Seeing Double: Intercultural Politics in Ptolemaic Alexandria.

• Author: Verhoogt, Arthur
• Position: Book Review

Seeing Double: Intercultural Politics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. By SUSAN A. STEPHENS. Hellenistic Culture and Society, vol. 37. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2003. Pp. xvi + 292, illus. $65.

Ptolemaic Egypt was a society with two faces, one Egyptian, the other Greek. This insight has been current in documentary papyrological studies for a quarter century now (see esp. the studies by the Leiden [P. W. Pestman and others] and the Leuven schools [W. Clarysse, K. Vandorpe, and others]). The present volume brings this realization to the realm of Greek literary scholarship. With the help of a number of detailed readings from Hellenistic poetry, the author, Susan Stephens, shows how the Hellenistic poets residing in Alexandria were very aware of their Egyptian surroundings, and referred to and made use of Egyptian aspects in their work, especially in presenting and probing Ptolemaic kingship.

By carefully reading and analyzing sections from three Alexandrian poets (Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius) Stephens is able to illustrate the "though experiments" (p. 248) that these three authors engaged in to provide the new Ptolemaic rule with cultural background. The new aspect of Stephens' study is that she convincingly shows that this background was not wholly Greek, but based in both Greek and Egyptian thought. In thinking about matters of Ptolemaic history and kingship, Hellenistic poets used both Greek and Egyptian mythologies and models of kingship.

The structure of the book is of breathtaking clarity. After an introductory chapter in which Stephens sets forth what Greeks wrote about Egyptian culture and civilization from the fifth to the early third century B.C. (chapter 1), she devotes three chapters to the three main Alexandrian poets, Callimachus (chapter 2: Callimachean Theogonies), Theocritus (chapter 3: Theocritean Regencies), and Apollonius (chapter 4: Apollonian Cosmologies). In a concluding chapter (chapter 5: The Two Lands) she puts the work of the three poets in the context of the Ptolemaic court ideology.

To show the Greek and Egyptian cultural legacy in the three poets' works Stephens has chosen particular works of Callimachus (Hymn to Zeus and Hymn to Delos) and Theocritus (Idylls 17 [Heracliscus] and 24 [Ptolemy]), and particular passages of Apollonius' Argonautica. She both discusses general patterns in these particular works and closely reads particular passages with references to Greek terms...