"Scholars commonly view the fourth century B.C. Aegean and eastern Mediterranean world before the time of Alexander the Great in terms of Greek concerns and activities. In Politics of a Persian Dynasty, however, Stephen Ruzicka adopts a non-Greek perspective and reconstructs the history of the Hecatomnid dynasty of Caria in the context of Aegean and eastern Mediterranean politics. Located in the southwestern corner of Anatolia (modern Turkey), Caria was one of the semiautonomous satrapies of the Persian Empire in the fourth century. It was governed from the 390s to the 330s by the Hecatomnids, a native dynastic family whose best-known member was Maussollus. This comprehensive account provides the first substantial treatment of the dynasty as a whole."--BOOK JACKET. "At first sight one of the lesser histories of the fourth-century world, the Hecatomnids' story is one of great intrinsic interest, involving the pursuit of wealth and power in the tangled complex of Aegean, Anatolian, and Persian politics, the "modernization" of a traditional society, and great feats of building, including one of the "wonders" of the ancient world, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus."--BOOK JACKET. "Lying on the fringes of both the Greek and Persian worlds, Hecatomnid Caria was a region where different, often conflicting political forces converged. Ruzicka's account reveals a picture of activities in marked contrast with Demosthenes' charges of Hecatomnid imperialism, on which succeeding accounts have been built. Rather than being concerned with aggression and expansion, Ruzicka argues, the Hecatomnids sought simply to survive amid the vicissitudes of fourth-century Aegean, Anatolian, and eastern Mediterranean politics."--BOOK JACKET. "While concentrating on the Hecatomnids, Ruzicka also offers fresh insights into the Persian-Egyptian conflict in the fourth century, the background of the King's Peace, the Great Satraps Revolt of the 360s, the Social War, and the Macedonian expansion of the 340s and 330s. This reconstruction of Hecatomnid history thus sheds new light on affairs throughout the fourth-century Aegean and eastern Mediterranean world from a non-Greek point of view."--BOOK JACKET.