Rolf Strootman brings together various aspects of court culture in the Macedonian empires of the post-Achaemenid Near East. During the Hellenistic Period (c. 330-30 BCE), Alexander the Great and his successors reshaped their Persian and Greco-Macedonian legacies to create a new kind of rulership that was neither western' nor 'eastern' and would profoundly influence the later development of court culture and monarchy in both the Roman West and Iranian East.
Drawing on the socio-political models of Norbert Elias and Charles Tilly, After the Achaemenids shows how the Hellenistic dynastic...