Book Review: The Land of the Elephant Kings

The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empireby Paul J. KosminHarvard University Press, 2014 Harvard University Classics Professor Paul Kosmin assembles the latest scholarship and field research about the long-vanished Seleucid Empire in his new book The Land of the Elephant Kings, but it's an uphill climb, and not just because Kosmin only seldom manages to escape the slightly chloroforming rhetoric so common to academic writing. No, the main obstacle here is that the Seleucid Empire, which only lasted a comparatively short time in the fullness of its strength (Kosmin pegs his dates as 311 - 64 BC), was always a ghastly conception, a loosely-held conglomeration stretching from Bulgaria to Tajikistan and almost from the Baltic to the Adriatic, comprised of countless different and fractious mini-kingdoms and warring ethnicities, and ruled over - desperately and almost from the start bumblingly - by the over-stretched armed forces of Seleucus I Nicator, who grabbed as much of the land as he could when his former commander-in-chief, Alexander the Great, died in Babylon in 323 BC.Seleucus was the very prototypical example of Alexander's old-guard Macedonian generals: vicious, logistically limited, fearless, and almost drunkenly ambitious. He staked out a capital, put his men a key river fjords and upland passes to tax and harass trade caravans, and then he and his successors set about trying to hold on to it all. That long and ultimately doomed struggle is the central story of Kosmin's book, including all the ways Seleucus and his successors mapped their ruling practices onto those already in place under the protracted and violent dynasties of the Achaemenids (the last of whom, Darius III, was hounded out of life by Alexander). A key to the vast Oriental kingdoms, for instance, was their peripatetic nature, the Court always in motion, its guards, administration, and pomp traveling from city to city throughout the kingdom. Kosmin stresses that such inherited policies should be studied both as continuations and independently:

Archaeological excavation and textual evidence has brought to light a a built infrastructure of way stations, paradeisos gardens, and pavilion residences along the well-maintained Royal Roads - an architectural rhetoric suited to an imperial court passing en route from one great palatial complex to the next ... We must resist the temptation to treat Seleucid travel as an unconsidered survival of these Achaemenid imperial practices. The Selucid evidence deserves to be gathered and discussed in its own right.

"It is hard to tell a story of fragmentation," Kosmin writes, and despite frequent turns toward the turgid, he does what is very likely the best job telling such a story about the Seleucids that's been done in the last several decades. He covers the hectic procession of Demetriuses, Antiochuses, Seleucuses, and of course Alexanders through the years and fights of the kingdom, a procession he rightly calls a kind of "bewildering courte duree" for which he nevertheless functions as a clear-sighted guide. And sometimes, when he can find a moment of genuine pathos, he goes with it - one example being the fight between Seleucus I Nicator and Lysimachus, "a former comrade in Alexander's army and now a rival for his inheritance." Their fight in 281 BC (which Kosmin calls "the last of Alexander's funeral games") resulted in Lysimachus's defeat - and a strange aftermath:

The aftermath of Seleucus' Corupedium campaign is associated with an ideological enunciation of exceptional importance. Following the battlefield death of Lysimachus, Seleucus could have claimed his enemy's entire kingdom in Asia Minor, Thrace, and Macedonia by right of conquest. Instead, he characterized his incorporation of Lysimachus' trans-Aegean realm as a nostos, a homeward journey of a homesick king. Like a lumbering elephant, the elderly Macedonian was going home to die.

The Land of the Elephant Kings can be as slow and ponderous as its titular animals, but even so, how can it fail to fascinate - not only Alexander completists but anybody watching the morning's newsfeeds, in which the exact same fractious and turbulent stretch of the old Seleucid Empire is so balefully prominent.