Ptolemy I, the founder of the Lagid dynasty, heavily invested in the navy and thus established the Ptolemies as a formidable sea power, his work continued by his successor Ptolemy II Philadelphus, who employed his fleet to pressure lesser powers of the Mediterranean. The following article examines the activity of Ptolemy II’s fleet in the Aegean Sea. At the end of the 270s, Ptolemy II sent a naval expedition to the Black Sea; the operation helped him establish a political relationship with Byzantion and demonstrated that maintaining a naval presence on foreign waters could influence other rulers to favor the Ptolemies. The Ptolemaic fleet under Ptolemy II Philadelphus operated in the Aegean during two major international conflicts, the Chremonidean War and the Second Syrian War. In this article I argue that the surviving evidence on the Chremonidean War indicates that Ptolemy II’s aim was not to subdue Greece or even Macedonia but to maintain the Ptolemaic hold over the Aegean with Egypt’s relatively small naval force under Patroclus. In turn, the outcome of the Second Syrian War led to a considerable weakening of the Lagids’ position in the Aegean. Ptolemy II adroitly cultivated international relations through diplomacy, propaganda, international euergetism and spreading his dynastic cult; sending the Ptolemaic fleet to patrol foreign seas constituted one crucial instrument Philadelphus could employ to shift the Mediterranean balance of power in his favor.

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The activity of Ptolemy II’s fleet in the Aegean Sea

The small, second-century BCE temple of Herakles at Kleonai has long been a landmark in the southern Corinthia, visited by early travelers in Greece and thoroughly studied and published. Less attention, however, has been paid to the in situ fragmentary colossal cult statue of Herakles, and questions concerning its date, artist, and sculptural “type” remain unresolved. The fragmentary nature, colossal scale, and significant context of the fragment have made these interrelated issues difficult to study using traditional means of documentation. This article presents a novel reexamination of the cult statue in its architectural and archaeological contexts, employing methods drawn from both traditional sculptural study and recent innovations in digital object documentation. In September 2020, the authors undertook a complete restudy of the Kleonai torso, collecting detailed measurements and photographs. This data set was used to create a scaled 3D photogrammetric model that illuminates previously undocumented traces of facture and offers new evidence for the display context of the complete statue. These results resituate this fragmentary sculpture as one of the most notable examples of a Hellenistic sculptural type, the Herakles Epitrapezios, popular across the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean.1

Carol J. King

Papers

The Hellenistic Peloponnese: Interstate Relations. A Narrative and Analytic History, from the Fourth Century to 146 BC by Ioanna Kralli