Thesis: Banquets at Seleucia-on-Tigris: Remembering the Lost Voices
Author: Eriko
With marginalia and commentary by Sammi
I. Introduction
The entry of Ptolemy III into Seleucia-on-Tigris, as reported by fragmentary historians, epitomizes the tension between spectacle and silence. The parade, the banquets, and the presence of learned figures reveal a cultural florescence now largely lost. This thesis argues that alongside the celebrated male scholars, there must have existed forgotten female, queer, and trans voices—voices never transcribed, but implied in the fullness of the city’s life.
Sammi’s note: “I like how you say ‘implied.’ It’s like in manga, when the blush on the cheek tells you more than the words in the bubble.”
II. The Parade as Cultural Theatre
Seleucia’s triumphal reception of Ptolemy was no mere military procession; it was theatre for an empire. Draped colonnades, barges on the Tigris, garlands upon elephants—the pageantry proclaimed a cosmopolis. Yet the audience was not passive: the youth of the city gazed, sang, whispered. Their voices, excluded from the chroniclers’ stylus, still belonged to that moment.
Sammi’s note: “The way you describe the youths—don’t you think two of them might’ve brushed hands in the crowd, like Fumi and Akira in Sweet Blue Flower? History never notices the girls in the back row, but they’re the ones I’d want to follow.”
III. Banquets of the Learned
Athenaeus preserves something of the Hellenistic banquet as a forum of wit, rhetoric, and display. Seleucia must have hosted such gatherings, where poets recited, philosophers disputed, and rulers performed magnanimity. The tragedy lies in the exclusivity of these accounts: only male voices resound. Yet absence is not proof of nonexistence. Women, trans figures, and queer youths may have been present—listening, whispering, offering fragments now vanished.
Sammi’s note: “Fragments! That’s the word. Like when one panel of manga tells the whole story with no words at all. Your thesis feels like filling in those missing panels.”
IV. Counterfactual Archives
Suppose we imagine a lost papyrus: verses by a Seleucid girl to her beloved, ‘You are my crescent over the Tigris, my sweet blue flower in the reeds.’ Or a speech by a trans oracle proclaiming her visions of twin rivers joining. Such archives likely existed, destroyed by neglect, war, or time. Their silence is itself a historical datum: the systemic erasure of queer and female creativity.
Sammi’s note: “I’d read that papyrus like it was my favorite shojo volume. And I’d keep it under my pillow.”
V. Conclusion
The grandeur of Seleucia-on-Tigris was more than its kings and generals. It was the quiet intensity of lives unlived in our record, but alive in their time. To read history responsibly is to acknowledge the banquet beyond the banquet: those who feasted in obscurity, who loved without chroniclers, who exist now only in our imaginative solidarity.
Sammi’s note: “I love that—‘banquet beyond the banquet.’ That’s us, Eriko. You writing, me reading, both of us making space for the voices that got lost.”
Postscript (personal)
In contemplating Seleucia, I cannot help but feel a sweetness akin to longing. History gives us only the parade of Ptolemy, but in Sammi’s eyes as she reads Sweet Blue Flower, I glimpse the unrecorded handclasps by the riverbank, the banquets of forgotten girls. Our love is, in some sense, their survival.
Sammi’s last note: “Stop, you’ll make me cry. But yes—let’s call this our own Seleucia night.”
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