Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire.

• Author: De Ruiter, Branko F. Van Oppen
• Position: Book review

Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire. BY PAUL J. KOSMIN. Cambridge, MA: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. x + 379, illus. $55.

Intended as a companion piece to the author's The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (2014), this volume concerns the implementation of the Seleucid Era--a consecutively numbered dating system continuing beyond a single generation. The two volumes can easily be read separately, however, and one gets the feeling that a third is in the works. The Seleucid Era, to be sure, presented an innovative method of time-reckoning, though similar to the Olympiad system, and is the immediate precursor of the Common Era (the modernization of the Anno Domini calendar).

Apart from a short preface with acknowledgments, an introduction, and a brief conclusion, the monograph is divided into two parts: the first deals with the implementation of the Seleucid imperial dating system, the second with local responses to and supposed resistance against it; each part is further subdivided into three chapters of unequal length (ca. 15-50 pages). Additionally, the backmatter consists of extensive endnotes (65 pages), lists of abbreviations, maps, illustrations, and tables, as well as a substantial bibliography (60 pages) and a helpful index (11 pages).

The imperial dating system that is the Seleucid Era introduced a standardization of rationalized time administration that remained in use for centuries, rather than starting anew each generation as the common method of counting regnal years. Kosmin, Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, emphasizes that the Seleucid Era was reckoned retroactively from Seleucus's return to Babylon (in 311 BCE), after he had been ousted as provincial governor (satrap) by Antigonus, the general (strategos) of Western Asia (in 316 BCE), nominally under Macedonian sovereignty. Seleucus had actually assumed kingship only six years later (in 305 BCE), after claiming to rule as general of Asia as successor to Antigonus, as well as satrap of Babylonia, positions for which he had to fight (both during the Babylonian War, 311-309/8, and the Fourth War of the Successors, 308-301 BCE). As such, the author contends, the Seleucid Era represents an artificial epoch which he believes constitutes a "technology of historical idealization" (p. 26).

The second chapter traces the bureaucratic implications of the new dating system, particularly the different methods in which the...