Parthika: Greek and Roman Authors' Views of the Arsacid Empire.

• Author: Drijvers, Jan Willem
• Position: Book review

Parthika: Greek and Roman Authors' Views of the Arsacid Empire. Edited by JOSEF WIESEHOFER and SABINE MULLER. Classica et Orientalia, vol. 15. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2017. Pp. xiii + 312. [euro]78.

This volume is the second resulting from the conference "Bilder des Orients: Megasthenes, Apollodoros von Artemita und Isidoros von Charax," organized at the Christian-Albrechts-Universitat in Kiel in 2012. The first volume, Megasthenes und seine Zeit / Megasthenes and His Time, edited by Josef Wiesehofer, Horst Brinkhaus, and Reinhold Bichler (Classica et Orientalia, vol. 13, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz) came out in 2016. The papers in this volume focus on Apollodoros of Artemita (three contributions) and Isidoros of Charax (four contributions). They are preceded by an elaborate paper on Greek acculturation in the Arsacid empire.

The second half of the volume contains four contributions--on Flavius Josephus, Trogus-Justinus, Tacitus, and Arrian, important authors for the Graeco-Roman perspective on Parthia and the Parthians. Although the title on the cover is in English (the title page also has a German title: Griechisch-romische Bilder des Arsakidenreiches), only three papers are in English; the others are in German (eight) and French (one). The short introduction by the editors is also in German.

In this introduction the editors explain that the main purpose of the volume is to contribute to the discourse on the dimensions of the Graeco-Roman literary sources about the Arsacid empire and their stereotypical view, as was already made clear from an earlier volume edited by Wiesehofer: Das Partherreich und seine Zeugnisse (1998), as well as in additional publications dealing with otherness.

The opening contribution here by Mark Olbrycht presents an overview of Greeks and Greek culture in the Parthian empire. In spite of the facts that many Arsacid rulers present themselves as philhellene, that there still were many Greeks living in various parts and cities of Iran, and that the Greek language was widespread among the Parthian elites, this nevertheless does not mean that Parthian society was Hellenized, as some scholars think. Olbrycht argues convincingly, staying close to the sources (both literary and material), that Iranian culture and the Parthian ethos were predominant and that the presence of Greek culture in the Arsacid empire should not be overestimated.

The three contributions on Apollodoros of Artemita open with an interesting paper...