Alexandreia Troas in the Hellenistic Period: War, Finance, and Civic Identity

This book uses the best but least exploited evidence we have for Alexandreia Troas--its coinage--to explore the city's Hellenistic history and the reception of that Hellenistic past in the imperial period after the polis was replaced by a Roman colony under Augustus. Alexandreia was especially valued by the various states that contended for control of the Greek world in the Hellenistic period for its strategic location at a crossroads in the eastern Mediterranean. As a result, the fate and fortunes of this community were tied to the shifting geopolitics of the Hellenistic world to an unusual degree. In the relative absence of other evidence, it is the coinage of Alexandreia that allows us to reconstruct the city's complex relations with external powers, to trace the community's struggle as a newly founded polis to define its place in the Greek world, and to understand how the city's Hellenistic past was rewritten in the imperial period.