The Seleukid Study Group would like to announce a call for papers for the sixth Seleukid Study Days to be held at Nipissing University in North Bay, Ontario, Canada from September 1st to 3rd, 2017. The theme for the workshop will be on how Seleukid claims to political legitimacy were received by those over whom they claimed suzerainty. Can we see local nuances to central policies? Could local authorities afford to ignore them completely? Which forms might dissent have taken? And what were the responses, once open resistance was declared?
There is a growing body of scholarship on the mechanisms and ideology of Seleukid rule (i.e. P. Kosmin 2014, L. Capdetray 2008, S. Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993). What is sorely needed, however, is a thorough examination of how such claims to legitimacy were received. The centrifugal tendencies of Seleukid power have long been noted in scholarship, tendencies that have often been explained away as the result of deficiencies in Seleukid governance structures or the opportunistic behavior of powerful dynasts. Moreover, it is often assumed that, with a few notable exceptions, subjects simply acquiesced in Seleukid claims to political legitimacy. But this assumption is belied by the aforementioned centrifugal tendencies of Seleukid rule. Open revolt, after all, requires significant popular support. But beyond open revolt, resistance to claims of legitimate authority can take on a variety of forms aside from violence, expressing itself linguistically, artistically, religiously, and in myriad other ways. It is hoped that a thorough understanding of all the various responses and forms of resistance to Seleukid rule, and how the royal center reacted to those responses, will bring into sharper focus our understanding of the character of Seleukid rule, where it succeeded and why it ultimately failed.