POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 27territory assigned to them. These territories were farmed not like those of the
cities of Old Greece, by citizen farmers, but, by native peasants who were
subjected to the citizens, and enjoyed very few civil rights.
Thereafter, founding new Gree kcities became a normal activity for all of
the so-called Hellenistic kings who succeeded Alexander, and, even more so,
for the Romans who succeeded them, so that the entire eastern Mediterranean
and Near East was eventually linked by a web of Greek cities. These cities
enjoyed no more legal rights than autonomous non-Gree knations did, but
they were unquestionably prestigious and prosperous, their self-confidence
enhanced by royal patronage and friendship. They were thus soon joined by
ancient non-Gree kcities, li ke Sardis in Asia Minor, or Tyre and Sidon in
Phoenicia, which in the third century succeeded in transforming themselves
into Gree kcities, though few of their citizens were of Gree kdescent.^20
Given the omnipresence of Gree kcities in the Fertile Crescent and the
pressures on better-off natives to adopt Gree kculture wholesale and even to
become Gree k(pressures, it bears emphasizing, not consciously imposed by
the rulers but rather built in to their system of rule), the stakes in hellenization
changed dramatically after Alexander the Great. It was now not unthinkable
that nations long in existence or established by the Persians might simply be
willed out of existence by their upper classes’ desire to be Greek, to reconsti-
tute themselves as the citizen body of a Gree kcity. Indeed, such a process,
indirectly attested for many cities of Asia Minor and Phoenicia in the third
century, may be precisely what occurred in Jerusalem and Shechem in the
second century, precipitating the Maccabean revolt.
The TobiadsWe can get some sense of the complex effects of Macedonian rule on Jewish
society, and the limits of the utility of hellenization in explaining them, by
briefly considering two bodies of information. The first of these is Josephus’s
“Tobiad romance,” a historical fiction embedded in boo k12 of theAntiquities
(154–236). Josephus misdated the story to the early years of Seleucid rule,
though its content makes it clear that the story is set in the last generation of
Ptolemaic rule.^21 The second body of information consists of several pieces of
writing from the third and early second centuries, which allow us to see how
Macedonian rule affected the concerns of Judaean priests and scribes, but in
ways that have no obvious connection to hellenization.
In Josephus’s account, Joseph son of Tobias, a member of the Tobiad family
mentioned previously and nephew of the Judaean high priest Onias II, suc-
(^20) See S. Schwartz, “Hellenization of Jerusalem and Shechem.”
(^21) On the story, see most recently D. Gera,Judaea and Mediterranean Politics, 219 to 161 BCE
(Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 36–58.