The Hellenistic World by F. W. Walbank

Author:F. W. Walbank
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2013-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

coming into the assembly and personally declaring our city and territory holy, asylos and free from tribute and promising that we should be freed by him from the other contributions which we had made to King Attalus (P Herrmann, Anadolu (1967), p. 34, 11.17–20 = Austin, 151).

This Tean appeal for immunity from reprisals, asylia, was directed especially to the cities of Aetolia and Crete, which were renowned for their practice of piracy and so a manifest danger to any maritime city. There can be little doubt that requests for asylia made in Crete and Aetolia were concerned not so much with restraining the exercise of legitimate syle but rather with the limitation of piracy and later in the second century (probably around 160) a second series of Tean inscriptions shows the Teans once again approaching Cretan cities to request the ‘renewal’ of the grants of asylia (which had evidently become a dead letter) and to secure some kind of procedure through grants of isopoliteia, nominally a potential exchange of citizenship but in this instance a means of obtaining access to the courts in the Cretan city, where piratical outrages might (it was hoped) be brought to book (on isopoliteia see further pp. 150fr.).

The Tean request of 204/3 was unusual in not being associated with any divine epiphany or oracle or with the asylia of a temple. But all these feature in one of the best recorded attempts to secure immunity from attack, that made in 207/6 by the city of Magnesia-on-Maeander, on its own behalf and on that of its temple of Artemis Leucophryene. A fragment of a sacred history of Magnesia recorded on the stone wall of a portico in the city describes epiphanies of both Apollo and Artemis Leucophryene, the latter in 221/0. Apollo was thereupon consulted at Delphi, where an oracle declared ‘that it was better and more desirable that those reverencing Pythian Apollo and Artemis Leucophryene should regard the city and the territory of Magnesia-on-Maeander as holy and asylos’ (Syll., 557, 11. 7–10). Fourteen years later – the delay can be explained in various ways – in 207/6 we know from a series of inscriptions that in response to Magnesian embassies many cities, peoples and kings granted this recognition together with that of the games held in Artemis’ honour every fourth year. These were declared to be equal in rank with the Pythian games at Delphi and to be stephanitai or ‘crowned’, i.e. games at which as an indication of their prestige the victors received wreaths, sometimes instead of, but in this case as well as, cash prizes. Of the kings whose replies are preserved only Ptolemy IV, however, grants the requested asylia, Antiochus III, Philip V (almost certainly) and Attalus I making no reference to this. It certainly looks as if those kings were keeping open the option of annexing Magnesia, should a suitable occasion arise – in which case a previous grant of asylia would have been an embarrassment.

The festival of Artemis Leucophryene was only one of many which were set up at this time.

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