Why did the Hellenistic kings care so much about Greek literature?

by Caolán Mac An Aircinn

What would you do if the King of Egypt asked to borrow the priceless original performance texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides and promised to give them back? If you’re like the Athenians, you might think of an exorbitant deposit – say, fifteen talents. Personally I find it a bit difficult to grasp how much money that is, so here are some comparisons: that’s somewhere in the region of four hundred kilograms of silver, or very roughly one hundred and sixty five years’ work for an unskilled labourer in Eleusis a few decades prior.¹ In other words, fifteen talents is more money than anyone in their right minds would part with over some mouldering old scrolls. But if you’re like the Athenians, you also haven’t reckoned with Ptolemy III Euergetes. Ptolemy loved books. He loved books so much that he made every ship which put in to Egypt disgorge all books on board to be copied; and he loved books so much that to him, those old scrolls would have been cheap at twice the price. He never gave back the performance texts and told the flabbergasted Athenians to keep the money.

Kings with absolute power sometimes take odd fancies, and if this were the only story of Ptolemaic bibliophilia, one might brush it off as Ptolemy III just being a bit eccentric. It’s not, though. The Ptolemies devoted enormousresources to attracting and cultivating Greek literature, up to and including building and furnishing “the bird-cage of the Muses,” in Timon of Phlius’ somewhat envious phrase²: the Museum, a compound in which resided scholars and writers and which included the famous Great Library. Pretty much everyone who was anyone in Hellenistic literature resided at the Museum: Callimachus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Theocritus and Eratosthenes, to name just a few, as well as scholars like Aristophanes of Byzantium. Even some of the Ptolemies themselves dabbled in writing: Ptolemy I Soter, for example, wrote a history of Alexander’s campaigns, in which he had of course participated. Alexandria must have been a city alive with the scratching of pens on papyrus.

The Ptolemies weren’t alone in their love of literature either. They were by far the most successful at attracting, retaining and cultivating scholars and writers, but other courts tried their hands at it too. Aratus of Soli, for example, the didactic poet, made a career at the Antigonid court in Macedon, as did the historian Hieronymus of Cardia. The Attalid kings in Asia Minor created their own version of the Great Library at Pergamon, from which the Egyptian library was replenished when Caesar’s troops burnt a part of its contents. This kind of engagement with literature wasn’t universal – there’s not much evidence that the Seleucids of Asia cared much for poets, to give one example, and the same goes for the kings of Pontus -but it seems to have been pretty common in the Hellenistic world.

It’s worth bearing in mind just how odd this is. None of these kings lived in Greece, and their connection to Greece was arguably quite tenuous. Moreover, the Hellenistic kings had many other things to care about, such as – to use the technical term – thrashing the living daylights out of each other, not to mention rebellious subjects, nation-building, and, as the third century wore on, the Roman storm-cloud gathering on the horizon. While Ptolemy III was splashing around cash on scrolls, he also had the Third Syrian War and native Egyptian rebellions to deal with. One might have thought that fifteen talents of silver might be better spent on mercenaries.

It’s also worth noting that it seems to be mostly Greek literature that the Hellenistic kings are interested in. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, may have been made at Ptolemy II’s direction, but the Egyptian Manetho and the Babylonian Berossus both took the time to write histories of their respective countries in Greek, and they don’t seem to have made much of an impact. Despite the fact that the Hellenistic kings were so far flung, when it came to literature, they were laser-focused on Greece. Why were the Hellenistic kings so interested in Greek literature?

That’s a bigger question than I can answer here with any honesty, but scholars have suggested a couple of reasons.³There’s pretty straightforward prestige – if a famous poet writes a famous poem about you, it makes you look good. There’s propaganda as well – to hear Theocritus tell it in his seventeenth Idyll, Ptolemy II ruled pretty much the whole world. Identity is also an important factor. The Ptolemies, Attalids and Antigonids were Macedonians – dubiously Greek to begin with, as Demosthenes would tell you at great length – and the first two lived outside the traditional boundaries of Greece. Professor Shipley puts it nicely: “collecting all known Greek texts and classifying them… was to make an almost sacred claim to be the guardian and controller of Greek culture for all Greeks.”⁴ But my personal favourite explanation is that patronising Greek literature gave the Hellenistic kings another way to compete with each other. If your poet is better than the other guy’s poet, then you look better than him. It’s essentially war by other means. On that understanding, fifteen talents for some scrolls doesn’t seem like a bad deal at all.

Further reading

• Erskine, Andrew (ed.), A Companion to the Hellenistic World, Wiley-Blackwell: Oxford, 2005
• Hopkinson, Neil, A Hellenistic Anthology, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1988
• Shipley, Graham, The Greek World after Alexander, 323 – 30 BC, Routledge: Oxfordshire, 1999
• Strootman, Rolf, The Birdcage of the Muses: Patronage of the Arts and Sciences at the Ptolemaic Imperial Court, 305-222 BCE, Peeters: Leuven, 2017

About the author

Caolán Mac an Aircinn is a translator and writer from Dublin, Ireland with some of a PhD in Classics from UT Austin. When he isn’t writing or working, he enjoys bothering his wife and his cats.

I also calculated the workman’s wages in the first paragraph using the website Trapezites (Trapezites: an Ancient Currency Exchange), which is managed by Dr. Giuseppe Castellano of the University of Vienna.

Any and all errors are, of course, mine alone.

Footnotes

1. https://trapezites.com/, accessed 13:09 GMT 8/Jan/2026; I have assumed Attic talents and assumed that the labourer is working 365 days a year. ↩︎
2. The citation is SH 786. ↩︎
3. Strootman 2017, 147ff. summarises current scholarly understandings of the subject. ↩︎
4. Shipley 1999, 242. ↩︎