Hellenistic History Research Articles

The Boscoreale Figure-Paintings

The interpretation of the figure-scenes from the big hall of the villa of Publius Fannius Synistor, near Boscoreale, built and decorated probably soon after the middle of the first century B.C., has been much discussed during the half-century since their discovery. No theory yet put forward, however, has met with general acceptance; and indeed there is no general agreement on the question whether the characters are taken from Greek religious mythology, Hellenistic history, or Roman daily life. The theory here advanced is in many points conjectural, but it does, I think, take one step forward on solid ground. If that step be accepted, it becomes virtually certain that the subject is historical.The surviving figures and groups have been wrenched from their decorative setting, which has been largely destroyed; but it was described and partly drawn by Barnabei, and its character and place in the decoration of the villa as a whole have been admirably interpreted by Beyen.

A Babylonian King List of the Hellenistic Period

A number of cuneiform tablets containing chronological lists of kings of Babylonia and Assyria from various periods have been published during the last seventy-five years. None, however, of these King Lists deals with the Seleucid period, which is now covered for the first time.The present edition of the King List is intended to be a preliminary one. Once it is subjected to the detailed criticism of the Greek historians and after the one minor philological difficulty that remains is solved by our Assyriological colleagues, we expect to republish it in a more definitive form in a larger work that we are planning on the fragments of Hellenistic history that are embedded in a considerable body of unpublished astronomical texts of the Seleucid and Arsacid periods. On that occasion, we also expect to reconsider in detail the chronological data contained in the date formulas of economic and literary cuneiform texts as well as in astronomical tablets of various types, both published and unpublished. Rather than wait until every scrap of Babylonian, let alone classical, evidence has been sifted, we have thought that the interests of scholarship would best be served by the present prompt publication, particularly since the authors of this article are primarily Assyriologists and their knowledge of Hellenistic history is therefore not very profound.

Perioeci in Crete

T rHE object of the present study is to attempt to answer the question whether there existed in Crete a class of subject communities with local self-government similar to the of Sparta. Throughout the paper perioeci will always be used in this sense. If it is doubtful that a word in a source has this meaning, it will be given in its Greek form. The study is based chiefly on epigraphical evidence. A majority of the inscriptions used are found in the Sammlung der griechischen Dialekt-Inschriften, but in some cases it has seemed advisable to cite also earlier editions.1 The conclusion reached is that there is sufficient evidence to affirm that existed, and to make it possible to describe their status. It has often been held that there were in Crete, but most of the discussions in handbooks and histories are based too exclusively on the literary sources. On the one hand, there is Aristotle, who in the Politics uses -7rEpLOLKOL to designate a class that corresponds to the helots of Sparta2 and so seems to imply that Crete had no class corresponding to the Spartan perioeci; on the other hand, the Hellenistic historian Sosicrates states that the Cretans applied the term 7rEpL0LKOL to their '7rW'KOOL.3 The evidence of another Hellenistic writer, Dosiades,