Today, I’d like to look at what classical and historical scholarship looked like in the early 20th century, and by extension that in the late 19th century as well, via a particular lens, in order to give all of you what I think is a good insight into a number of issues relevant to BadHistory.

I have, for the purposes of research, recently been taking a look at old scholarship on the Seleukid Empire. For those unfamiliar with the Seleukids, the Seleukid state was one of several formed out of the post-Alexander-the-Great free for all derby that ensued upon the eponymous Makedonian’s death. It was founded by one Seleukos, and was an extremely major power in western Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean until the mid-2nd century BCE, having been buffeted by the Romans, and then kicked out of Mesopotamia and everything east of it by the rising Arsacid state (most commonly referred to as the Parthian Empire). The rump state lingered in the Seleukid heartlands of Syria, before eventually descending into internecine irrelevance and then getting absorbed by the Romans without too much pomp or circumstance during the mid 1st century BCE.

The Seleukids are not my sole academic area of interest or focus, as people aware of my posts in AskHistorians and even in earlier BadHistory threads might already know. But what motivated this specific piece of reading was the fact that, until recently, the Seleukids tended to get very disdainfully treated by historians. It’s still an attitude that I frequently have to contend with, though I am very pleased that this is continuing to improve. But it’s also one that’s so fresh in the mouth that I don’t think it’s been critically examined the long duree, reaching back beyond ‘modern’ scholarship and into what came before. In other words, I wanted to look at the historiography of the Seleukids prior to what you might call the current post-60s era of scholarly methodology, thus I encountered the work that we’re about to look at. And, well, the first chapter alone was enough to make me want to post about a huge number of subjects on BadHistory, so make of that what you will.

Before I introduce the work and begin, I’d also like to establish that in my own comments, as you’ve already encountered, I tend to prefer a slightly different form of transliterating ancient Greek-derived terms than what you might be used to. If at any point this causes confusion then I apologise, because it’s not intended to do so; I just prefer rendering Greek like that, especially in ways that guide English speakers to a slightly more accurate understanding of how it was originally pronounced.

The Work and Author

The work I’m looking at here is: The House of Seleucus, Volume 1, by Edwyn Robert Bevan, published in 1902.

Edwyn Robert Bevan was born in London in 1870. He was the fourteenth child of Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, who was a partner in Barclays bank. We are thus immediately dealing with a very monied segment of the world’s premier imperial power. He won a classical scholarship to attend New College at Oxford University, where he did very well. For anyone familiar with Oxford you will understand what I say he achieved there, for anyone else I apologise for the fact that Oxford is very weird for anyone who didn’t attend it (which includes me); he got a first in Classical Moderations and then in Literae Humaniores, which essentially means he got the highest degree grade possible in Oxford’s equivalent of a Classics degree. This marks him out as being within the absolute apogee of the Classical academic world of the time, particularly within Britain, whilst also establishing him as being in the social and intellectual elite of Britain as well- Classics is the degree that several Prime Ministers possessed across the late 19th and 20th centuries, including William Gladstone, Herbert Asquith, and Harold Wilson. He was wealthy enough that he did not attach himself to an academic institution, and published as an independent scholar. Thus far, the House of Seleucus is the earliest such work of his that I can find, published in multiple volumes. This continued until World War One, when he worked for the Foreign Office in political intelligence and the department for Propaganda and Information, and in the post-war economic slump he finally needed a salary, so he got himself hired by Kings College London where he lectured for 11 years.

Chapter 1 of the House of Seleucus- Our Main Star

I’ll be putting some commentary in this bit, but will be saving a lot of that for later. The title of the chapter in the original is ‘Hellenism in the East’, and if you want to follow along with the full text (which I advise) rather than my abridged excerpts then here’s a link to a copy on archive.org.

It is not so much the characters of the kings which gives the house of Seleucus its peculiar interest. It was the circumstances in which it was placed. The kings were (to all intents and purposes) Greek kings; the sphere of their empire was in Asia. They were called to preside over the process by which Hellenism penetrated an alien world, coming into contact with other traditions, modifying them and being modified. Upon them that process depended.

Excusing the extremely old fashioned tone, several sentiments here would not be out of place in a modern work on the Seleukids, particularly the idea that the Seleukids both caused change and themselves changed, including by extension the Greeks settled in the Empire. Likewise, even though Greek merchants or adventurers probably penetrated the territory of the Persian Empire at some point, it’s true that much of that world was extremely poorly known to Greeks as a whole, with many prior works on geography and ethnography getting distinctly fuzzy when they passed further east than Kilikia and Phoinikia, though the word ‘alien’ might be a little extreme.

Hellenism, it is true, contained in itself an expansive force, but the expansion could have hardly gone far unless the political matter had been in congenial hands.

Again, not a particularly controversial notion, the idea that a given polity had to be friendly towards Greek culture to promote it.

As a matter of fact, it languished in countries which passed under barbarian rule.

And here we start coming into the parts where the era of scholarship expresses itself rather clearly. I could be extremely snarky here but I’d rather be precise. Firstly, from whose point of view are we talking about barbarians- because the Romans, one of the most famous cultures with regards to adopting many trappings associated with Hellenic culture, would have been barbarians to the Greeks, particularly in the era in question. Likewise, in terms of cultures that were heavily influenced by Hellenic things that were not ruled by Greeks, we have in no particular order; the Etruscans, the other Italic speaking cultures, the Iapgyian cultures of Italy, large parts of Illyria, Carthage, the Nabataeans, parts of the Iberian peninsula, Near Eastern culture in general under the Parthians, Central Asia and what is now the Indus region under the Kushans, various cultures along the Danube… It would be considered extremely stupid these days to write off these ‘countries’ as languishing, or as barbarians (though you will still find people who persist in doing that). Making that statement means you have already written off all of these cultures as actually having any kind of development or achievements of note, or even a worthy place in the conversation of history.

It was thus that the Seleucid dynasty in maintaining itself was safeguarding the progress of Hellenism.

Because, of course, all of the other Greek-ruled states, like Pergamon and its famous library, Ptolemaic Egypt, the Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, had absolutely no part in promoting Hellenic culture. At all.

The interest with which we follow its struggles for aggrandizement and finally for existence does not arise from any peculiar nobility in the motives which actuate them or any exceptional features in their course, but from our knowing what much larger issues were involved.

Nothing interesting or special happened in the Seleukid Empire’s history, and instead their importance solely lies in us recognising how the path of history developed. Yummy.

At the break-up of the dynasty we see peoples of non-Hellenic culture, Persians, Armenians, Arabs, Jews, pressing in everywhere to reclaim what Alexander and Seleucus had won. They are only checked by Hellenism finding a new defender in Rome.

Bahaha, hahahaha, hahahahahaha. Because of course a non-Hellenic culture can be a defender of ‘Hellenism’, but only the super civilized ones.

The house of Seleucus, however feeble and disorganized in its latter days, stood at any rate in the breach till Rome was ready to enter on the heritage of Alexander.

Here’s another feature of the period expressing itself- the progression of civilizations and Empires. We still do this now, but not so teleologically in works of any kind of scholarly quality, and certainly not with moral purpose. Here the entire purpose of the Seleukids is to be a temporary entertainment until the real act comes on stage- the Romans. Even by trying to defend the Seleukids from criticism as irrelevant here, Bevan is still conceding to most of the basic positions- the Seleukids are important because of their relation to much more important, better things that come with Romans. This is despite calling this era foundational in the spread of ‘Hellenism’, I’ll note.

But what does one mean by Hellenism?

Interesting how he’s already talked about Hellenism as though everyone knows what it is, as though it has a fixed definition, and only now thinks that it’s appropriate to define it. I’ll talk about that more later.

Also, here on out’s where it gets spectacular for the modern reader.

That characteristic which the Greeks themselves chiefly pointed to as distinguishing them from “barbarians” was freedom. The barbarians, they said, or at any rate the Asiatics, were by nature slaves. It was a proud declaration. It was based upon a real fact. But it was not absolutely true. Freedom had existed before the Greeks, just as civilization had existed before them. But these two had existed only in separation. The achievement of the Greeks is that they brought freedom and civilization into union.

I leave you this statement with no commentary, aside from the fact that the italics are as in the text, and are not my own invention.

We, like the Greeks, are apt to speak in our loose way of the Asiatic or the “Oriental”, reflecting on his servility, his patience, his reserve. But in doing so we lose sight of that other element in the East which presents in many ways the exact opposite of these characteristics. Before men had formed those larger groups which are essential to civilization they lived in smaller groups or tribes, and after the larger groups had been formed the tribal system in mountain and desert went on as before. We can still see in the East to-day many peoples who have not emerged from this stage.

And so, everyone, I bring us our first, enormous, totally pure nugget of raw Orientalism. This is not our alloyed, adulterated stuff which talks about African mud huts, but also acknowledges that places like China (full of communists and worker bees), India (full of spices and mystics), Iran (full of hard line Islamists and wine) are quite different from one another. This is unmixed, unrestrained, and unbound. Nor is it to be our last.

I’m skipping a chunk about the earliest known civilizations, and the freedom of primitive tribes; to Bevan, Egypt and Babylonia, though they are interesting context- the discussions of in particular Babylonia as the oldest ‘civilizations’ must postdate the beginning of archaeology in Mesopotamia, which I will come back to in the later analysis.

By the time that Hellenism had reached its full development the East, as far as the Greeks knew it, was united under an Irânian Great King. The Irânian Empire had swallowed up the preceding Semitic and Egyptian Empires, and in the vast reach of territory which the Persian king ruled in the fifth century before Christ he exceeded any potentate that the world had yet seen. He seemed to the Greeks to have touched the pinnacle of human greatness.

It interested me that Bevan chooses to consciously use the term Irânian (with a little hat and everything) here, though its presence alongside Semitic means that it’s intended to be a racial categorisation- despite the fact that he knows that Persians and Iranians are two different things, nonetheless the fact that Persians are an Iranian people. Likewise, Jews, Akkadians, Arameans, Arabs, and many others are totally different peoples, yet the Neo-Babylonian and Assyrian Empires to which he refers are ‘Semitic’. This is also the first time that a race-related set of categorisations has really reared its head so far.

I now skip a chunk about tribalism vs monarchy among the Persians, which doesn’t really say anything that I’d care to remark on for our current purposes, for good or ill, aside from a continued insistence on uncritically utilising Herodotus which comes up elsewhere.

As an alternative, them, to the rude freedom of primitive tribes, the world, up to the appearance of Hellenism, seemed to present only unprogressive despotism. Some of the nations, like the Egyptians and Babylonians, had been subject to kings for thousands of years. And during all that time there had been no advance. Movement there had been, dynastic revolutions, foreign conquests, changes of fashioned in dress, in art, in religion, but no progress. If anything there had been decline.

Here we find another raw thing that is almost always very reduced in both modern scholarship and in the modern world; a) for the purposes of the progress of history, only the Eurasian world focused around the Mediterranean and Near East count, and b) literally no progress existed of any real kind until the Greeks and then Romans come along. I’m also going to present this without comment, because I think it speaks for itself.

We then skip an otherwise hilarious and interesting chunk about how everyone under kings was a slave, in the interest of time.

It was under these circumstances that the character we now describe as “Oriental” was developed. To the husbandman or merchant it never occurred that the work of government was any concern of his; he was merely a unit in a great aggregate, whose sole bond of union was its subjection to one external authority; for him, while kings went to war, it was enough to make provision for himself and his children in this life, or make sure of good things in the next, and let the world take its way. It was not to be wondered at that he came to find the world uninteresting outside his own concerns- his bodily wants and his religion. He had to submit perforce to whatever violences or exactions the king or his ministers chose to put upon him; he had no defence but concealment; and he developed the bravery, not of action, but of endurance, and an extraordinary secretiveness. He became the Oriental whom we know.

Have another nugget! Again, there’s almost nothing I feel I actually need to say here, except to of course note that almost all societies could be summarised as having individuals primarily concerned with bodily wants and ‘religion’, if we decide to define that as ambiguously as this has done. But believe me, we’ll be coming back to ‘the Oriental’.

Then with the appearance of Hellenism twenty-five centuries ago there was a new thing in the earth. The Greeks did not find themselves shut up to the alternative of tribal rudeness or cultured despotism. They passed from the tribal stage to a form of association which was neither one nor the other- the city-state. They were not absolutely the first to develop the city-state; they had been preceded by the Semites of Syria. Before Athens and Sparta were heard of, Tyre and Sidon had spread their name over the Mediterranean. But it was not till the city-state entered into combination with the peculiar endowments of the Hellenes that it produced a new and wonderful form of culture.

So, I’d just like to note that ‘Semites of Syria’ could mean, variously, Arabs, Hebrews, Arameans, Assyrians, or Canaanites/Phoenicians depending on when we’re talking about and exactly whose definition of Syria we’re talking about. From context, it’s clear that Bevan intended to specify the Phoenicians, as we’d call them, or Canaanites as they’re generally called before c.1000 BC. In the which case, his use of Syria is odd, and contrary to the definition of Syria generally used by the ancient geographers. However, the Syria of his day would have included what is now Lebanon and ancient Phoinikia. But, if he was including the territory of Ottoman or even Roman Syria, then ‘Semites of Syria’ could still have meant all of the peoples that I just mentioned. Also, there have been far more city-state cultures than the Phoenicians and the Greeks in the ancient world…

I’m skipping a bit about Greek geography being a deterministic influence in their state formations.

CONT’D BELOW