The most interesting instance, and the one most touted by ideologists, is the rising at Pergamon led by Aristonicus, in 132.⁸⁹ Aristonicus aimed at creating a new “City of the Sun”; he was joined in this endeavor by the Stoic philosopher Blossius of Cumae, who had been tried for high treason after the death of his friend Tiberius Gracchus, but, luckily, acquitted. Now perhaps about 250 or 225 (the exact date remains uncertain) one Iambulus had written a utopian novel about an island on the equator, in the Indian Ocean, inhabited by sun worshippers: a communal paradise of tall sages with hairless skin and flexible bones, who lived in kinship groups of about four hundred persons, shared all property (women and children included: there was no marriage), and voluntarily committed suicide, by lying down on a lethally soporific plant, at the age of 150, or sooner if crippled or diseased.⁹⁰ It has been argued that Aristonicus, with Blossius’s advice, was trying to establish this odd Heliopolis on earth.⁹¹ Now it is quite possible that Aristonicus knew Iambulus’s fable, even that he borrowed the idea of Sun Citizens (Hēliopolitai) from it.⁹² But at the same time we should take heed of Finley’s salutary warning, for a society in which literature was monopolized by the educated (i.e., upper) classes, “against seeking some particular book behind every popular idea or popular action.”⁹³ More important is the fact that Aristonicus was an illegitimate aspirant to the throne of Pergamon, and furious because Attalus III had, the year before, bequeathed his entire kingdom to Rome (cf. below, p. 529). His appeal to the serfs on the great estates, and the uncommitted smallholders of the interior (as opposed to the wealthy, who were only too willing to truck with Rome, and, as usual, took fright at any threat to redistribute wealth or land), sounds far more like personal and nationalist ambition.⁹⁴ That he held out promises of freedom and justice to his supporters is likely enough, and this may well have involved the connection, common in Near Eastern religious thought, between the divine sun and human justice.⁹⁵ But the motivation, again, is hardly ideological.⁹⁶
With the possible exception of Aristonicus, no one, so far as we can tell, ever thought of actually putting these ideas into practice.¹⁰⁴ The one case we hear of is, as we might expect, a private venture on the part of an eccentric, with no revolutionary violence involved, an Epicurean-style withdrawal from society supported by ample private funds. Cassander’s brother Alexarchus is said to have founded a city named Ouranopolis, “The City of Heaven,” on the Athos peninsula: it would be nice to think that the monastic tradition there owed something, even if only indirectly, to his example. We should not attach too much significance to the fact that he took the radiant sun as a symbol on the coins he struck, since the sunburst, though used in Near Eastern sun cults, may also have served, at least since Philip II’s day, as the emblem of the Macedonian Argead dynasty.¹⁰⁵ More interestingly, he was a linguist, who invented a language for his foundation: a specimen preserved by Athenaeus looks like the Greek equivalent of Anthony Burgess’s Nadsat in A Clockwork Orange, foreign loan words oddly compounded.¹⁰⁶ It would be interesting to know if he actually got people to talk that way. But this dotty (and obviously financially secure) contracting-out has more in common with Coleridge’s dream, in 1794, of Pantisocracy on the banks of the Susquehanna than with any kind of organic movement to change the fundamental structure of Hellenistic society. The notion of the alternative society, on the other hand, deserves more attention than it has hitherto received: at least it restated the popular urge to reject society as it stood in positive, constructive terms. All it needed—but failed to discover—was its America.— Peter Green, Alexander to Actium