Historians have voiced quite different opinions about the influence that the royal courts of the Hellenistic east had on the development of the Roman imperial court. This chapter considers this question, emphasizing the methodological challenges involved in identifying when one court has influenced another. After an outline of the major characteristics of the Hellenistic empires and the courts at their hearts, the focus is on the similarity of the problems faced by Hellenistic and Roman imperial leaders in the eastern Mediterranean, and on the two functions of the court that developed in response to this diversity: the court as a centre for the production of imperial, ‘cosmopolitan’ culture and as an instrument of elite integration. The chapter argues that Hellenistic influence on Roman court culture should be seen primarily in the Roman adoption of Hellenistic forms of court ritual and ideology.

This central chapter turns to written communication to explore its part in regulating and networking theatres and repertoire. It begins with an exploration of the types of information shared between troupes and how discursive networks supported their performances. Although theatres are commonly portrayed as having to compete to survive, this chapter reveals that they also regularly cooperated. By illustrating the equal importance of discursive networks and material exchange among the Großmann (touring), Mainz (ecclesiastical court-affiliated), and Schwerin theatres (secular court-affiliated), it reveals that theatre companies were designed with both court and public audiences in mind, and in practice cultivated a shared repertoire. Programming choices were made to some degree based on location, the status of audiences, tastes of patrons, and access to performance materials. But this chapter argues that such decisions were usually owing to the intense communication of theatrical information and recommendations between theatre directors and enthusiasts – and, ultimately, on the expectations to which a collective imperial culture gave rise.

This chapter maps the vast web of German-language theatres that connected Central European audiences around the year 1800. Using periodicals and missives written by those active at these institutions, it investigates how the network functioned in practice as well as how it was imagined across vast distances. It explores the mobility of theatre companies to at once redraw the theatrical map of late eighteenth-century Central Europe and challenge perceptions of oppositional court and public music cultures. The Reich's theatrical network simultaneously existed in the imaginary thanks to print culture and a reading public. While touring companies made the journey from one performance location to the next, readers could be transported to theatres scattered across the Empire with the turn of a page. This rendered the network as much a political and theatrical reality as an imaginary realm, where the bandwidth of data was as important as the institutions, personnel, repertoires, and developments the information conveyed. The Empire’s musico-theatrical complex – both physical and imaginary – was the foundation upon which a shared imperial repertoire could be cultivated.

Tsar Aleksei came to power on his father’s death without controversy. His first marriage, to Mariia Miloslavskaia, produced several sons, the first being Tsarevich Aleksei. His father designated him as his heir in a new public ceremony in the Kremlin in 1667, complete with brief speeches. The new ceremony was part of the new culture of the court, poetry and declamations authored by the Kiev-educated monk Simeon Polotkii. The model was the Baroque court culture of Poland and Central Europe. The death of tsarevich Aleksei and his mother led Tsar Aleksei to remarry in 1671. The second wife was Natal’ia Naryshkina, whose first son was the later Peter the Great. Tsar Aleksei designated as his heir Mariia’s second son Fyodor, who succeeded in 1676. His own two marriages produced no heirs. On his death the boyar elite and the church proclaimed the boy Peter as tsar, but the musketeers preferred Aleksei’s third son, the incapable Ivan Alekseevich. The result was two boy co-tsars under the regency of their older sister Sofiia. Peter overthrew her and her favorites in 1689, ruling in name with his brother.

In the Hellenistic period, cities were the cornerstones of imperial rule. Cities were the loci for the acquisition of capital and manpower, and imperial agents (philoi) were recruited for a large part among Greek civic elites. This chapter departs from the dual premise that premodern empires are negotiated enterprises and that they are often networks of interaction rather than territorial states. The relentless competition between three rival superpowers in the Hellenistic Aegean – the Seleukid, Ptolemaic and Antigonid Empires – gave cities a good bargaining position vis-à-vis these empires. The fact that the imperial courts were dominated by philoi from the Aegean poleis moreover meant that these cities held a central and privileged place in Hellenistic imperialism, and benefited greatly from it. Royal benefactions structured imperial-local interactions. They were instrumental in a complex of reciprocal gift-exchange between empires and cities. Empires most of all needed capital, loyalty and military support. As kings were usually short of funds, the gifts by which they hoped to win the support of cities against their rivals often came in the form of immaterial benefactions like the granting of privileges and the protection of civic autonomy.