Introduction

TONY SPAWFORTH

Taking the field of ancient history as a whole, including the Middle and Far East as well as Europe and the Mediterranean, the monarchical court cannot be said to have occupied centre-stage in a way that might seem justified by the prevalence of monarchy as a system of power in antiquity.¹ The reasons for this relative neglect are complex and cannot all be unpacked here.² But one, certainly, is the sense of the court as a ‘moribund social formatio[n]’³ which has permeated western consciousness since the French Revolution. Backstairs influence, intrigue and flattery: these generic phenomena of courts have earned themselves a bad reputation in western democracies which pose as the mirror-opposites of ‘old-regime’ arrangements of power, and in the study of ancient monarchies they are often sidelined, or their association by ancient writers with ‘bad’ or ‘weak’ rulers, or with whole societies classed as degenerate, as the ancient Persians were by the ancient Greeks (Brosius in this volume), taken at face value.⁴ In those nineteenth-century European monarchies which survived, especially after 1848, constitutionalism was the order of the day, as it had been (at least notionally) in the United Kingdom since 1688. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century the students of monarchical institutions in the ancient world have often been preoccupied with modernist attempts to define their legal basis – as with the Macedonian kings, say, or the early Roman emperors. In the legacy of earlier generations of scholars, there are obvious exceptions to this sidelining of the court, such as the researches of L. Friedländer on early imperial Rome or H. Berve on Alexander the Great, and these have proved mighty bulwarks for at least two of the chapters in this book (Spawforth; Paterson). But even these studies tend to be descriptive rather than analytical. As the contributors to this book have found out, the court as a central entity within the monarchies which they study has often been taken for granted (Brosius; Spawforth), or scarcely conceptualised at all (Wiesehöfer; van Ess; Spence). A related reason for this neglect is the traditional separation in western scholarship of the ‘trappings’ from the ‘substance’ of power. The ‘trappings’ involve aspects of monarchy which scholars trained to focus on the history of events or institutions have traditionally found hard to take seriously as objects of study – ceremonial, say.⁵ They also involve the crossing of interdisciplinary boundaries: the study of palaces, gardens, costume and iconography is traditionally the field of art historians and archaeologists; the study of feasts – a subject which often comes up in this book – is arguably more the domain of the social scientist; and so on. Finally, this interdisciplinary complexity is nowadays being reinforced by the gendered approaches which are reappraising the role of women in rulers’ courts, both ancient and modern. The prejudice in most if not all ancient societies against women rulers (see Spence in this volume on Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt) has meant that powerful royal women have often been presented as ‘unnatural’ by ancient (male) writers, from Achaemenid queens and princesses to the younger Agrippina, when in fact this sort of influence is a sociological phenomenon arising more or less naturally from the embedding of a ruler’s exercise of power in the domestic setting of the court.

   What, then, is a ‘court’? All the chapters in this book have sought to answer this question with reference, first, to contemporary perceptions. In some ancient societies a word for ‘court’ is harder to track down than in others, and here the issue may require more lexicographical research (Spence and Wiesehöfer in this volume). Elsewhere, with Chinese ch’ao, say, meaning literally ‘morning audience’, a modern dictionary may retroject today’s sense of ‘court’, a meaning of which the Han Chinese may not have been fully conscious (van Ess in this volume). It is clear, though, that the ancient Greeks and Romans had conceptualised the court at least to some degree.⁶ Thus the Greek word from which the modern neologism ‘aulic’ derives, aulē, along with the Latin equivalent aula, is used by ancient writers both of the ruler’s dwelling as a physical entity and in a more abstract sense of the people to be found there – ‘those peri tē n aulē n’ (see Spawforth, Paterson and Smith in this volume).

   This idea, that ‘the court’ is both the spatial framework of the ruler’s existence and also the social configuration with which he shares that space, is fundamental in modern attempts to define and analyse the court. It might be argued that the word ‘household’ then starts to look like a perfectly adequate alternative to ‘court’, in the sense of the members of the ruler’s family cohabiting in his dwelling, along with their domestic attendants and bodyguards. There is some cogency in this viewpoint. But a concept is needed which takes account of more than simply household personnel. For a start, the dwellings of ancient rulers were the focus for decision-making and governance in monarchies which were all (in the case of the ones studied in this book) personal and more or less absolutist. Factored into the ruler’s entourage in this kind of ‘Weberian’ patrimonial monarchy, therefore, must be the comings-and-goings of political ‘helpers’ and, in some cases (the late Roman and Han Chinese empires, say: see Smith and van Ess in this volume), a fledgling state bureaucracy. The apocryphal saying of Louis ⅩⅣ, ‘L’état c’est moi’, could not be more misleading about the complex reality of the exercise of royal power in pre-Revolutionary France, where ‘ideas, practices and even institutions’ did much to limit – albeit not control – the French king’s ‘theoretically formidable’ authority (Antoine 1989: 175–9). Some such formulation, albeit with less emphasis (perhaps) on ‘institutions’, could be put forward in summary of the powers of most, if not all, the monarchies studied in this book (the nomoi or ‘customs’, say, which restrained the Macedonian king). For this reason, the ruler’s space was also the potential site of exchanges between ruler and all manner of subjects who were not necessarily members of his household or even in any sense his officials. This space, finally, was also where envoys of foreign powers were received. The attempts by each side to control or manage these exchanges gave rise to the theatricality often thought of as characteristic of courts: pomp and circumstance on one side; a carefully controlled demeanour, incorporating deference, ingratiation and flattery, on the other. The semantic field ‘court’ best conceptualises the idea of a social configuration characterised by these distinctive modes of communication.

   The chapters which follow highlight the state elites as the key-group of subjects in the workings of ancient courts. The study of monarchical courts, then, is unavoidably a form of elite history, since no ancient monarchies (or at least, none of those studied here) conceived themselves as instruments of ‘people power’, even if gift-giving to the masses (the ‘bread and circuses’ of imperial Rome) was one of ‘the necessary costs of stable autocratic government’ in antiquity.⁷ The court in its physical sense was not entirely isolated from the people – the linkage of the late Roman imperial palace to the hippodrome is the most striking example of the quasi-integration of ordinary subjects into the spatial configuration of the courts studied here (Smith in this volume). More often, however, as the following chapters show, the court turns out to be a place where issues of access to the ruler seem mainly to focus on the elites: these were the people whose face-to-face encounters with the ruler Akhenaten’s Window of Appearance (Spence in this volume), say, or Alexander’s state tent (Spawforth in this volume), not to mention feasts and hunts (Smith in this volume), were – to differing degrees – intended to manage. Ancient monarchs, like those of later periods, relied on trustworthy servants with whom they were obliged to share their power if territories were to be administered, armies commanded, and other functions of ancient-world governance discharged. From the ruler’s point of view, management of relations with his elites was critical, since it was this group which provided both his key helpers and, as often as not, the most potent source of attempts to supplant him. The chief spatial and social setting in which both ruler and elites sought to manage their mutual interaction was the court. In the following chapters the manner of this interaction is shown to be culturally specific in different ancient societies in a range of ways; in all chapters, however, it is a recurrent and a major theme. Most chapters distinguish an ‘inner’ from an ‘outer’ court, the former comprising the ruler and those whom service or kinship kept more or less permanently in his vicinity, the latter denoting members of the elite who were a more intermittent presence, in part by virtue of the coming-and-going between centre and periphery imposed on them by the delegated power with which the ruler entrusted them.

   Ancient courts, then, were complex entities. In negotiating this complexity, contributors to this volume were able to take their bearings in part thanks to the edifice of current scholarship on medieval and early modern courts inspired, as even his critics concede, by the German social historian Norbert Elias.⁸ Elias was the first scholar to impart scholarly rigour to the study of monarchical courts. His doctorate was first published in 1933. As Die höfische Gesellschaft (‘The Court Society’) it only became widely known a generation later, however, following the publication of a new (and different) German edition in 1969. This was translated into French in 1974, with English translation by Edmund Jephcott following in 1983.

   Elias centred his work on the court of Louis ⅩⅣ and his successors at Versailles, for his picture of which he was heavily reliant on the brilliant but partisan memoirs of a courtier, the duc de Saint-Simon (1675–1753). The text of Elias is rich and dense. One of his central propositions, that the court society of pre-Revolutionary France marked a necessary stage in the ‘socio-genesis’ of the nineteenth-century French state, does not directly concern this book. Another, however, is more relevant. Basing himself on Saint-Simon, Elias posed the question: How do hereditary monarchies of the patrimonial type reproduce themselves from one ruler to the next, often over a period of centuries? He argued that the crucial relationship in this type of monarchy was between the ruler and the elites (see above), and that the court was the means by which each sought to bring influence to bear on the other – its fulcrum. In his case study, Louis ⅩⅣ was cast as a conserving ruler, third king of the Bourbon line, whose chief aim was to maintain his inherited position of power. Louis achieved this by constructing the ‘hyper-palace’ of Versailles. Here he ensnared the kingdom’s elite – the French high nobility – by means of an elaborate system of etiquette. This kept grandees in their place by conferring or withholding prestige-fetishes, such as the notorious privilege of holding the candlestick at the royal coucher. The Versailles system worked for Louis ⅩⅣ, according to Elias, because it manipulated the aristocratic outlook of noble courtiers and in particular their obsession with honour and distinction. For the monarchy, Versailles offered the means to replace the real power of the high nobility with honorific functions.

   Elias’ arguments have not escaped a revisionist assault from historians in recent years. In particular, it is argued that he exaggerated the absolutism of Louis ⅩⅣ and underplayed the fact that Louis and his courtiers were engaged in a mutual negotiation, in which the latter exchanged their attendance and their deference for royal patronage and the wherewithal to maintain traditional aristocratic status-goals;⁹ and, even if Louis ⅩⅣ can be said to have dominated his court, this was less obviously the case with his two successors, where the reverse could seem more the case.¹⁰ Even so, the work of Elias still remains perhaps the richest source of reflections on the ruler’s court as a social configuration. One of its strengths is that it constantly stands back and risks general observations about power, monarchy and social structure. The interest of these for scholars of ancient courts can be gauged by the number of citations of Elias in the chapters which follow. For students of ancient courts, Elias is also highly stimulating for his analysis – less fresh in 2007, of course, than at the time when he wrote it – of the ‘substance’ of monarchical rule by means of the ‘trappings’, and for insisting on the importance of sociological concepts, notably conspicuous consumption and status, in trying to understand the workings of courts. Less remarkable now, to be sure, than when he originally wrote, this kind of approach, while it may seem commonsensical these days in some fields of history-writing, cannot be said to be taken for granted in the study of antiquity.

   In recent years the work of Elias has started to attract historians tending one particular corner of antiquity, namely Greece and Rome. In the 1970s the potential of the Eliasque approach was recognised by Keith Hopkins, well known for using methodology informed by the social sciences to break new ground in studies of the Roman empire.¹¹ In the mid-1990s, in his chapter on the court of the Julio-Claudian emperors for the Cambridge Ancient History Andrew Wallace-Hadrill acknowledged his debt to Elias,¹² as did Gabriel Herman in an original study of Hellenistic court politics and court etiquette (see below).¹³ More recently there has been a spate of German studies of ancient (classical) courts within the Elias tradition led by the wide-ranging historian Aloys Winterling, who worked first on the court of the early modern electors of Cologne¹⁴ before turning to ancient (classical) courts, above all the Roman imperial court.¹⁵ This volume is greatly indebted to the contributions of Winterling and his colleagues. That said, their work is not well known in Anglophone scholarship.

   Turning to the present volume, it was born out of a common conviction among the contributors that our understanding of ancient monarchies could be usefully improved by viewing them through the optic of the court. A first aim is to explore ways of adding conceptual rigour to an aspect of ancient rulership which, as noted earlier, has tended to be taken for granted, if it has been considered at all. A second aim is to take the Elias-inspired debate about the court to a range of ancient societies. To an extent this approach has been anticipated by Winterling (1997), in a collection which looked comparatively at the ruler’s court across the sweep of classical antiquity. The Newcastle project, however, sought to take the discussion of ancient courts out of this classical ‘box’ and to adopt a cross-cultural perspective. Egypt, Persia and China were chosen for a number of reasons. Diversity is one. Han China was clearly not influenced by the practices of the classical world; nor was Egypt in the period studied by Spence in this volume. Along with Persia, all three were ancient societies where little or no explicit attempt has so far been made to model the ruler’s court, and this chance to experiment was a further attraction. Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt, moreover, was at best a proto-historic society, and Spence’s investigation necessarily addresses the methodological challenge of melding historiographic models with archaeological evidence to a far greater extent than other chapters in the book. Within classical antiquity, Alexander the Great was an attractive figure because on the one hand his court ceremonial is relatively well attested, while on the other he tends to be seen chiefly as a military, not an aulic, figure. As already noted, the court of the Roman emperors is far from being virgin territory. But we felt that there was still room for reviewing the imperial court in an explicitly comparative way. The Roman Principate allows the initial stages in the creation of a court society to be followed in some detail by the usual standards of ancient evidence. The two chapters on Rome by Jeremy Paterson and Rowland Smith not only debate with Elias, but also take account of recent German work as yet relatively unknown in the Anglosphere. With all the ancient states under review, in one respect the project sought to compare like with like. States were chosen which combined strong monarchies with empire in the periods of their history examined in this book, because these seem to be the conditions in which, historically, court culture has tended to flourish.

   The Newcastle project explicitly adoped an interdisciplinary approach, and all contributors are aware of, and in different ways have been stimulated by, contemporary court studies. Inevitably, the figure of Elias looms large. It is important to stress, however, that the project was not intended to be merely reactive to Elias and modern court studies. Indeed, the collection is not touting a methodology as such, nor does it espouse any one model of the court. In fact, despite the impact of The Court Society on modern work on the court, currently there appears to be no authoritative model of a court to which early modern historians all subscribe.¹⁶

   In order to strike a balance between diversity and the coherence of theme required to sustain a multi-authored approach, the editor provided an initial briefing paper for contributors to consult when writing their first drafts. All contributors attended a workshop in Newcastle in May 2004, where each pre-circulated draft was discussed among the group. The workshop concluded by subscribing to a common agenda around which final contributions could cohere.¹⁷ Various issues were agreed to merit discussion, although it was up to individual contributors to decide where the emphasis should lie.

   It was proposed that each paper in its final form should reflect on two broad questions: whether it was legitimate to talk of a ‘court’ in the specific monarchy being discussed, and how crucial the ruler’s court was for understanding the machinery of power in the double sense of actual decision-making and power’s ‘representation’. To pursue these questions, further issues were identified which should, or could, be considered.

1    Can the concept of a ‘court’ and of ‘courtiers’ be identified in contemporary thought and language?

2    Who belongs to the court? How does membership break down into different status groups? Is it helpful to think in terms of an inner and outer court of, respectively, people permanently in the ruler’s personal vicinity and others whose presence is temporary?

3    How are the people closest to the ruler recruited? How far is the ruler’s freedom to recruit these people tempered by, for instance, established career-structures, where these can be said to exist at all?

4    What structures of communication characterise the court? How is physical access to the ruler articulated? In the interaction between ruler and courtiers, what part is played, and for what ‘structural’ reasons, by flattery and servile opportunism, or intrigue, or faction?

5    What is the relationship of the ruler’s domestic setting or household function to decision-making? How far, and for what particular reasons, do members of the household, including relations and domestic functionaries, influence decision-making?

6    Does the ruler’s residence function as a site of representation? ‘Representation’ embraces the whole range of forms of symbolic communication, such as art and architecture, ceremony and costume, which legitimate the ruler’s authority.

7    Does the court display ‘stateliness’, in the sense of clearly amounting to an institution in its own right, acquiring organisational complexity, or coming to function of its own volition, or influencing social attitudes, or generating an autonomous ‘court society’?

8    How important is the court as a symbol of social order, a place where social ranking is put on display and different elite groups are integrated by means of ceremony?

   From the outset, it was clear that the ancient sources would be a critical constraint in the investigation of these issues. All contributors were therefore asked to make explicit the strengths and drawbacks of the source material at their disposal. It cannot be emphasised enough how limited these sources are when compared to those, for example, available to the modern historian studying the court of Louis ⅩⅣ. In this last case, the material includes works of literature and reports by observers (Saint-Simon’s memoirs; the missives of foreign ambassadors), courtiers’ journals (the marquess de Dangeau’s notably¹⁸), official records of court departments and court ceremonies, royal artefacts, and of course the royal residences themselves, which, even if destroyed or (as in the case of Versailles) severely altered since the Revolu- tion, are still copiously documented by the surviving archives.

   The ancient societies viewed here exemplify enormous diversity in the different sorts of limitations imposed by the evidence. For classical antiqui- ty we are heavily reliant on the artful works of a literary elite predisposed – by cultural tradition as much as by political feeling – to sing the praises of personal autonomy and view monarchy with ambivalence. In Alexander’s case this literary bias is further skewed by the fact that the extant Alexander-historians wrote, at the earliest, some three centuries after Alexander’s death; inevitably, they import the cultural colouring of their (Roman) time. Ancient Chinese historiography provides the basis for the study of the Han Chinese court and displays similar difficulties for the modern historian (van Ess in this volume): the great Ssu-ma Ch’ien was critical of imperial policy; the Book of the Later Han was composed some four centuries after the start of the Later Han period; and so on. The most striking feature of the sources for the Achaemenid Persian period is the authority of a body of contemporary writing from a largely hostile, neighbouring culture (Greece), which used (and arguably distorted) representations of the Achaemenid empire as a means of constructing the cultural ‘other’; this can be offset to a limited degree by contemporary documents and archaeology, given full weight by Brosius in this volume. Sasanian Persia, likewise, has left behind no contemporary literature of its own about the court, although there is relevant material in the literary culture of a hostile neighbour (the late Roman empire), not to mention much later Iranian traditions with the usual problems of distortion and colouring. Inscriptions play an important part in offsetting the dearth of other kinds of written testimony in the cases of Persia and Egypt. These texts are not, of course, without problems of their own: Egyptian funerary inscriptions address eternity; official inscriptions of the Achaemenid or Sasanian rulers belong to the field of royal representation and must be understood as such. As for material remains, for one of the contributions, on Alexander, they are simply not available: modern knowledge of the physical setting of Alexander’s court is dependent on written descriptions. For the other ancient societies studied in this volume there is, indeed, archaeological evidence, although the modern tradition of archaeological exploration is much stronger for some parts of what was once the ancient world, such as Egypt, than for others, such as the Sasanian empire (respectively Spence and Wiesehöfer in this volume). Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt and Achaemenid Persia are particularly remarkable for the survival of a rich body of ‘royal’ art depicting the ruler and the court; these to some extent compensate for the absence of much (Egypt) or anything (Achaemenid Persia) in the way of indigenous written observations about the ruler’s court.

   The chapters in the book illustrate this diversity of ancient source-material and also show how this diversity limits, in different ways, our attempts to analyse ancient courts. At one extreme, that of Sasanian Persia, simply to delineate the court in broad brush-strokes, on the basis of a fragmentary and problematic palette of evidence, is an achievement. At the other extreme, the court of the fourth- and fifth-century Roman emperors is attested by a copious body of evidence across a wide range of media. The varying nature of the surviving evidence inevitably makes for difference in the length of chapters in this book. The one on Sasanian Persia, a first attempt to document the Sasanian court, is relatively brief. The length of the chapter on the later Roman empire (Rowland Smith), by contrast, is justified by the richness of the evidence and the consequent complexity of the topic.

   What can be said to have emerged from this book? Some general remarks can first be made about the Eliasque approach and its relevance to ancient courts. In terms of the physical arenas for courtly behaviour, none of the ancient courts studied here turns out to have been like Versailles in the sense of being housed in a palace which also provided lodgings for elite courtiers.¹⁹ Partly this seems to have been a function of the absence of a tradition of domestic attendance on ancient rulers by high-status members of the elite – except in the case of Achaemenid Persia and Macedon (both societies, significantly, without large slave populations). But there were certainly court capitals like Persepolis, early imperial Rome, the palace-cities of the Han, or Akhetaten. Another practice of Versailles, the system of entrées which controlled the admission of members of the elite to the ruler’s presence first thing in the morning, has ancient parallels (Paterson). This has long been noticed, and may be understandable in broadly similar terms: ‘attendance on the prince’s first public appearance has a sound practical reason: to find out what he intends to do, to try to remain in his company and hope to enjoy its attendant advantages’.²⁰ The disproportionate influence at court of low-status household attendants, especially those whose personal services made them intimates of the ruler, turns out to be a recurrent feature of courts both ancient and modern. Imperial freedmen and eunuchs in Roman and Chinese antiquity (Paterson; Smith; van Ess), royal valets at Versailles:²¹ the amalgam of private household and ‘stateliness’ which constituted the ruler’s court had the effect of politicising quite lowly domestic roles if they conferred frequent access to the ruler. The ruler’s promotion of such people has also been seen as structural rather than a function (as contemporaries claimed) of personal ‘weakness’: a device, that is, to offset over-reliance on an entrenched military and political elite (Smith). Along with eunuchs, the harems of some ancient courts offer a dimension to court life which is obviously missing from more recent European courts. This undoubtedly real difference might seem to limit the applicability of an Eliasque approach to ancient courts (van Ess), although even this is debatable. Harems and eunuchs were also very much a part of the Achaemenid Persian and the late Roman courts, which Brosius and Smith in this volume both see, albeit from different perspectives, as complex court societies ‘in something like the sense Elias proposed for Versailles’ (Smith).