Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire by Paul J. Kosmin

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 379 to come. The book is all meat and no filler and is clearly written throughout. It is an important book and a valuable contribution to the field. University of Colorado Boulder Peter Hunt Time and Its Adversaries in the Seleucid Empire. By Paul J. Kosmin. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2018. Pp. x, 379. Paul Kosmin's second book—a companion piece to his 2014 monograph on space and territory in the Seleucid empire1 —is a social-historical tour de force. It focuses on the Seleucids’ innovative chronological system, the “Seleucid Era count” (henceforth, SE), and explores the roles this system played in both imperial and indigenous identity-formation. This book belongs in the company of works such as Dennis Feeney’s Caesar’s Calendar and Sacha Stern’s Calendars in Antiquity,2 which explore how ancient communities used their temporal systems to express alliance with or resistance toward other groups or ideologies. Kosmin advances this discussion by bringing together textual and material evidence that is usually sequestered within separate disciplines (e.g., classics, Near Eastern studies, biblical studies). He proposes a number of provocative and compelling claims and, by highlighting the eerie similarities between the SE system and modern-day Western chronology, he encourages us, as readers, to reexamine the temporal frameworks that shape our own lives. While other Hellenistic kingdoms dated events by regnal years, the SE system uniquely did not reset its numerical count with each imperial succession; in fact, SeleucidEra years were not associated with monarchs at all. Instead, the SE count, which began with a “Year 1” in 311 b.c.e., continued to advance in an unbroken sequence of numbers, whose linearity, impersonality, and inexorability is very familiar to us in 2019 c.e., but would have seemed highly unusual to ancient contemporaries. Kosmin posits that the similarities between modern and Seleucid chronological systems are not simply structural; he encourages readers to identify in the writings of Seleucid-Era subjects elements of the nostalgia, temporal anxiety, and “terror of history” (135) that have been attributed traditionally to “modernity” alone. Kosmin’s thesis is that the new genres of historical writing which arose among Seleucid subject populations— with their emphases on periodization, totalizing narratives, and, especially, apocalyptic eschatology—were, in fact, direct responses not only to the SE system as a symbol of empire , but also to the crisis of historical meaning engendered by its apparent interminability . Thus, Kosmin argues that, in contrast to long-held assumptions, an open-ended linear and mathematical view of time actually preceded and prompted the development of apocalyptic temporalities. 1 P. Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings: Space, Territory, and Ideology in the Seleucid Empire (Cambridge, MA 2014). Reviewed by Richard Wenghofer in Phoenix 68 (2014) 361–363. 2 D. Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History (Berkeley 2007); S. Stern, Calendars in Antiquity: Empires, States, and Societies (Oxford 2012). Surprisingly absent from the book’s bibliography is J. Rüpke, Kalender und Öffentlichkeit: Die Geschichte der Repräsentation und religiösen Qualifikation von Zeit in Rom (Berlin 1995). 380 PHOENIX The overall structure of Kosmin’s text is logical and symmetrical, consisting of an introduction, two sections of three chapters apiece, and a brief conclusion followed by extensive chapter notes. The introduction clearly lays out the book’s central claims, motivations, and methodologies. Kosmin positions his arguments within current debates, and takes care to identify the methodological pitfalls he seeks to avoid (e.g., teleology, unitary causation, and undue extrapolation from uneven evidence). The introduction also orients readers to the peculiar features of the Seleucid kingdom, such as its unique reliance on abstraction in many aspects of its state design. Overall, the introduction is lucid, engaging, and useful, and it makes a persuasive case for the book’s importance. Part I (“Imperial Present”) looks at how the Seleucid court structured and disseminated its Era count, and how this system changed the texture of long-term timekeeping in the region. Chapter One (“The Seleucid Era and Its Epoch”) introduces readers to the SE system itself and discusses why Seleucus Nicator’s

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