A ‘contagion’ of sōtēria: Hellenistic Kingship and Collective Salvation between Political and Religious Discourse

Soteria is a prominent word in the vocabulary of Greek religious and political history and a category intimately connected with the expectations for resilience in times of crises, both at the societal and individual level. Scholarship has repeatedly investigated the success of this concept in Hellenistic culture, identifying it as a crucial field prompting contacts and transfers from religion to politics, and vice versa. At the collective level, soteria has been granted particular attention as regards the relationships between civic communities and political leaders, both internal and external. However, the vast documentation about the link between soteria and the resilience of civic communities in the Hellenistic world is far from having been fully exploited. To date, we can count on a satisfactory understanding of why soteria was considered as an effective category to describe the expectations of communities undergoing periods of severe crisis as well as to fashion the (self-)representation of monarchs and other major political figures as religious figures. However, this general understanding still lacks a detailed analysis of the specific factors, agents, and contexts that promoted the diffusion of soteria as an efficient concept and consequently underlie the creation of a durable cultural tradition. In order to contribute to this research, we must go back to a fine-grained study of sources. Accordingly, this paper will reassess the diffusion of the epithet Soter in use for Hellenistic rulers with a focus on what aspects made its use different from context to context, and with the related purpose of identifying points of rupture and change in the tradition, beyond the more known surface of similarities and continuities. The selected case studies include the honours for Antigonos and Demetrios in Athens (307/6 BC); the encounters between deities and monarchs bearing the epithet Soter; and the diplomatic interactions between Antiochos III and the citizens of Teos.