ABSTRACT
This chapter examines ways in which the new landscape of violence was refracted in, and mediated by, a variety of religious narratives within the polis. It focuses on early Hellenistic Athens. The cities of the Hellenistic world were vulnerable to the armies of the great kings and generals in a fashion arguably unparalleled in the classical period. The conferral of divine honours on potentates and kings, a gesture itself often shaped by the polis' vulnerability to violence, opened up to Greek cities the possibility of engaging with those potentates through the rituals, genres and language associated with the gods and thereby navigating the polis' experience of Diadochan violence. The very fact of cult honour itself can be linked to the climate of violence that cities such as Athens were experiencing in the late fourth century. In the articulation of Poliorcetes' divine identity at Athens, as in much of ruler cult more broadly, there is a strong emphasis on soteric power.
