Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period. A Study in Greek Epigraphy.

Aus der Bibliothek von Prof. Wolfgang Haase, langj�igem Herausgeber der ANRW und des International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT) / From the library of Prof. Wolfgang Haase, long-time editor of ANRW and the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (IJCT). - altersgem�sehr guter Zustand / very good condition for age - PREFACE -- The letters of the kings of the Hellenistic period are interesting for their content and for their language. In both fields they are primary historical sources. They show the Hellenistic states as they actually functioned, their administrative and diplomatic dealings with subjects and with officials and occasionally with neighbors. They are not the products of historians writing for posterity and interested according to their bent in suppressing either the favorable or the unfavorable aspects of their subject. Their authors were the principals themselves, concerned of course with presenting their actions in a favorable light but occupied only with the execution of a particular design. They deal with details and they are avowedly biased, but their bias cannot extend to obscuration of the transaction. By showing the administration of details, they make it possible to see behind the generalities of political historians and to form a conception of the living conditions within the Greco-oriental kingdoms of the heirs of Alexander. -- The language of the letters was the spoken language of the Hellenistic courts. Their rhetoric is not the rhetoric of a historian with literary p retensions but the cultured speech of the educated class, adapted to the epistolary form. The period which they cover, the last three centuries B. C., saw the development of the Koine, the �common� Greek which superseded the old dialects and spread as the medium of communication throughout the Mediterranean world and the Hellenized orient. It arose as the language of the common people, soldiers and merchants. The aristocracy, both Macedonian and Greek, tended naturally to preserve the dialect in which it had been educated; for the former group as for a good part of the latter, this was the literary Attic of the fourth century. The royal letters show the progressive intrusion of �common� sounds and idioms into the court speech of the chancery, slowly in Pergamum, more rapidly in Syria and Egypt, as the innovations of the people became gradually accepted as good usage. -- The present collection includes only those royal letters which were inscribed on stone in Asia or on islands in Asiatic waters. This limitation is based partly on principle, partly on convenience. It can I think be defended, although a definitive study of the subject will have to include also letters from other parts of the Hellenistic world as well also letters quoted in the writings of Josephus and other historians. With the latter, however, there arises in many cases the question of authenticity or of accurate transmission. The former, which include a few inscriptions from Macedonia and Greece and a considerable body of inscriptions and papyrus texts from Egypt, differ for the most part in one fundamental respect from the body of Asiatic letters. They are primarily administrative texts, addressed to state officials. They belong, in the main, to the field of business rather than of diplomacy.