03 - Land Transfer and Property Rights: Infrastructural Power in Seleucid Asia Minor

This work explores how Seleucid kings exercised infrastructural power in the third century BCE by allowing individuals to re-attach the land property they received from the royal administration to the Greek cities in Asia Minor. Originally proposed by British Sociologist Michael Mann in 1984 as a part of his two meanings of state power, the concept of infrastructural power refers to the state's capacity to "penetrate civil society" and to "implement political decisions throughout the realm," as opposed to the despotic power, which describes what "the elite is empowered to undertake without institutionalized negotiation with civil society groups (Mann 188-189)." Meanwhile, recent studies conducted by Clifford Ando and Emily Mackil have already addressed and problematized the applicability of Mann's theory in studying territoriality in Archaic Greek and Roman worlds (Ando 115 - 48; Mackil 63-90). This work, therefore, builds upon their effort and takes the discussion further into early Hellenistic Asia Minor and uses despotic and infrastructural powers as the lens to look closely into the question of land and state power in the Seleucid West.

To achieve its aim, this present study advances its argument in the following steps. First, it refrains from viewing despotic and infrastructural powers as completely disentangled ideas as they appear in Mann's original thesis, while proposing to extend Mann's definition of ‘infrastructure' from a political, administrative notion to an intellectual one. Then, by examining epigraphic sources such as RC 10-13, Didyma 20, and the Denizli inscription, it testifies to the despotic power which Seleucid kings exercised when they granted or sold royal lands to individuals, who could then choose to register these lands at a Greek state in Asia Minor and thus change its boundary. After that, it pays specific attention to the term ‘kyrieia' mentioned in those texts. As an economic concept describing de facto ownership that had been well-developed in Classical Greece (cf. Dem. Ora, 53.4), kyrieia substantiated the status of those beneficiaries as legitimate property-holders whose capacity to register their newly acquired estates at a city of their choosing constituted a ‘force of suspense' that could rouse the interests of many Greek states seeking to expand their civil territories. By piecing all of these together, this paper argues that alongside their despotic power, the Seleucid kings also exercised an infrastructural power that penetrated the civic operations of Greek cities in Asia Minor and fostered pro-Seleucid leanings among them through effective employment of kyrieia, a concept that was already deeply entrenched in the civil and intellectual infrastructures of the Hellenic world.

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Presenters

Qizhen Xie, Brown University

  SCS-66