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I know that not many people on this forum are anywhere close to Canada, but this might be something worth following! If I can attend maybe I will do a conference report like I did for the conference on the tacticians in Winnipeg.

Frances Pownall wrote:CFP: THE COURTS OF PHILIP II AND ALEXANDER THE GREAT:
MONARCHY AND POWER IN ANCIENT MACEDONIA
University of Alberta, May 2–4, 2018

From Frances Pownall

This conference, to be held at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada) on May 2-4, 2018, will explore the transformative effects of the reigns of Philip II and Alexander the Great, who are seminal figures in the emergence of a court society that was highly influential upon later periods of history.

Proposals are welcome from all academic disciplines addressing any aspect of the courts of Philip and Alexander, including (but not limited to):

kingship and the role of the king
court institutions and dynamics
the nature of royal authority
royal self-fashioning and/or display
interactions with the Greek world and Achaemenid Persia
the Macedonian army
the Macedonian elite
legitimation and/or ideology
the role of propaganda
material culture
the source tradition
the divinity of Alexander
the Alexander legend
the image of Alexander (literary or artistic) from ancient times until the modern world
the influence of the courts of Philip and Alexander

Papers should be approximately 20 minutes in length. Paper proposals should include a title, an abstract of c. 100-150 words, and a brief c.v., and must be submitted to Frances Pownall (frances.pownall@ualberta.ca) no later than May 15, 2017.

I look forward to welcoming colleagues near and far to the University of Alberta!

Frances Pownall
Conference Organizer

I can see something there you might possibly contribute to?? Some few years back I'd be there with bells on. Times are a changed unfortunately.

Interesting food for thought. How much did Philip's court differ from that of his predecessors? What innovations did he make, what new roles did he create? Alexander's court must have been heavily influenced by the logistical needs of the expedition, and subsequently by taking on the Persian civil service. How much was Alexander's court influenced by the Persian court?

Greetings Sean

It would be excellent to read a report on such a conference. Looking forward to your commentary!

Regards,
Sikander

Alexias wrote: Alexander's court must have been heavily influenced by the logistical needs of the expedition, and subsequently by taking on the Persian civil service. How much was Alexander's court influenced by the Persian court?

Alexander's court was more Persian that his father's. Part of this is because of the "logistical needs of the expedition" as you say. Alexander's court, from near day one, was a mobile court. Although its seat was always Macedonia prior to the anabasis, from the expedition's commencement it was a court on the move. The Persian court, too, was a moveable feast, though between its "capitals" for the great part. Persian kings took the apparatus of empire with them whether simply moving about the empire or on campaign. The exigencies of a long campaign dictated that Alexander's would follow suit. By expedition's end Alexander's court had traveled the entire journey from go to whoa. In the final years it aped the Persian court not only in its adoption of functionaries and practice but was just as easily able to move as matters dictated. Would be interesting to see if Alexander planned to continue the moveable feast had he not died at Babylon. I suspect he was somewhat rather too paranoid to leave the apparatus of empire and its government to a regent in Babylon or elsewhere. The only trustworthy candidate was dead and I think Alexander would even balk at leaving the empire in the hands of Hepaistion by 323.

Be a good conference to be at. Don't hold your breath for publication of the proceedings though, still awaiting same from the Diodorus conference of 2011!!

A little far from my country of residence...

Sandros wrote:A little far from my country of residence...

Well, in theory I will be giving a paper on "Darius III and the Crisis of Achaemenid Ideology" in Tartu in June http://caemc.ut.ee/icaem2017 I don't see any papers on Alexander in the program though ... mine is on how the Persians and Egyptians and Babylonian dealt with their 'outside context problem' (or it will be about that, when I have written it!)

sean_m wrote:

Sandros wrote:A little far from my country of residence...

Well, in theory I will be giving a paper on "Darius III and the Crisis of Achaemenid Ideology" in Tartu in June http://caemc.ut.ee/icaem2017 I don't see any papers on Alexander in the program though ... mine is on how the Persians and Egyptians and Babylonian dealt with their 'outside context problem' (or it will be about that, when I have written it!)

I may be missing the obvious, but who was their OCP? Greece? Alexander? More advanced societies?

Well, Achaemenid ideology presents the world as already conquered, and any signs of disturbance as temporary accidents which will be stamped down with the help of Ahuramazda. Kingship is part of the Creation, and the fact that there were once kings who were not Persians is hardly worth mentioning. This is very different from, say, Roman or Assyrian ideology, where kings or emperors constantly boasted about conquering new lands or the horrible outsiders who invaded the empire and had to be punished. A king could look down from the platform at Persepolis and know that there was nothing remotely comparable to his empire in the world (even if he knew very well that there were some lands still unconquered beyond the steppes in the distant east and beyond the Ocean in the west). As far as their monuments and inscriptions show, these other places are hardly worth noticing.

The Babylonians could at least comfort themselves that Persians were not too exotic, and even if they came from (the mountainous part of) Elam they were not Elamites (even if some of them wrote and probably spoke a little bit of Elamite).

Then in a few years, just after the triumphant reconquest of Egypt, the Persian monarchy is overthrown by a bunch of Ionians from a kingdom nobody in the centre of the empire has ever heard of. There wasn't a precedent to deal with that, in the way that the Romans were used to a general marching on Rome and seizing power, or the Greeks were used to tyrannoi and stasis.

sean_m wrote:Then in a few years, just after the triumphant reconquest of Egypt, the Persian monarchy is overthrown by a bunch of Ionians from a kingdom nobody in the centre of the empire has ever heard of. There wasn't a precedent to deal with that, in the way that the Romans were used to a general marching on Rome and seizing power, or the Greeks were used to tyrannoi and stasis.

Umm, I don't think that is quite true (unless I have completely misunderstood what you mean). There were Greeks at Darius's court, there were Greek (and probably Macedonian) mercenaries in Persian armies, Persia had occupied Macedonia for several years and had significant influence there, and there were Persians at Philip's court.

It is my understanding that OCP relates to culture shock - for example, Dutch and English ships arriving in Japan in the 17th century, Captain Cook and South Sea Islanders, the Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America, or fictional accounts of extra-terrestrial encounters. There can't be a cultural shock between neighbours who have interacted for millennia and have shared trade and technological methods. Individuals may have experienced cultural shock, and conquest will have introduced drastic changes, but not shock brought about by an inability to comprehend, adapt or absorb the other culture, resulting in a fracture and dislocation of a culture. Unless you are suggesting that Alexander's conquests were brought about by a military OCP? That would be a novel (and probably erroneous notion) to suggest that Alexander's conquests were achieved by using military techniques that shocked his opponents into defeat because they didn't know how to deal with something so different!

Well, I am saying that its very unlikely that anyone in the centre of the empire thought that Philip or Alexander was a threat to the existence of the empire, any more than anyone south of the DMZ thinks that North Korea is a threat to the existence of the USA (or anyone west of the Iron Curtain thought that the USSR could just suddenly peacefully fall apart). Philip might steal some of the King's cities and ravage his land, and force the King to send a general or money to deal with the nuisance, but doing more than that? Nobody from outside the King's land had done more in 200 years, and Ahuramazda and the other gods were with the King and his eternal kingdom.

And as far as we can tell, the Persians did not have an equivalent of American rhetoric about "existential threats" or Roman rhetoric about barbarian invaders, which even made people fantasize about being defeated. We don't know as much as we would like, but we know some things.

I am sure that the Macedonian exiles at court thought that they and their troubles were important, but so did the Saka and Indians and Nubians I doubt that anyone with power listened to them, because that is not how empires work. Part of the point of running an empire is that you don't have to listen to or try to understand those nasty foreigners with their strange ways and troublesome habit of seeing things differently (whereas if you are in a small country, you at least have to try to understand the big ones).

Edit: I am also sure that those exiles could talk about different families in Macedonia, and the difference between highland and lowland Macedonians or Thessalians and Epirotes, for days ... but I doubt that the vast majority of the people who mattered at court had patience for learning more than 'oh, they live in the islands beyond the Ocean with the other Ionians, and they have a king who is threatening the King's cities.' The empire was very big and every land had people with complicated stories about local politics and reasons why the King should spend money.

So to put it another way ... since Cambyses conquered Egypt the first time, the Persians had had no neighbour which threatened the heartland of the empire. Invaders might ravage the King's land, or even conquer one of the outlying lands temporarily, but not march all the way to Babylonia or Persis in the way that invaders from the north sometimes invaded Italy and embarrassed Caesar. Invasions from outside the empire were not part of the experience of people in the centre.

The Persians don't present their empire as surrounded by threatening outsiders like the Assyrians, or build up one of their neighbours as a rival like the Romans did with the Parthians. They present threats as internal: there can be uprisings within the King's lands, or an impostor can become king.

And the Persians don't seem to have had a model which allowed for someone outside the empire conquering it. Scholarly Babylonians had a long tradition of stories about translatio imperii (where one dynasty follows another), and people like Herodotus and Thucydides and maybe some people in Judaea were developing the idea, but the Persians preferred to present their empire as timeless and complete, and scholarly Babylonians were not eager to engage with the fact that the world was much bigger than the old tablets described. So what Alexander did was totally unexpected, and posed some real challenges to anyone in the heartland of the empire who wanted to explain it.

N.B., these conferences are not always open to the public. Before anybody shows up, you should contact Dr. Pownell. It's not intentionally exclusive, but conference venues often have to be paid for, etc. They're not free. I've run conferences before, and trust me, there's a lot of money involved in planning them. Attendance may be permitted with a registration fee, but I know she's not at that point yet, or even knowing exactly how many days it will be. (Yes, I will be there.)

So please, *before* planning to attend, if you are in the area and would like to come, *contact her* for protocol and whether it's open to the public, or open to the public with a registration fee.

Jeanne Reames wrote:So please, *before* planning to attend, if you are in the area and would like to come, *contact her* for protocol and whether it's open to the public, or open to the public with a registration fee.

Good advice. It can help if you happen to be a member of a relevant Classical Society. My membership of the ASCS has helped in the past but each conference is different.

I have finally finished my conference report at https://bookandsword.com/2018/06/23/mon ... macedonia/ "I don't always blog about Alexander, but when I do there is Pothos."