Austin A. Hattori, University of Cincinnati
What is propaganda? Very few scholars of Hellenistic poetry have attempted a definition (e.g. Kosmetatou 2004), although a limited few in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity in general have asserted the necessity for critically rigorous definitions of propaganda as applied to ancient contexts: Weber and Zimmermann (2003) deny altogether that “propaganda” is a meaningful term for antiquity, while Enenkel and Pfeijffer (2005) suggest that “propaganda” may be a useful term in ancient contexts with certain limitations. One of the central issues debated by these scholars is the extent to which ancient media can be understood to represent a top-down message from those in authority to disseminate to the masses.
The very recent publication of a papyrus in ZPE by Chepel (2022) provides an opportunity to revisit these debates as it regards Hellenistic poetry. This papyrus definitively proves for the first time that there were musical contests (μουσι[κοὺς] ἀγῶνας, lines 8–9) at a festival in Ptolemaic Alexandria: as Chepel suggests, the papyrus likely details the extravagant proceedings of the Theadelpheia festival in March–April 242 BCE. Until now, it had been an open question; notably, Cameron (1995) had suggested festival agōnes as a context for the first performances of Hellenistic poetry, but had been unable to produce evidence of such contests in Alexandria during the time of the great third-century BCE Hellenistic poets (cf. Harder 2012).
Already in the editio princeps of this papyrus, Chepel (2022) claims that the Theadelpheia festival of 242 was an opportunity for Ptolemy III and Berenice II to legitimize their rule and spread propaganda. It is undeniable that the Theadelpheia would have required extensive top-down planning on the part of Ptolemy and Berenice, but in this paper I argue that the politics of the festival require us to complicate the picture, especially as it regards the group of musicians likely responsible for organizing the event. These were the technītai of Dionysus, often called “artists’ guilds” in modern literature; the Chepel papyrus itself twice mentions registrations of technītai (lines 5, 8). The artists’ guilds of Dionysus operated under a Hellenic civic model and were the only non-polis institutions to appoint their own proxenoi (Lightfoot 2002; Kloppenborg 2020). The Dionysiac guild of Ptolemaïs Hermiou declared itself to be a techniteuma (I.Prose I 6.11, ca. 246 BCE), a word possibly modeled after politeuma, and in the early second century BCE the technītai of Teos were even involved in an economic dispute which came close to civil war (Le Guen 2022). Thus, I argue that our understanding of the politics of Alexandrian musical festivals must accommodate how the Ptolemies would have employed the musicians in the guilds on a more horizontal dynamic of power than is accommodated by the top-down model employed by most Hellenistic poetry scholarship so far. While the Ptolemies certainly orchestrated Alexandrian musical contests, the musicians involved formed their own political identity and wielded power themselves, and it does not necessarily follow that all their poetry was composed as “propaganda” for the Ptolemies.