Postimperial Transitions: The End of Hellenistic Empires

As has long been recognized, the idea of a “Hellenistic world” is a slippery concept – defined at once temporally and culturally – and one that elides the very different internal characteristics of the major Hellenistic empires and many smaller kingdoms that arose in this period. And nevertheless, it has also proven to be an indispensable analytical category, allowing the period to emerge not just as an interregnum between Classical Greece and the rise of Rome, but rather as a vibrant and innovative time in its own right. However, discussions of the ends of these Hellenistic empires are generally marked, even today, by their focus on the role of crisis as a driving factor in state decline.

Moving away from such biological descriptions of imperial decay, this paper develops a model for comparing the political evolutions that accompanied the end of the Hellenistic period in both the major Hellenistic empires and in smaller independent kingdoms, tracing three different transitional patterns (absorption, dissolution, expansion) happening at different time scales across the wider space. This model lets us consider two key points: (1) the range of local responses to shifts of power in the final century and a half BCE, rooted both in structural characteristics of Hellenistic power and its different instantiations, and also in variable historical contingencies; and (2) how later historiographic traditions have colored present understandings of these responses.

The question of how this period ended, and indeed whether “end” is the right word to describe this transformation, provides an opportunity to reflect on the spatial and temporal borders of the Hellenistic world. At the same time, the approach draws out features of the Hellenistic period that would continue to echo even after the rise of the next phase of supra-regional powers.