This article examines the interactions between the Seleukid queen Laodike III and the cities of Iasos, Teos and Sardis in Asia Minor, three communities whose commemorations of her patronage have survived in the known corpus of inscriptions, along with her own letters, a rare female voice in the world of Hellenistic interstate politics. Asia Minor was a major battleground for all the Hellenistic kingdoms, including the Seleukids and a number of Anatolian dynasties, and during the third and second centuries BCE it was a patchwork of changeable royal claims to control and demands of loyalty. Cities faced repeated conquest, occupation, exaction of tribute, abandonment and recriminations, and had to secure their existence with carefully devised allegiances and constant negotiation of political status. Ideologically autonomous, but with a history of foreign rule by the Persians and now the Hellenistic kings, cities fought to survive by mustering claims to traditional rights and rallying influential elites who might intercede on their behalf. Interactions with whichever king happened to be in control were fraught with tension and manipulation as city ambassadors sought to obtain royal favour, either to endure under that king's rule, or for protection lest the king hand them over to a rival power. In this context, Queen Laodike mediated royal goodwill, ameliorated the violence of her husband's conquests and opened up a positive chain of communication with beleaguered cities.Laodike's intervention in cities centred on her patronage of women, in particular their roles as wives and mothers to sustain the demos, or civic community. Her benefactions to women had demographic and political ramifications and, in return, the cities made Laodike the focus of female ceremonial activity in public life. Participation in the Greek cities depended on family membership, and throughout the Hellenistic period it was characterised by the increasing use of fictive kinship terminology to represent the bonds between members of the civic body. 1 This paper shows that the characterisation of Laodike as benefactress par excellence, as sister-wife to Antiochos and as highly esteemed mother mirrored the identities of women in the cities she helped. Laodike's patronage of women generated a reciprocal relationship between demos and royal dynasty, and both parties enhanced their own magnanimity and prestige by praising

At its height during the reign of Antiochos III (223–188 BCE ), the Seleucid empire spanned most of the Near East from western Asia Minor to Afghanistan, and Armenia to Palestine, covering for the most part areas previously conquered by Alexander the Great. The Seleucid royal family was of Macedonian origin on its paternal side, Iranian on the maternal and exercised control of the empire by grafting Hellenistic forms of organization onto pre‐existing Near Eastern systems. As such, the introduction of new settlements and Greek‐style cities was an integral part of Seleucid imperial rule.

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parts of the Hellenistic world. Three contributions deal directly with issues of dating. Ch. Crowther establishes a provisional palaeographical sequence for Hellenistic Koan inscriptions and identiμes different epigraphical hands. His work, though open to revision as new material becomes available, must form the basis for all future discussions. Chr. Habicht's article discusses the chronology of the Koan eponymous magistrates, the monarchoi, revising the dates (downward) of the victor lists of the Koan Greater Asklepieia, and of two documents from Halasarna (down by 25-30 years). His redating, if accepted (I μnd it persuasive), has consequences well beyond the island's own history. H. herself, again using epigraphical evidence, critically revises the chronological sequences established by D. Berges for the many cylindrical funerary altars found on the island. H. Ingvaldsen shows that personal names on Koan coins cannot yet be μrmly dated and prosopographically μxed but holds out the promise that with further analysis of die links such results will one day be possible. The evidence of Koan amphorae, too, provides invaluable dating sequences relevant to many aspects of Koan history and to the Hellenistic world and its economy more generally. Amphorae from Halasarna are analysed by V. Georgopoulos, while H. Johnson and G. Finkielsztejn discuss, in a wider Mediterranean (and methodological) perspective, the evidence of Koan amphorae exported to the southeastern Mediterranean and the southern Levant. The volume's important and fascinating μnal paper, by Eirene Poupaki, successfully questions established interpretations of the chronology and nature of the exploitation of the island's marble and stone quarries and points the way to future research. Two further papers, by K. Rigsby and K. Buraselis, deal with aspects of the Koan Asklepieia (theôroi and asylia respectively); S. Carlsson places Koan democracy within a wider discussion of democracy in the Hellenistic period.