0009838818000071 ppf: 97 ppct: 15 formats: tig: atl: ANOTHER CENTURY OF GODS? A RE-EVALUATION OF SELEUCID RULER CULT. aug: au: Erickson, Kyle affil: University of Wales Trinity Saint David su: Seleucids Middle East history -- To 622 Antiochus III, King of Syria, ca. 242 B.C.-187 B.C. Kings & rulers Ptolemaic dynasty, 305 B.C.-30 B.C. sug: subj: Seleucids Middle East history -- To 622 Antiochus III, King of Syria, ca. 242 B.C.-187 B.C. Kings & rulers Ptolemaic dynasty, 305 B.C.-30 B.C. ab: This paper proposes that living Seleucid kings were recognized as divine by the royal court before the reign of Antiochus III despite lacking an established centralized ruler cult like their fellow kings, the Ptolemies. Owing to the nature of the surviving evidence, we are forced to rely heavily on numismatics to construct a view of Seleucid royal ideology. Regrettably, it seems that up until now much of the numismatic evidence for the divinity of living Seleucid rulers has not been fully considered. I argue that the evidence from silver coinage produced in the name of the Seleucid kings presents a version of the official image of the reigning king and that images which portray the king as divine reflect central acceptance of the king's divinity. This is clear from the epithets on the coinage of Antiochus IV and his successors, but I will argue that the same principle holds for all earlier Seleucid kings. Thus coinage with divine images of Seleucid kings provided one of the mechanisms through which the royal court transmitted the divine nature of the kings to the population. As we will see, in the case of Antiochus Hierax, local considerations also influenced the numismatic representation of the king. This blurring of boundaries between the local veneration of the king, which has long been accepted as normal civic practice in the Greek city-states and in non-Greek temples, and the royal images of the divine king calls into question the strict division between civic and centralized ruler cults. The reflection of local cults within royal ideology can be seen as a manifestation of a negotiating model of Seleucid power that relied heavily on a dialogue with a wide range of interested groups. This article argues that the inconsistencies in the development of an iconography of divine kingship before the reign of Antiochus IV is a manifestation of the same phenomenon. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2018 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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