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In this passage, Nebuchadnezzar behaves like a traditional Babylonian king, restoring the walls, temples, and palaces of the city in a manner that recalls his own inscriptions, as has already emerged. Yet Nebuchadnezzar, in Berossos’s description, also acts like a Hellenistic monarch. John Dillery has drawn attention to phrases such as κοσμήσας φιλοτίμως (“decorating lavishly”) and τειχίσας ἀξιολόγως (“fortifying in a remarkable manner”), which are associated with the discourse of euergetism in Hellenistic times (Dillery 2013 esp. 84–85).⁶ More generally, Nebuchadnezzar’s actions chime with the common notion that royal benefactors supported the growth of (Greek) cities. Berossos, it would seem, cast Nebuchadnezzar as a proto-Seleucid king, and his Babylonian subjects as profiting from an early form of Hellenistic euergetism. The idea was by no means absurd: recent research has shown that Hellenistic Babylon enjoyed a significant degree of political independence (Clancier 2012b) – though the situation may already have changed under Antiochus III (and not Antiochus IV as previously thought). To some extent, this would have allowed Berossos to assimilate it to Hellenistic Greek cities and their relationship with the Seleucid king. Yet, Berossos was not so rash as to suggest that Greeks and Babylonians should enjoy the same status, much less that the two cultures could simply be merged. What he proposed was more realistic: Greek and Babylonian élites, he suggested, could continue to function each on their own terms, but within a shared framework of Seleucid institutions, values, and ideas.