Pergamon in 218 B.C.

Pergamon — Spring 218 BC · The Self-Made Kingdom Rebounds.

Pergamon — the brilliant upstart kingdom of north-west Asia Minor, ruled from a soaring citadel above the Caicus plain. Its Attalid kings are no ancient royal house but the heirs of Philetaerus, an officer who seized a war-treasury and a rock-fortress; their crown was won in battle against the Galatian Gauls, against whom Attalus I styled himself Soter, the Saviour, and king. For a moment in the 220s Pergamon overran Seleucid Asia this side of the Taurus — until the rebel Seleucid Achaeus drove Attalus back inside his own walls and made himself master of the rest. In 218 BC, while Achaeus is entangled far to the south, Attalus takes the field again with a fresh band of Gauls from Europe to reclaim the cities of Aeolis and the Troad, rebuilding the kingdom city by city.

Pergamon’s power has just been broken and is only now reviving. In the confusion of the Seleucid house Attalus I had pushed his frontier across most of Asia Minor north of the Taurus — but then Achaeus, cousin of the new king Antiochus III, crossed the mountains to recover those lands, shut Attalus up within the walls of Pergamon, made himself master of everything else, and put on the diadem as a king in his own right. So in 218 BC the Attalid realm is once more little more than the ancestral citadel and the Caicus valley about it. Yet the moment is turning. Achaeus has marched south to make war on Selge in Pisidia, and Attalus, seizing the opening, brings over a host of Aegosagae Gauls from Europe and sets out through Aeolis and the Troad — and the cities that fear had driven into Achaeus’s arms come back to him, most of them gladly.