τούτου υἱὸς Λαβοροσοαρχοδοσς ἐκυρίευσε μὲν τῆς βασιλείας παῖς ὢν μῆνας θ, ἐπιβουλευθεὶς δὲ διὰ τὸ πολλὰ ἐμφαίνειν κακοήθη ὑπὸ τῶν φίλων ἀπετυμπανίσθη.
His son Laborosoarchodos took over the kingship while he was still a child. He ruled for eight months, after which the friends plotted against him and put him to death because of the wickedness which he had displayed in many regards.
During the turbulent years after the death of Nebuchadnezzar, Berossos tells us, the friends overthrew and killed the child king Laborosoarchodos. Again they take action in times of crisis – though in this case they plot against the king. Berossos is ambivalent about the process: on the one hand, he describes Laborosoarchodos as “wicked,” which suggests that the friends did act in the interests of the empire. On the other hand, the unusual and slightly obscure verb ἀποτυμπανίζω (“put to death,” literally “crucify on a plank”) suggests a degree of unpleasantness that is perhaps significant in view of the fact that the conspirators’ intervention turns out to be ill-fated: their chosen candidate for the kingship is Nabonidus, the hapless last king of the Chaldaeans, according to Berossos.
The murder of Laborosoarchodos illustrates well the strengths of the Seleucids’ military and administrative élites as Berossos saw them: these men were needed to sustain the empire and in times of crisis could act decisively and in the interest of the common good. However, their methods were problematic, and could not guarantee long-term stability. There is no suggestion that the friends acted in bad faith when they got rid of Laborosoarchodos, but Berossos does hint that murdering the young king (whom one might perhaps rather have thought in need of benign correction) contributed to the downfall of the dynasty not long after. The friends of the king, it would seem, did not have the wherewithal to “maintain the kingship” in the long term; that, Berossos suggests, was a Chaldaean task.
In Book 2 of the Babyloniaca Berossos traces the Chaldaeans, as a group, back to the time of the great flood, and to King Xisouthros, who saved not only humankind but also the archive of human civilization:
τὸν Κρόνον αὐτῶι κατὰ τὸν ὕπνον ἐπιστάντα φάναι μηνὸς Δαισίου πέμπτηι καὶ δεκάτηι τοὺς ἀνθρώπους ὑπὸ κατακλυσμοῦ διαφθαρήσεσθαι. κελεῦσαι οὖν [διὰ] γραμμάτων πάντων ἀρχὰς καὶ μέσα καὶ τελευτὰς ὀρύξαντα θεῖναι ἐν πόλει Ἡλίου Σι[σ]πάροις (…) γενομένου δὲ τοῦ κατακλυσμοῦ καὶ εὐθὺς λήξαντος (…) τὸν (…) Ξίσουθρον (…) ἐκβῆναι μετὰ τῆς γυναικὸς καὶ τῆς θυγατρὸς καὶ τοῦ κυβερνήτου προσκυνήσαντα τὴν γῆν καὶ βωμὸν ἱδρυσάμενον καὶ θυσιάσαντα τοῖς θεοῖς, γενέσθαι μετὰ τῶν ἐκβάντων τοῦ πλοίου ἀφανῆ. τοὺς δὲ ὑπομείναντας ἐν τῶι πλοίωι μὴ εἰσπορευομένων τῶν περὶ τὸν Ξίσουθρον, ἐκβάντας ζητεῖν αὐτόν, ἐπὶ ὀνόματος βοῶντας· τὸν δὲ Ξίσουθρον αὐτὸν μὲν αὐτοῖς οὐκ ἔτι ὀφθῆναι, φωνὴν δὲ ἐκ τοῦ ἀέρος γενέσθαι, κελεύουσαν ὡς δέον αὐτοὺς εἶναι θεοσεβεῖς· καὶ γὰρ αὐτὸν διὰ τὴν εὐσέβειαν πορεύεσθαι μετὰ τῶν θεῶν οἰκήσοντα (…) εἶπέ τε αὐτοῖς, ὅτι ἐλεύσονται εἰς Βαβυλῶνα, καὶ ὡς εἵμαρται αὐτοῖς, ἐκ Σι[σ]πάρων ἀνελομένοις τὰ γράμματα διαδοῦναι τοῖς ἀνθρώποις (…) ἐλθόντας οὖν τούτους εἰς Βαβυλῶνα τά τε ἐκ Σι[σ]πάρων γράμματα ἀνορύξαι, καὶ πόλεις πολλὰς κτίζοντας καὶ ἱερὰ ἀνιδρυμένους πάλιν ἐπικτίσαι τὴν Βαβυλῶνα.
Kronos stood over him in his sleep and said that on the fifteenth of the month of Daisios mankind would be destroyed by a flood. He ordered him to deposit the beginnings and middles and ends of all writings under ground, in the city of the Sun, Sippar. (…) After the flood had come and straightaway ended, Xisouthros (…) disembarked with his wife and daughter, and the captain, and made obeisance to the earth, erected an altar and sacrificed to the gods. Then he disappeared together with those who had disembarked from the ship. When Xisouthros and the others did not come back in, those who had remained on the ship disembarked and searched for him, calling out his name. Xisouthros himself they no longer saw, but there was a voice from the air telling them that they should be god-fearing. For Xisouthros, it said, had gone to live with the gods because of his piety. (…) The voice also told them that they would go back to Babylon and that they were fated to fetch the writings from Sippar and hand them down to humankind. (…) So, when they went to Babylon, they dug up the writings from Sippar. After that, they founded many cities and temples, and settled Babylon anew.
What Berossos sketches here is an etiology of his own peers. The Chaldaeans, he suggests, started off as the “friends” (philoi) of Xisouthros, the mythical king from the time of the great flood. The conceptual framework is again Seleucid, though Berossos adds an important qualification: after the flood, the Chaldaeans can be friends of the king only at one remove; henceforth, their commitment is to kingship as an institution, and to the arts of civilization that underpin it. Berossos explains the shift from personal loyalty to institutional commitment as a process of loss and (partial) compensation: the Chaldaeans lose Xisouthros and are entrusted with the archive of civilization instead. This trade-off explains not only how they could preserve kingship for Nebuchadnezzar, but also what they might contribute to the flourishing of the Seleucid Empire as Berossos saw it – for the Seleucids too needed someone who maintained the kingship. Berossos’s own work seems conceived with just that aim in mind: by writing his history of kingship, he offered Antiochus the level of institutional support, experience, and wisdom that only the Chaldaeans could give.
Conclusion
Berossos was an extraordinary figure, and the Babyloniaca is an exceptionally interesting text. It is not sufficient to describe it as a typical product of the Hellenistic imagination, as has sometimes been suggested, nor should we content ourselves with saying that Berossos advertised Babylonian culture to his Greek masters. He did that too, as has transpired, but he also had a more interesting project: I have argued that he proposed a specifically Seleucid framework of concepts, institutions, and ideas to which Greek and Babylonian élites contributed, each in their own way. The (Greco-Macedonian) friends of the king expanded and defended the empire; and the (Babylonian-based) Chaldaeans guarded a tradition of kingship that went back to the very beginnings of the world. Berossos knew, and accepted, that Greco-Macedonian élites had all the power in the Seleucid Empire: as friends of the king, they were in control of the army and could even overthrow the incumbent