The return of the king: Civic feasting and the entanglement of city and empire in the Hellenistic Aegean

In the third century BCE, mainland Greece fell within the spheres of influence of three competing imperial systems: the dynastic empires of the Antigonids, Seleucids and Ptolemies who simultaneously strove for hegemony in the Hellenistic Aegean. Although most Greek poleis retained their autonomy, they all had to somehow find ways to deal with the new imperial reality. The entanglement of city and empire was a complicated one, and the practice of empire in the Hellenistic world, I would argue, can be best approached as a negotiated enterprise rather than as a clear-cut system of dominance. It is increasingly well understood how royal banquets at the imperial court, with the ritualized gift exchange that took place there, served as loci for the interaction between the ruler and his guests. But what happened when a king himself was a guest? In this paper, accounts of the various visits of Demetrios Poliorketes to Athens will serve as a starting point to explore how cities sought to accommodate monarchy within the democratic polis institutions by allowing kings to participate in local cults and festivals. It will be argued that by engaging in civic sacrificial ritual and the subsequent ritualized feasting, foreign kings were integrated into polis society: they became citizens of sorts. But by assigning to the king the honor of performing the central act of offering, he could simultaneously be singled out as an extraordinary ‘other’.