The Hellenistic World
The Hellenistic World
F. W. Walbank
The vast land empire that Alexander the Great left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. Alexander’s family and generals created a new order of monarchies and city-states which was to control most of the territory between the Adriatic Sea and western India for three hundred years.The term ‘hellenistic’ is commonly used to describe this world in which Greek was the lingua franca.Greeks flocked southwards and eastwards to found new settlements or to enlist in mercenary armies in search of their fortunes, confident in their status as members of a new ruling class. Inevitably there were upsets and clashes as indigenous peoples and cultures were absorbed, often unwillingly, into the encroaching wave of hellenism.With extensive use of quotations from original source material, this far-ranging study examines the political events in the hellenistic world from Alexander’s death until its incorporation in the Roman Empire. It also describes the different social systems and mores of the peoples under Greek rule, important developments in literature, science and technology and the founding of new religious movements. The author has assimilated all pertinent recent scholarship in the filed, and fashioned an absorbing and highly readable account of a vast and complex society whose ideas and achievements form the bedrock of present-day western civilization.
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First published in Great Britain by Fontana 1981
Copyright © F. W. Walbank 1981, 1986, 1992
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Dedication (#ulink_d24c1397-73a5-52fc-a40e-9a646644aa6c)
For
Dorothy
Mitzi
Christopher
John
Contents
Cover (#ua2f5cb93-b4b7-5420-929f-0c84354b8f94)
Title Page (#ude8973e7-023d-5d9c-9d06-c33c799ac25b)
Copyright (#ulink_aea5cfa6-a4d9-5175-96fb-6bb90969f35e)
Dedication (#ulink_247004e8-5737-5717-9088-e50dab454f72)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_cc4fdd24-8094-5290-be26-bf249894108f)
Preface (#ulink_745052fd-9acf-5e51-b710-4624352c2d40)
1. Introduction: The Sources (#ulink_6475ef00-0ae4-5ff5-9df9-5ed3cbac3fbe)
2. Alexander the Great (336–323) (#ulink_d017cd0a-a4d5-5162-888f-450717dcfdd9)
3. The Formation of the Kingdoms (323–276) (#ulink_f1dde72b-1502-5f26-8dfe-3bc94ede94b3)
4. The Hellenistic World: A Homogeneous Culture? (#ulink_9f27c211-bced-54c0-a9f1-484a15aa33a2)
5. Macedonia and Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Ptolemaic Egypt (#litres_trial_promo)
7. The Seleucids and the East (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Inter-City Contacts and Federal States (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Social and Economic Trends (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Cultural Developments: Philosophy, Science and Technology (#litres_trial_promo)
11. The Frontiers of the Hellenistic World: Geographical Studies (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Religious Developments (#litres_trial_promo)
13. The Coming of Rome (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Maps and Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Date Chart (#litres_trial_promo)
Abbreviations (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading and Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index of Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
General Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Fontana History of the Ancient World (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_a4a42bb4-c403-58b7-9b52-c4aa7b52a224)
No justification is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.
The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for the period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.
Oswyn Murray
Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,
Balliol College, Oxford
General Editor
Preface (#ulink_a2418f14-7139-5b8d-8aa6-b9b9da9b25a6)
When writing about the hellenistic world it is not easy to strike a balance between a chronological treatment of the political events, and the discussion of special problems – whether those peculiar to particular regions or those relevant to all areas. In this respect the present book is not alone in being something of a compromise. Furthermore its emphasis is largely on the third and early-second centuries, since the main lines were laid down then and the greatest achievements of the hellenistic world belong to that period. I have also borne in mind the fact that the later period, from the middle of the second century onwards, during which the power of Rome became increasingly dominant throughout the eastern Mediterranean, has already been treated from the Roman aspect in another volume in the series.
The manuscript and proofs have been read by Dorothy Crawford, to whose vigilance I owe many corrections; I have also profited from many valuable suggestions which she made, especially in the parts concerned with Ptolemaic Egypt. Oswyn Murray also read the manuscript and suggested several improvements, for which I am grateful. I should also like to express my debt to the published works of Anthony Long and Geoffrey Lloyd, which have been reliable guides in areas where I was less at home. Other debts are to the Coin Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for the photographs of coins and to the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, for the rest of the photographs; in particular I wish to thank Professor Snodgrass, Mr T. Volk and Mr E. E. Jones. The photograph of the inscription from Ai Khanum is reproduced by permission of Professor A. Dupont-Sommer, given on behalf of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris; I should like to thank him warmly too. Finally I am grateful to Miss Helen Fraser and the staff of Fontana Paperbacks and in particular to Miss Lynn Blowers for their help in getting the book out.
For any readers who wish to look at the original evidence quoted in the text I have provided a list at the end of the book indicating where the various items are to be found, together with further reading arranged under chapters and concentrating on books and articles in English. I have ventured to include a few titles in other languages, mainly French, where there was no satisfactory English equivalent. Unless otherwise indicated all dates are BC.
Cambridge
January 1980
1. Introduction: The Sources (#ulink_f2b903ac-4a38-58f3-91f5-76c153d5c65c)
I
For rather more than a century – from 480 to 360 BC – the city-states of Greece pursued their rivalries and feuds without serious challenge from outside. But from 359 onwards the growing power of Philip II of Macedonia threw a shadow over the Greek peninsula. In 338, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip decisively defeated the armies of Thebes and Athens and through a newly constituted Council at Corinth imposed peace and his own policy on most of the cities. Already Philip had his eyes on Persia, the great continental power beyond the Aegean, whose weakness had been dramatically revealed sixty years earlier, when a body of Greek mercenaries in the pay of an unsuccessful rebel prince and led by the Athenian Xenophon had marched all the way from Mesopotamia to the sea at Trebizond (400/399). Polybius writes later:
It is easy for anyone to see the real causes and origin of the war against Persia. The first was the retreat of the Greeks under Xenophon from the upper satrapies in which, though they traversed the whole of Asia, a hostile country, none of the barbarians ventured to face them (iii, 6, 10).
Encouraged by this and by the campaign of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor shortly afterwards, Philip planned to invade the ramshackle Persian dominions of Asia Minor in search of money and new lands – though as a pretext he alleged the wrongs done to Greece during the Persian invasions of the early-fifth century. Philip did not live to carry out his plan. In 336 he was assassinated and the projected invasion of Persia was left as part of the inheritance of his son Alexander.
Alexander reigned for only thirteen years, but during that time he completely changed the face of the Greek world. In the great colonizing age from the eighth to the sixth centuries the shores of Spain, the Adriatic lands, southern Italy and Sicily, northern Africa and the Black Sea shores had been settled with Greek maritime colonies. The new expansion was of a different order. Advancing overland with his army – a mere 50, 000 at the outset – Alexander marched through Asia Minor and Palestine to Egypt, from there to Mesopotamia and eastward through Persia and central Asia to where Samarkand, Balkh and Kabul now lie; thence he penetrated the Punjab and after defeating the Indian king Porus brought his forces partly by land and partly by sea back to Babylon, where he died.
The vast land empire which he left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. It was in fact the old Persian empire under Greek and Macedonian management and it formed the theatre within which the events of Greek history were to be enacted during the next 300 years. The Greeks who during the seventy or so years following Alexander’s death flocked southwards and eastwards to join new settlements or enlist in mercenary armies, hoping to make their fortunes, found themselves no longer insulated within the traditions of a city-state but living in any one of a variety of environments alongside native peoples of every race and nationality. The term ‘hellenistic’ – derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to speak Greek’ – is commonly used to describe this new world in which Greek was in fact the lingua franca. It carries a connotation, not so much of a diluted hellenism, but rather of a hellenism extended to non-Greeks, with the clash of cultures which that inevitably implies. There were of course still city-states in Greece and the Aegean – often powerful like Rhodes – and the relations between the cities of Greece proper and Macedonia, though often strained, were not seriously complicated by cultural differences. But within the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia, whether we look at the armies or at the bureaucracies, Greeks and Macedonians occupied positions of dominance over Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians and the diverse peoples of Anatolia. The relationships thus established were uneasy and far from static. From the outset there were tensions, and as the flow of Greeks dried up the relative position of Greeks and barbarians changed gradually in many ways. The pattern of this development varied from kingdom to kingdom. Greeks influenced barbarians, and barbarians Greeks. It is indeed in this clash and coming together of cultures that one of the main interests of the period lies.
From the late-third century onwards a new power appears in the hellenistic world, the Roman republic. The taking-over of one after another of the hellenistic kingdoms by Rome has already been recounted and discussed in another volume of this series (Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic) and will not be repeated here, though the cumulative effect of the first half-century of the process is discussed below in Chapter 13. The main emphasis in this book will be rather on the hellenistic kingdoms themselves and on their relations with each other and with the Greek cities in Europe and Asia. We shall be concerned with economic and social trends, with the cultural developments in the new centres set up at Alexandria and Pergamum, with the expanding (and contracting) frontiers of this new world, with its scientific achievements and with the religious experience of its peoples.
II
The evidence for the period is uneven. The career of Alexander himself presents a particular source problem. The most important surviving account of his expedition is that of Arrian, a Greek-speaking Roman senator from Bithynia in Asia Minor, who was active in the second century AD. Arrian opens his Anabasis of Alexander – the title echoes that of Xenophon’s Anabasis – with these words:
Wherever Ptolemy son of Lagus and Aristobulus son of Aristobulus are in agreement in their accounts of Alexander son of Philip, I record their statements as entirely true; where they disagree I have selected the version that seems to me more likely and at the same time more worth relating (Arrian, Anabasis, i, praef. I).
(We may note that ‘more likely’ and ‘more worth relating’ are concepts that do not necessarily coincide.) Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, was later king of Egypt; his History, probably written many years later in Egypt, drew on Alexander’s official Journal, and Arrian was right to regard it as generally reliable. Aristobulus also accompanied the expedition, probably as a military engineer. Unlike Ptolemy he was a Greek, not a Macedonian, and wrote at least two decades after Alexander’s death. There were others who gave eyewitness accounts of the expedition. One was the official historian, Callisthenes, the nephew of Alexander’s tutor, the famous philosopher Aristotle, but his account broke off early for the sufficient reason that he was executed for treason in 327. Another was the Cretan Nearchus, who sailed the royal fleet back to Susa from the Indus, and composed a description of India and a record (which Arrian uses) of his voyage; he later fought in the wars of Alexander’s successors. Nearchus’ lieutenant Onesicritus, who was the helmsman of Alexander’s own ship on the voyage down the Jhelum (Arrian, Indica, 18, 1), also left an account but the surviving fragments do not make it easy to assess its character and it was not very influential. Finally mention should be made of the Alexandrian Cleitarchus, who though probably not a member of the expedition wrote a history of Alexander in at least twelve books. There is a vast literature on these lost sources. It is likely, but not certain, that Cleitarchus, Ptolemy and Aristobulus published their works in that order. Of the three Cleitarchus became the most popular, especially under the early Roman empire, though a discriminating writer like Arrian criticizes him (without actually naming him) for his many inaccuracies (Arrian, Anabasis, vi, 11, 8). Indirectly Cleitarchus’ history provided one element in the Romance of Alexander, which was developed in successive versions from the second century AD until the middle ages, eventually in more than thirty languages – a striking testimony to the impression made on both his immediate successors and subsequent generations by Alexander’s career and personality.
All these primary accounts are lost and our knowledge of them depends on later writers who used them and so indirectly caused them to be superseded. Apart from Arrian, the more important of these are Diodorus Siculus, a Greek who wrote a world history in the late-first century BC which, for Alexander, followed Aristobulus and Cleitarchus, Quintus Curtius (whose date and sources are both uncertain), Justinus, whose work epitomizes that of a lost Augustan historian from Gaul called Trogus Pompeius and in the second century AD Plutarch of Chaeronea, the popular philosopher and biographer, whose Life of Alexander (twinned with that of Caesar) mentions no less than twenty-four authorities – though how many of these he knew at first hand we cannot be sure. By Plutarch’s time a vast amount of material concerning Alexander was available in the writings of rhetoricians, antiquaries and gossip writers, many of whom are but names today. The value of much of this is slight.
Thus for Alexander’s career there is no lack of literary sources. The problem is to determine where they got their information from and to assess their merits and allow for their prejudices for or against the hero. For the period after Alexander’s death – the hellenistic age proper – the historian faces a very different situation. Until we can begin to use Polybius from 264 onwards, we are still, to be sure, dependent on secondary sources but they differ from those concerned with Alexander in that after Alexander’s death his empire was divided among his. generals, and writers now attached themselves to one court or another. For the history of the first fifty years of the new regimes our best tradition goes back to a great historian, Hieronymus of Cardia, who served first his fellow-citizen Eumenes, Alexander’s secretary, who fought loyally for the king’s legitimate heirs, and then, after Eumenes’ death in 316, Antigonus I, his son Demetrius I and his grandson Antigonus Gonatas (see pp. 50–9). Hieronymus’ lost account of the Wars of the Successors went at least as far as the death of Pyrrhus of Epirus in 272, and was used by Arrian for his work on Events after Alexander and, indirectly by Diodorus (books 18–20), as well as by Plutarch in several Lives (those of Eumenes, Pyrrhus and Demetrius). Unfortunately, from book 21 onwards Diodorus’ work survives only in fragments, of which the most important are from a collection of excerpts made on the orders of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the tenth century.
Other lost writers were Phylarchus, who covered the years 272–219 in twenty-eight books and, according to Polybius (who was prejudiced against him for his support of Cleomenes of Sparta, the enemy of Achaea, ) wrote in a sensational and emotional manner. Polybius has a virulent attack on his account of the Achaean sack of Mantinea in 223:
In his eagerness to arouse the pity and attention of his readers, Phylarchus treats us to a picture of women clinging with their hair dishevelled and their breasts bare, or again of crowds of both sexes together with their children and aged parents weeping and lamenting as they are led away to slavery (ii, 56, 7).
Phylarchus’ methods were not peculiar to him, but represent a type of writing well represented in hellenistic historiography. One noted forerunner was Duris of Samos, a pupil of Theophrastus, who wrote a History in the early part of the third century dealing with Macedonian and Greek events down to 280 (as well as a history of Agathocles of Syracuse). Other third-century writers were Megasthenes, who visited Pataliputra as the ambassador of Antiochus I, and wrote a book about his journey which later writers used, and the Sicilian historian Timaeus from Tauromenium (mod. Taormina), who spent some fifty years in exile in Athens and is savagely criticized by Polybius as an armchair historian who never took the trouble to visit the places he was writing about or to acquire essential political experience. It is probably to Timaeus that we owe an innovation which brought an immeasurable gain to the historian’s craft, the adoption of ‘Olympiad years’, numbered from the institution of the Olympic festival in 776 to provide an era into which events all over the Greek world (and the Roman world later) could be fitted. Thus Polybius himself announces (i, 3, 1) that ‘the date from which I propose to begin is the 140th Olympiad’ (220–216) and after telling his readers (i, 5, 1) that he will begin his introductory books from ‘the first occasion on which the Romans crossed the sea from Italy’ (264) he goes on to explain that this follows on immediately from the close of Timaeus’ history and took place in the 129th Olympiad (264–260). It was a popular practice among Greek historians to begin their history where a predecessor left off.
Polybius himself is the most important source for the years 264 to 146. His special concern was with Rome and his object was to explain ‘by what means and under what kind of constitution the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government’ (i, 1, 5). But Polybius was himself an Arcadian from Megalopolis, which was a member of the Achaean Confederation (see pp. 154 ff.) and he describes the growth of that confederation and also many other Greek events not directly relevant to Rome, such as the war between Antiochus III of Syria and Ptolemy IV of Egypt, which ended in the former’s defeat at Raphia in 217. Unfortunately only the first five books survive intact; of the remaining thirty-five we have only fragments. Polybius is a sane and balanced writer (though not entirely free from prejudice). Without his work we should be infinitely poorer. ‘His books’, wrote the German historian Mommsen, ‘are like the sun shining on the field of Roman history; where they open, the mists . . . are lifted and where they end a perhaps even more vexatious twilight descends.’ They are no less valuable to the student of the hellenistic world generally. Poseidonius of Apamea, who lived for many years at Rhodes (whence he visited Rome), and was a philosopher as well as a historian, began his Histories (of which only fragments remain) at the point where Polybius left off. His work covered the Greek east and the western Mediterranean from 146 to the time of Sulla (d. 78) and was later drawn on by the Roman historians Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus and by Plutarch. Poseidonius gave a wealth of information especially about the west, and in some ways he became a spokesman for Roman imperialism.
For a consecutive account of events – something not available for all areas nor all periods of the hellenistic age – the historian must, however, turn to secondary authors, who include (as for Alexander) Diodorus, Arrian and Plutarch, and also Appian, an Alexandrian Greek, who in the second century AD composed a history of Rome tracing separately the histories of various peoples during the time when they were being absorbed into the Roman empire. Like Diodorus, Appian made great use of Polybius, though by no means exclusively nor always at first hand. Among Latin authors we have Justinus’ epitome of the so-called Philippic Histories of the Gaul Trogus Pompeius (the title of this ‘universal’ history indicates his approach, independent of the Roman patriotic tradition) and, more importantly, Livy, who fortunately used Polybius as his primary source for eastern affairs. But Livy’s history, written under Augustus, is itself fragmentary, for only books 1 to 10 and 21 to 45 survive, taking us to 168 and the end of the Third Macedonian War (172–168). Both the geographer Strabo, also writing under Augustus, and Pausanias, who composed his periegesis of Greece in the middle of the second century AD, furnish valuable historical and topographical information, while for Jewish history several books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (especially the Maccabees) are of relevance, as is Josephus, who wrote his Jewish Antiquities under the Flavian emperors (AD 69–96) at Rome (see further pp. 222 ff.). Later Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340), composed a chronicle of universal history which is important for chronology. It was translated into Latin and expanded by St Jerome.
This rapid review of fragmentary sources, all of which present many problems of accuracy and reliability, must also include Memnon of Heraclea Pontica, who wrote an important history of his native city, probably in the first century AD, and Polyaenus, whose book on military stratagems was composed a century later. With the help of these, along with other, minor sources, uneven in scope and often quoting incidents out of context, it is possible to write some kind of history of some parts of the three hundred years which constitute the hellenistic age. Fortunately this can be supplemented from other sorts of historical evidence which, it is true, generate problems of their own, but allow us to check the statements of literary historians against more immediate and normally non-literary documents. It is thanks to the regular growth in the amount of such evidence that the history of this period (and of others in antiquity) is constantly being reshaped in detail as the availability of new information leads to the revision of current hypotheses.
III
This new material falls mainly into three categories. The first consists of inscriptions on stone or marble. The classical world was addicted to inscribing information on durable material of this kind. For the period with which we are concerned, including the reign of Alexander, the majority of these inscriptions are in Greek but from Egypt we have also Egyptian inscriptions in both the hieroglyphic and the demotic forms. The famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, is a piece of black basalt containing a decree passed by the Council of Priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 and enumerating the good deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and the honours which they proposed to pay to him (OGIS, 90). The Greek version was followed by a translation into Egyptian, which was recorded in hieroglyphic and demotic, and it was this that enabled the French scholar Champollion, from 1820 onwards, to begin the long process of unravelling the Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are also a few Latin inscriptions but most of the documents which concern Roman relations with Greece come from Greece and are in Greek. They have been conveniently assembled in R. S. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. There are also several cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia of relevance to the history of the Seleucids.
Inscriptions were set up for a variety of reasons. A few are directly concerned with recording historical facts, such as the so-called Parian marble, of which two fragments survive and which gave an account by an unknown author of
the dates from the beginning, derived from all kinds of records and general histories, starting from Cecrops, the first king of Athens, down to the archonship of [Ast]yanax at Paros and Diognetus at Athens (264/3) (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 239).
But the majority are preserved for other reasons. Many register official matters such as a treaty or law or agreement to exchange citizenship (sympoliteia) or the findings of an arbitration; here the purpose is to set up a public record, available to all and sundry, of decisions taken publicly by sovereign and other bodies. For the hellenistic period a special group of inscriptions records relations between Greek cities and the kings; often a letter from a king is inscribed in full followed by decisions taken in accordance with its instructions. Some examples of these will be considered below in Chapter 8. Others record decrees passed by city assemblies honouring eminent citizens of the same or some other city for services rendered – financial, political and, especially, for serving on important embassies. There are also building inscriptions recording expenditure, details of loans incurred by cities, requests for grants of immunity from reprisals (see pp. 145 ff.) by temples, cities and other bodies, and records of their concession by kings and cities, details of embassies sent to solicit collaboration in the setting-up of new religious festivals or the up-grading of established ones, or of the manumission of slaves (in which temples like that of Apollo at Delphi were regularly concerned), and a score of other categories, all having one thing in common, someone’s need to keep a permanent record.
The historian requires a special technique and experience to extract the fullest information from this epigraphic material. The exact provenance of many inscriptions is uncertain and they are usually fragmentary or partially illegible. Happily they tend to be couched in somewhat stereotyped language and the study of the vocabulary and phraseology used in various contexts at various dates enables the skilled epigraphist to suggest plausible restorations to fill lacunae on the stone. It is however vitally important to distinguish clearly between what actually stands on the stone and what is someone’s more or less convincing restoration. To make such restorations it is of course essential to be able to date an inscription at least approximately and this can be done by taking note of the letter forms and the context and character of the inscription, including in some cases the names of the persons mentioned in it. But letter forms can persist over several decades and it is by no means always possible to identify an individual mentioned in an inscription with certainty, since many Greek names are quite common and boys were often named after their grandfather. For example, a series of eighteen Megarian decrees which mention a king Demetrius were for a long time habitually referred to Demetrius I Poliorcetes, who captured Megara towards the end of the fourth century, until in 1942 a French scholar argued that the Demetrius in question was Demetrius II, who ruled in Macedonia from 239 to 229. This hypothesis substantially modified our picture of the reign of Demetrius II and his activity in Greece. Quite recently, however, it has again been argued that the attribution to Demetrius I is correct and the history of the two reigns has thus once more been thrown into, the melting-pot.
If inscriptions require special care and knowledge for their effective use, they are nevertheless among the most important sources of new information. Moreover, because of their stereotyped form it is not only possible to use one to restore gaps in another, but inscriptions falling into certain categories – building inscriptions, manumissions, decrees in honour of doctors, funerary inscriptions, records of private associations, etc. – can be used together to furnish information on such diverse subjects as price levels, the status of occupations, the incidence of slavery or the structure of royal bureaucracies and, as we have just seen, the publication of new inscriptions (or the more accurate republication of old ones) often leads to the revision or abandoning of established theories and assumptions.
IV
A second category of document important for the study of this period consists of papyri, mainly from middle Egypt and especially the Fayum, where the dry soil and climate have preserved through the centuries scraps of paper consigned to rubbish tips or reused, for example in stuffing the mummy-cases of sacred ibises, cats or crocodiles. The information contained in these papyri is in many ways different from that furnished by inscriptions. The latter have survived because they were intended to be preserved, the former because they were discarded. Papyri, too, furnish information which is usually more local in its relevance. If we ignore the fragments containing extracts from literary works, which range from the discovery nearly a century ago of Aristotle’s lost Constitution of Athens to that, more recently, of long sections of lost plays by Menander, we are dealing in the main with the waste-paper baskets of minor civil servants – correspondence, petitions and drafts of replies, summonses, depositions, records of judgements, administrative details concerning the billeting of troops, the passing on of edicts and orders, the auctioning of leases, the making of contracts and submission of tenders, the uneasy relations with the temples and public announcements like that offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of a runaway slave. The papyri already discovered include several major finds, such as the archive of Zenon of Caunus, the agent of Apollonius, the dioiketes or head of the civil administration under Ptolemy II, which gives a detailed picture of the working of a great estate, a gift from the king, on which much took place that was not perhaps typical of life generally among the Greeks in Egypt (on this see further p. 106), or the so-called Revenue Laws of Ptolemy II (cf. Select Papyri, 203) introduced by Apollonius, which contain regulations for the control of the royal oil monopoly. We have also several royal ordinances and indulgences (concessions to the populace in the form of amnesties, tax remissions and the like). An example is that of 118, in which
King Ptolemy (Euergetes II) and Queen Cleopatra (II) the sister and Queen Cleopatra (III) the wife proclaim an amnesty to all their subjects for errors, crimes, accusations, condemnations and offences of all kinds up to the 9 Pharmouthi of year 52 except to persons guilty of wilful murder or sacrilege (Select Papyri, 210).
These concessions are then elaborated for another 260 lines. Another papyrus from Tebtunis (P. Tebt., 703) contains instructions sent by the dioiketes to a newly appointed subordinate in the Egyptian countryside (see pp. 106‘7).
The papyri thus throw light on everyday life as well as on official policy and activity. But they have to be used with circumspection. Since there are some 30, 000 Greek papyri available compared with only 2000 demotic, it is clear that the conclusions they lead to are likely to be heavily weighted towards the Greek minority, a situation which can be rectified only as more work is done on the still unpublished documents in Egyptian. Furthermore, the papyrological evidence concerns administration at the local end rather than the centre of government in Alexandria, where soil conditions have prevented the survival of papyri. What we have can only be used safely for the place and time to which it belongs, since we have reason to believe that conditions changed considerably from place to place and from decade to decade. Nevertheless, here, as on the stones, there is a growing mass of evidence invaluable for the study of Ptolemaic Egypt. Elsewhere this sort of material is not usually available, though in the Dead Sea scrolls and other similar documents the caves of the Jordan valley have supplemented the written authorities, usually for a period rather later than that with which we are concerned.
Coins also provide valuable evidence for the historian. In the classical world coins were more often minted to satisfy the needs of government than to facilitate trade (though of course they incidentally did this too). Hoards of coins hidden in a crisis and never recovered afford useful means of dating, and, where dates can be attached to particular issues, it is sometimes possible to correlate minting with general policy. The location of coin finds furnishes information on currents of trade, and the relative absence of Ptolemaic coins abroad illustrates the strict monopoly enforced by the Ptolemies upon those trading with Egypt (see p. 105). The coin-types minted also throw light on policy and attitudes. Thus Alexander’s decision to strike Persian-type darics after Darius’ death clearly indicates his claim to the Persian throne whereas the opening of mints at Sicyon and Corinth had the more practical aim of financing the recruitment of mercenaries. For some time after Alexander’s death his successors issued coins on the same standard in the name of the kings, that is Philip Arrhidaeus and later Alexander IV. But towards the end of the third century they began one by one to issue coins with their own heads on the obverse, thereby signifying their rejection of a united empire and claim to independent kingship. Thus coins provide evidence for political pretensions, military ambitions and of course economic policy but they require a certain expertise on the part of the historian to master the technical problems surrounding dies and mints, weight standards and, especially, dating.
Of less importance, but by no means negligible, are the documents that have turned up in other materials or tongues. As examples I will mention two. In 1954 A. J. Sachs and D. J. Wiseman published a cuneiform tablet from Babylon containing a list of kings reigning in the Seleucid dominions from Alexander the Great to the accession of Arsacid (Parthian) rule in Mesopotamia and providing new or confirming old dates for Seleucid reigns down to about 179 (Iraq (1954), pp. 202–12). Secondly, in 1976 J. D. Ray published an archive of documents on potsherds (ostraca) consisting of drafts of letters written by a certain Hor, an Egyptian from Sebennytus, who in support of his claims in a feud quoted his own prophecy that Antiochus IV, who was invading Egypt, would leave that country by sea before ‘Year 2, Payni, final day’ (30 July 168) and, on a separate ostracon, asserted that Antiochus had fulfilled his prophecy by leaving before that date. Thus from an obscure document in a curious context we obtain a firm date for an important event not only in Seleucid and Ptolemaic relations but in Mediterranean history generally.
The use of this non-literary evidence, which is essential to our growing knowledge of the period, depends upon its availability to the historian. Some of the main publications in which inscriptions, coins and papyri are assembled can be found listed in the bibliography but these quickly become out of date and have to be supplemented from articles in journals and such annual surveys of recent publications as the learned and comprehensive Bulletin épigraphique published annually by J. and L. Robert in the French quarterly Revue des Etudes Grecques.
Evidence of this kind supplements, but does not replace, the work of the ancient writers, even when these are mediocre, for only they can give us a narrative of events and they are usually essential for a chronological framework. But inscriptions and papyri provide a new perspective and often information which prompts the historian to ask a new type of question. They give a glimpse into the working of governments and sometimes enable us to attach names to the bureaucrats themselves. Occasionally they allow families to be traced from generation to generation; they provide evidence for social mobility in a particular community and by their help we can sometimes discover details of land tenure, social hierarchies, and the economic conditions of different groups and classes. Provided we exercise caution and remain aware of the vast gaps in our knowledge, it is still possible to attempt an answer, with far more nuances than in the past, to such questions as where, in this or the other monarchy, power really lay. But, as has already been indicated, answers to these questions are valid only for the time and place to which the evidence refers. The hellenistic world was a dynamic society, one which in some ways never achieved stability but carried on in a state of tension created on the one hand by the fact that the existing balance of power was only accepted faute de mieux and not as a recognized way of organizing international relations, and on the other by a shifting and uneasy relationship between the Greco-Macedonian ruling class and the native populations. Starting from the original impact of Alexander’s career the hellenistic world gradually ran down until eventually, shorn of everything east of the Euphrates, it was incorporated into the Roman empire. When in the fourth century AD the Roman empire itself split into two halves, the hellenistic world still enjoyed a ghostly existence in Byzantium.
2. Alexander the Great (336–323) (#ulink_651215ab-8d89-590a-aab9-44923b0953f9)
I
When Alexander succeeded his father Philip II as king of Macedonia in 336, he found it a country radically changed from what it had been when Philip assumed the crown twenty-three years earlier. Hitherto a backward frontier kingdom on the fringe of Greece proper, Philip had transformed Macedonia into a powerful military state with a tried army and well-chosen frontiers, dominating Greece through the League of Corinth (see p. 13) and all set for the invasion of Persia. The cultural level of the population had also risen. In a speech which Arrian (Anabasis, vii, 9, 2) puts into his mouth, Alexander described Philip’s transformation of the Macedonian people in these terms:
Philip found you vagabonds and poor, most of you clothed in sheepskins, pasturing a few sheep on the mountains and putting up a poor fight in defence of these against the Illyrians, Triballians and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear instead of sheepskins and brought you down out of the mountains into the plains, making you a match in battle for the barbarians who were your neighbours, so that now you trusted in your own courage rather than in strongholds. He turned you into city-dwellers and civilized you by the gift of good laws and customs.
When one has disallowed the rhetoric, this passage fairly describes the conversion of a pastoral people into settled farmers and town-dwellers, wearing woven clothing and enjoying the benefits of an ordered life. The population had also expanded. It has been calculated by G. T. Griffith on the basis of recorded troop figures that Philip’s economic policy brought about an increase of over 25 per cent in the numbers of men available for the army between 334, when Alexander mobilized 27, 000 Macedonians for his Persian expedition and for service in Greece (with some 3000 men already in Asia and perhaps 20, 000 old and young for home defence), and 323, when the figures reached about 50, 000 (including a margin for casualties meanwhile sustained in Asia).
Philip’s army had won him control over Greece, but he could not afford to leave it idle. No sooner had he established peace there than he planned to invade Persia. The idea was not new. Ten years earlier the Athenian publicist Isocrates had addressed a speech to Philip urging this very course.
I am going to advise you to become the leader both of Greek unity and of the expedition against the barbarians; it is advantageous to employ persuasion with Greeks and a useful thing to use force against barbarians. That is more or less the essence of the whole matter (Isocrates, Philip, 10).
Isocrates continues a little later in the same speech:
What opinion do you imagine everyone will form of you if you try to destroy the whole Persian kingdom or, failing that, to annex as much territory as you can, and to seize Asia, as some are urging you, from Cilicia to Sinope, and if as well you found cities in this region and settle in them there those men who are now wandering around through lack of their everyday needs, and doing outrage to whomsoever they fall in with? (Isocrates, ibid., 120).
It is likely that Philip saw Asia as a source of wealth and new lands in which to settle the many exiles and dispossessed people who were at this time a general threat to both Greece and Macedonia, given that there were states with sufficient wealth to hire them as mercenaries. Whether the territorial limits suggested by Isocrates formed part of Philip’s original plan we cannot tell. Isocrates later admitted that his advice merely chimed in with Philip’s own inclinations, and perhaps what matters most is that such ideas were in the air. Philip, however, saw his enterprise in a much more obviously Macedonian context than Isocrates had envisaged. When in 336 Philip was assassinated, an advance force of 10, 000 men was already across the Hellespont. Thus on his accession Alexander found the Persian War half-begun but it had his wholehearted approval, for by it he hoped to win personal glory – and also to strengthen his position vis-à-vis the senior advisers whom Philip had left him (for he was only twenty). His first two years (336–4) were spent securing his northern frontiers in Thrace and Illyria and suppressing a revolt in Greece. Then in spring 334 he crossed over into Asia with a modest force of about 37, 000 men, of whom 5000 were cavalry. There were 12, 600 Greeks (7600 sent by the League and 5000 mercenaries), about 7000 tribal levies from the Balkans, nearly 2000 light-armed and cavalry scouts from Thrace and Paeonia and the remaining 15–16, 000 were Macedonians and Thessalians. Europe he left in the charge of his general Antipater with an army of 12, 000 infantry and 1500 cavalry – about as many Macedonians as he took with him (Diodorus, xviii, 17, 3 and 5). His finances were shaky and on arriving in Asia he planned to live off the country.
Alexander’s army was to prove especially effective because of its balanced combination of arms. A great burden lay on the light-armed Cretan and Macedonian archers, Thracians and Agrianian javelin-men. But the striking force was the cavalry and, should the cavalry-charge leave the issue still undecided, the infantry phalanx, 9000 strong, armed with 15–18 foot spears and shields, and the 3000 hypaspists of the royal battalions would deal the final blow. The army was accompanied by surveyors, engineers, architects, scientists, court officials and historians. From the start Alexander seems to have envisaged an operation with no clear limits.
After a romantic visit to Troy he won his first battle at the river Granicus near the Sea of Marmara, and as a gesture sent 300 suits of armour from the spoils as a dedication to Athena at Athens by ‘Alexander, son of Philip, and the Greeks (except the Spartans) from the barbarians who inhabit Asia’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 16, 7). His intention, underlined by the omission of all reference to the Macedonians, was clearly to emphasize the ‘panhellenic’ aspect of the campaign. At Dium in Macedonia on the other hand he set up brazen statues of twenty-five Macedonians who fell in the first encounter (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 16, 4). The victory gave access to western Asia Minor and by the spring of 333 Alexander was master of the western seaboard, most of Caria, Lycia and Pisidia, and could press ahead through Gordium (where tradition told of his loosing – or cutting – the famous Gordian knot, a feat which could only by performed by the man who was to rule Asia) to Ancyra and thence into Cilicia. In autumn 333 he encountered Darius himself at Issus (near Iskenderun) and by a second great victory laid open the route into Syria. There Tyre held out for seven months, but Alexander did not relax the siege, and meanwhile received peace proposals from Darius, whose family had fallen into his hands at Issus. Darius offered him a ransom of 10, 000 talents for his family, the cession of all lands west of the Euphrates and a marriage alliance (Arrian, Anabasis, ii, 25, 1) but Alexander’s ambitions had now clearly expanded and he rejected the offer. By the winter of 332 all Syria and Palestine was in his hands and he was in Egypt, where he founded a new city, Alexandria, before making a journey through the desert to consult the famous oracle of Amon at Siwah. His strategic object at this time seems to have been to seize the whole sea-coast and so protect his base in Greece and Macedonia from any possible naval attack. For he had already taken a bold step: he had ‘decided to disband his navy both from lack of money at the time and also seeing that his fleet was not capable of an action against the Persian navy’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 20, 1). Perhaps too he mistrusted the Greeks who manned it. In fact, the death of Darius’ admiral Memnon in 333 had deprived the Persian fleet of most of its bite, and on land a Persian counter-attack in Asia Minor in winter 333/2 had been defeated.
In the summer of 331 Alexander once again met Darius’ army, this time at Gaugamela beyond the Tigris, not far from Nineveh. It was the decisive battle of the war and again Alexander was victorious, pursuing the retreating forces for thirty-five miles and then quickly advancing to occupy Babylon. Seizing the royal treasures, which amounted to 50, 000 gold talents, he advanced further into Persia proper, where he took Persepolis and Pasargadae. The burning of Xerxes’ palace at Persepolis was perhaps intended as a symbolic end to the war of revenge, the panhellenic war; such at least is Arrian’s view (Anabasis, iii, 18, 11), though other writers explain the incident, less probably, as arising out of a drunken escapade, inspired by a courtesan. At any rate, ‘on reaching Ecbatana Alexander sent back to the sea the Thessalian cavalry and the rest of the allies, paying each the agreed pay in full and himself making a largess of 2000 talents’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iii, 19, 5). Henceforth Alexander was to be waging a personal war. Placing the treasure under the control of Harpalus and leaving Parmenion, one of Philip’s generals, to control communications, he now pressed on at high speed after Darius. But Darius had been deposed by a usurper, Bessus, and Alexander found him stabbed and dying near Shahrud. Nothing now stood in the way of his claim to be the Great King, and a dedication of arms and bulls’ skulls at Lindus, probably in 330, was accompanied by the record:
King Alexander having defeated Darius in battle and become lord of Asia sacrificed to Lindian Athena in accordance with a prophecy in the priesthood of Theogenes, son of Pistocrates (Timachidas, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 532, c. 38).
The wording shows that Alexander’s new pretensions were now conveyed to the Greeks at home.
Crossing the Elburz mountains the king now advanced into Hyrcania, which lay to the south of the Caspian Sea, and after a short westward diversion towards the region of Amol, he accepted the surrender of Darius’ Greek mercenaries. He then marched east through Aria and Drangiana where at Phradah he found an excuse to eliminate the now irksome Parmenion. Parmenion’s son, Philotas, the commander of the élite Companion cavalry, was here accused of plotting against Alexander’s life and having been found guilty by the Macedonians was executed. At once a secret messenger was dispatched to Media to ensure the assassination of his father:
possibly because. . . Parmenion was already a grave danger, if he survived when his own son had been put to death, being so highly thought of both by Alexander himself and throughout all the army (Arrian, Anabasis, iii, 26, 4).
In the winter of 330/29 Alexander continued from Phradah along the Helmand into the Paropamisadae, where he founded Alexandria-by-the-Caucasus before crossing the Hindu Kush northwards into Bactria in pursuit of Bessus, who fled beyond the Oxus. There Bessus was deposed by the Sogdian leader Spitamenes and was taken prisoner by the Macedonian general Ptolemy; he was flogged, mutilated and in due course executed at Ecbatana. As Great King, Alexander thus in true Persian fashion avenged Darius, his predecessor.
Meanwhile he had crossed the Jaxartes to attack and defeat the Scythians with the aid of catapults and had founded Alexandria Eschate, ‘the farthest’, on the site of modern Leninabad in Tadzhikistan but it took him till autumn 328 to crush the national rising led by Spitamenes. A marriage with Roxane, the daughter of a Sogdian baron, Oxyartes, helped to reconcile his opponents in those outlying areas. His stay thereabouts was marked by incidents within his own camp which indicated a growth in royal absolutism and will be considered below (pp. 38–9).
In summer 327 Alexander recrossed the Hindu Kush and took his forces in two divisions over separate passes into India, and the following spring after some remarkable feats of warfare, including the capture of the almost impregnable pinnacle of Aornus (Pir-Sar), he crossed the Indus at Attock. The ruler of this area near the Jhelum and Chenab, the powerful prince Taxiles, now offered him elephants and troops in return for help against his rival Porus and on the left bank of the Hydaspes (modern Jhelum) Alexander won his last great victory against Porus, who now became his nominal ally. How much of India beyond the Punjab was known to Alexander is uncertain but he would have marched yet further east had not his troops mutinied. Reluctantly he agreed to return. On the Jhelum he built a fleet of 800 to 1000 ships and proceeded downstream to the Indus and so to the Indian Ocean, fighting and massacring as he went. At Patala, at the head of the delta, he built docks and a harbour and explored the two arms of the river. Then at last in October 325 he set off with part of his forces through Gedrosia (mod. Baluchistan) while the fleet under Nearchus sailed along the coast. An officer, Craterus, had already been sent with the baggage and siege train, the elephants and the sick and wounded, via Kandahar and the Helmand valley, whence he was to join Alexander on the river Minab in Carmania. Here eventually Alexander’s forces were reunited after he had suffered appalling losses in Gedrosia.
Both while he was in India and after his return to Mesopotamia Alexander carried out a drastic policy of dismissing and even executing many of his satraps.
Alexander is said to have grown at this time more ready to listen to any accusations, as if they were wholly reliable and to punish severely those who were convicted of slight errors because he felt they might, in the same frame of mind, commit heavier crimes (Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 4, 3).
Whether in fact this campaign is to be regarded as a somewhat severe but justifiable disciplining of errant governors or a reign of terror inflicted by a despot is a matter on which historians disagree but Arrian’s comments are the more telling in that he usually judges the king favourably. The Persian satraps in Paropamisadae, Carmania, Susiana and Persis are all known to have perished and at least three generals had already been brought from Media to Carmania, there convicted of extortion and executed. It was in this context that on his arrival at Susa, Alexander discovered that Harpalus, his treasurer, had fled with 6000 mercenaries and 5000 talents to Athens. He was later arrested, but escaped to Crete, where he was murdered.
Alexander’s stay in Susa was marked by a great feast held to celebrate the conquest of the Persian empire and also to encourage a new policy – that of fusing Macedonians and Persians into a master race. Alexander, his friend Hephaestion, and 80 officers all took Persian wives (almost all of whom were discarded after Alexander’s death). This policy led to several acts which aroused bitter resentment among the Macedonians, for instance the arrival of 30, 000 Asian youths who had been given a Macedonian military training, and the incorporation of orientals from Bactria, Sogdiana and Arachosia into the Companion cavalry. These and other steps designed to iron out the distinctions between conquerors and conquered came to a head at Opis in 324, when all but the royal bodyguard mutinied. Whereupon Alexander – for, says Arrian (Anabasis, vii, 8, 3) ‘he had grown worse-tempered at that time and oriental subservience had made him less disposed than before to the Macedonians’ – had the thirteen ringleaders executed and dismissed the rest. The opposition collapsed, and a vast banquet was held to celebrate the reconciliation. At this ‘Alexander’ prayed for all sorts of blessings and especially for harmony and fellowship in the empire between Macedonians and Persians’ (Arrian, Anabasis vii, 11, 9), indicating very clearly his concept of a joint condominium of the two peoples (though not of others too, as some scholars have thought). The same year Alexander sent two requests to Greece. First a decree was brought by Nicanor of Stagira to Europe and proclaimed at Olympia, requiring the Greek cities to receive back all exiles and their families (except for the Thebans). The second, a sequel to Hephaestion’s death at Ecbatana, was a request that he be honoured as a hero and (perhaps at the same time) that Alexander himself should be accorded divine honours. What these demands implied will be discussed below.
The following spring (323) Alexander received embassies from various parts of the Mediterranean world at Babylon, and busied himself with plans for exploration (which included the Caspian) but in June he suddenly fell ill after a prolonged banquet and drinking bout and on 13 June he died at Babylon, in his thirty-third year, after a reign of twelve years and eight months.
II
Alexander’s career has necessarily been sketched only in outline; it gives rise to many problems which cannot be considered here. It is however of special interest to consider to what extent his actions foreshadow and point forward to institutions and attitudes characteristic of the hellenistic world of which he was in some sense the initiator. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to some such aspects of Alexander’s life.
(a) First, the change in Alexander’s attitude towards Persia and his attempt to transform his army from a primarily Macedonian force, which still exercised the residual powers of the Macedonian people, into a cosmopolitan international force owing loyalty only to himself, in many ways anticipates the military foundation on which the personal monarchies of the hellenistic age rested. By 323 ‘King Alexander’ was the personal ruler of a vast spear-won empire which had little to do with Macedonia. His successors likewise were to carve out kingdoms for themselves with the help of armies bound to them only by personal bonds.
(b) Similarly, there was an increase in Alexander’s autocracy foreshadowing that of the hellenistic kings. In distancing himself from Macedonia and its national traditions Alexander had moreover necessarily assumed an autocratic power. The growth of this can be traced in a series of events which aroused the army’s hostility and often involved the elimination of his opponents. The first such incident occurred in 330 at Phradah, when Philotas’ execution was used as a pretext to have Parmenion assassinated. The next was at Maracanda (Samarkand) in 328, when Alexander murdered Black Cleitus, one of the Companions – the group constituting the king’s intimate advisers – and a leading cavalry officer, after provocation in a drunken brawl. Alexander subsequently reacted with a theatrical display of remorse but was persuaded by the philosopher Anaxarchus that the king stood above the law (Plutarch, Alexander, 52, 4).
In order that he might feel less shame for the murder, the Macedonians decreed that Cleitus had been justly put to death (Curtius, viii, 2, 12).
In the hellenistic monarchies (except Macedonia) the king’s decrees normally had the force of law and the king could do no wrong.
The third incident took place the next year at Bactra (mod. Balkh) and was the result of Alexander’s policy of surrounding himself with Persians as well as Macedonians. The presence of both at court led inevitably to difficulties, since the two peoples had very different traditions concerning the relationship between king and subject. To Macedonians the king was the first among his peers, to Persians he was the master and they were his slaves and the outward sign of this was an act of obeisance ( proskynesis), which a Macedonian or Greek was prepared to perform only to a god. Its exact character is controversial: some believe it to have involved physical prostration, others argue that it consisted merely in the blowing of a kiss from the upright, bowed or prostrate position. Whatever its precise form it was repulsive to Greeks and Macedonians when performed before a man, and when at Bactra in 327 Alexander tried to persuade the Macedonians to follow the Persians in according him this gesture, the Greek Callisthenes opposed him. There are two versions of what happened. According to the first, there was a debate between Anaxarchus and Callisthenes on Alexander’s proposal, in which the latter ‘while irritating Alexander exceedingly, found favour with the Macedonians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 1), and the whole plan was dropped. According to the second, Alexander sent round a loving-cup, which each was to take, offer proskynesis, and finally receive a kiss from the king; Callisthenes omitted the proskynesis and was denied the kiss (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 3–5). Whatever the truth of the details – both versions could be true – the incident led to Callisthenes’ destruction, for he was soon afterwards accused of being privy to a murder-conspiracy by some of the royal pages.
Aristobulus declares that they [sc. the conspirators] said that it was Callisthenes who had urged them to the plot; and Ptolemy agrees. But most authorities do not say so, but rather that through his dislike for Callisthenes . . . Alexander easily believed the worst about him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 14, 1).
Callisthenes was tortured and executed; the sources disagree only on the details. The whole incident smacks of the tyrant’s court.
(c) Alexander’s authoritarianism revealed itself, as that of his successors was also to do, in his relations with the Greeks. The expedition, as planned by Philip, had as its excuse the avenging of the wrongs suffered by the Greeks at the hands of the Persians. At the outset Alexander had been at pains to emphasize the panhellenic aspects of the war (see p. 31 for the panoplies sent to Athens after Granicus) but unfortunately our evidence is not sufficiently clear to allow us to say what status was accorded by Alexander to the ‘liberated’ Greek cities of Asia Minor. According to Arrian
he ordered the oligarchies everywhere to be dissolved, democracies to be set up, each city to receive back its own laws and to cease paying the taxes they had paid to the Persians (Anabasis, i, 18, 2).
But an inscription from Priene (Tod, 185) shows Alexander interfering extensively in the city’s affairs and although the Prieneans are declared ‘free and autonomous’ and released from the payment of ‘contributions’ – the word used, syntaxis, suggests that these were payments made hitherto to Alexander for the prosecution of the war rather than tribute paid to Persia – it is not clear just what ‘free and autonomous’ meant to the king. Some scholars have argued that the Greek cities of Asia Minor became members of the League of Corinth. This seems to have been true of the cities of the Aegean islands for an inscription from Chios, dealing with Alexander’s restoration of exiles there (probably in 332), declares that ‘of those who betrayed the city to the barbarians. . . all still remaining there shall be deported and tried before the Council of the Greeks’ (Tod, 192), which suggests Chian membership of the League of Corinth. But there is no firm evidence to determine whether the same was also true of the cities of Asia Minor. In practice they certainly had to do what Alexander ordered, like Ephesus where he restored the democracy but ‘gave orders to contribute to the temple of Artemis such taxes as they had paid to the Persians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 10).
This, however, also applied to the cities of the League, as the events of 324 clearly show. Faced with a problem of rootless men in Asia – unemployed mercenaries, political exiles, and settlers who (like 3000 from Bactria) had abandoned their new colonies and were on their way back to Greece – Alexander published an edict authorizing their return. According to Diodorus (xviii, 8, 4) he stated in this that ‘we have written to Antipater (who was in charge in Europe) about this, that he shall use compulsion against any cities that are unwilling to take back their exiles’. To ensure the maximum publicity for this decree, which, as an inscription from Mytilene (Tod, 201) shows, applied to Asia and Europe alike, Nicanor, Aristotle’s adopted son, was sent to Olympia to have read out to the Greeks assembled for the games a statement that ‘all exiles were to return to their countries, excepting those guilty of sacrilege and murder’ (Diodorus, xvii, 109, 1). A Samian inscription (Syll., 312) shows that Alexander had already previously made a similar announcement to the army. Though Diodorus says that the decree was welcomed, it certainly caused complications and even chaos over property, confiscated and sold, in every city (as inscriptions make clear) and it can hardly have pleased Antipater. It is a measure of Alexander’s disregard for the rights of the cities that he could take such a step without consulting them. In this, as in so much else, his actions were arbitrary and authoritarian. Traditional Greek rights were disregarded.
(d) Both Alexander and, later on, the hellenistic kings reinforced their autocratic power with claims to divinity. About the same time as he ordered the return of the exiles Alexander published a further demand in Greece, which met with a mixed reception. According to Aelian ( Varia historia, ii, 19), ‘Alexander sent instructions to the Greeks to vote him a god’ and this is borne out by other sources, none of which, however, mentions the exact context in which this request was sent. However, according to the Athenian orator Hypereides (Funeral Speech, 6, 21, delivered 323), the Athenians had been forced
to see sacrifices accorded to men, the statues, altars and temples of the gods disregarded, while those of men were sedulously cared for, and the servants of these men honoured as heroes.
The reference must be to the worship of Alexander and to the heroic honours which he had accorded to his dead friend Hephaestion. In the spring of 323 Alexander was visited at Babylon by embassies from Greece ‘wreathed in the manner of sacred envoys arriving to honour some god’ (Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 23, 2). In view of this evidence and a number of other passages, often ironical like the report of Damis’ motion at Sparta – ‘if Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god’ (Plutarch, Moralia, 219E) – it seems likely that the request was sent about the same time as the demand for the restoration of exiles, though there is little to be said for Tarn’s view in Alexander the Great, Vol. II, pp. 370–3, that ‘his divinity was intended by Alexander to give a political sanction to the latter request, which no existing powers authorized him to make’.
The request for divine honours seems more likely to have been a final step in the direction in which Alexander’s thoughts had been moving for some time. His father Philip had been honoured at Eresus on Lesbos by the erection of altars to Zeus Philippios (Tod, 191, 11. 5–6), a statue to him stood in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 11) – though this need not necessarily imply a cult – and at Aegae in Macedonia for ‘because of the greatness of his rule he had counted himself alongside the twelve gods’ (Diodorus, xvi, 95, 1). Recently an inscription has been found which attests the existence of a cult to him at Philippi. As for Alexander himself, he had been recognized as a Pharaoh, and so as a divine being (see p. 217), and early in 331 he had visited the oracle of Amon at Siwah in the Libyan desert, where, Callisthenes reported, ‘the priest told the king that he, Alexander, was the son of Zeus’ (Strabo, xvii, 1, 43), a statement generally interpreted to mean that the priest greeted Alexander as ‘son of Amon’. Shortly afterwards, and quite independently, the oracles at Didyma and Erythrae put out the same story ‘concerning Alexander’s descent from Zeus’ (Strabo, ibid.). To Greeks and Macedonians it was common practice to identify foreign gods with their own and Callisthenes called Amon Zeus, just as Pindar had done in his hymn to Amon, where he addressed him as ‘Amon, lord of Olympus’, and in a Pythian ode (4, 16) where he speaks of Zeus Amon. That Alexander encouraged the connection with Zeus, as his son or (like Philip) identified with him, can be seen from a silver decadrachm issued later to celebrate his victory over Porus, which depicts Alexander on horseback charging Porus on an elephant and on the reverse shows a figure of Zeus, wearing a strange amalgam of dress and wielding a thunderbolt in his right hand, which has also been identified with Alexander.
A further stage in the advance towards deification can be traced in the scheme, already discussed above (pp. 38–9), to introduce proskynesis at Bactra. In order to raise the topic, Anaxarchus, the amenable philosopher from Abdera, asserted that
it would be far more just to consider Alexander as a god than Dionysus and Heracles;. . . there could be no doubt that when Alexander had passed away men would honour him as a god; how much more just was it then that they should so honour him in his lifetime rather than when he was dead, and the honours would be no use to him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 10, 6–7).
But however attractive to Alexander, this argument went down badly with the Macedonians, as we have seen, and the plan to introduce proskynesis had to be shelved, largely in the light of Callisthenes’ speech in opposition. The final stage came with the request of 323, as a result of which several Greek cults of Alexander appeared – at Athens, probably at Sparta, and perhaps elsewhere. But Alexander’s death followed soon afterwards and any cults established seem to have been shortlived, at any rate on the Greek mainland. Cults established in Asia Minor, like the festival of the Alexandreia attested in an inscription found on the island of Thasos, seem often to date from his original campaigns of 334/3 and not to be a response to the message of 323. In their case the cult was often accompanied by the setting-up of a new dating era (as in Priene and Miletus), both being a spontaneous expression of gratitude for ‘liberation’. But the Greeks of the mainland needed no liberator and there cults were instituted only in response to pressure and soon disappeared. The difference is noteworthy. It is the Asian tradition which serves to throw light on the character of hellenistic ruler-cult during the next two centuries (see pp. 212 ff).
(e) Finally we must consider Alexander’s cities. Throughout the lands covered by his march he founded Alexandrias, not seventy, as Plutarch (On Alexander’s Fortune, 1, 5, p.328e) alleged, but a substantial number, perhaps about a score in all, mainly east of the Tigris, where hitherto urban centres were rare. Most of these foundations are merely names in lists, official names moreover, which were not always those by which they were later known. They were intended to serve a variety of purposes, some to guard strategic points, passes or fords, others to supervise wider areas; they presupposed an adequate territory to maintain the colonists and, preferably, a local population who could be pressed into agricultural work. Some were later to develop into centres of commerce, while others withered and perished. It seems certain that the bulk of the settlers were Greek mercenaries. This can be deduced from calculations based on recorded troop movements and is confirmed by remarks in our sources. To take the latter first, Diodorus reports that the Greeks whom Alexander had settled in the upper satrapies (especially Bactria)
were sick for Greek training and the Greek way of life and having been relegated to the frontiers of the kingdom they put up with this from fear so long as Alexander was alive, but when he died they revolted (xviii, 7, 1).
They were in fact 23, 000 in number and had come out East to make their fortunes – their fate was to be disarmed by the Macedonians and massacred for plunder. The picture of reluctant settlers is confirmed from a speech which Arrian put into the mouth of the Macedonian Coenus when the troops in the Punjab mutinied rather than march further east. After mentioning the sending home of the Thessalians from Bactria, he continues:
Of the rest of the Greeks some have been settled in the cities which you have founded, and they do not all remain there willingly; others including Macedonians, sharing in your toils and dangers, have in part perished in battle, while some have become invalids from wounds and have been left scattered here and there throughout Asia (Arrian, Anabasis, v, 27, 5).
Firm numbers elude us but Griffith has calculated (The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World, pp. 20 ff.) that in the course of his expedition Alexander received at least 60, 000 (and more probably 65, 000) fresh mercenaries, and that he left behind him as garrisons or settlers a minimum of 36, 000, which together with the numbers not recorded and casualties from battle or sickness must have reached a total equal to that of the new recruits. Eventually, at Babylon,
having sent home the older of his soldiers to their native land (Diodorus (xvii, 109, 1) puts their numbers at 10, 000) he ordered 13, 000 infantry and 2000 horse to be selected for retention in Asia, thinking that Asia could be held by an army of moderate size, because he had distributed garrisons in many places and had filled the newly founded cities with colonists eager to maintain things as they were (Curtius, x, 2, 8).
The Bactrian revolt shows how far Alexander had miscalculated the temper of these settlers.
Not all, however, broke loose. And though many of the cities (like Bactra) must have incorporated a strong native element, they maintained their Greek organization and later under the Seleucids they were reinforced by the establishment of new settlements. The character of these will be considered below (pp. 130 ff.). Here we may conclude this brief consideration of Alexander’s programme, which foreshadowed the many later foundations of his hellenistic successors, by noting that his first Alexandria, that founded on the Nile in spring 331, and his only settlement west of the Tigris, survived to become one of the most famous centres of the Roman empire and indeed of later times.
3. The Formation of the Kingdoms (323–276) (#ulink_800ebdc8-3f34-5890-a0ae-8d795c1d84a9)
On his death Alexander left an empire stretching from the Adriatic to the Punjab and from Tadzhikistan to Libya. But much of it was loosely held and parts of northern Asia Minor had never come under Macedonian control at all. Whether, had he lived longer, Alexander could have organized and co-ordinated this inchoate area effectively is a moot question. Without him even the survival as a whole seemed unlikely. The history of the next fifty years – from 323 until 276 – is of a struggle between Alexander’s generals and their sons and successors to take what they could for themselves. For a time that could have meant the whole. But the assumption of the royal title by several of the contestants from 306 onwards and the defeat and death of Antigonus at Ipsus in 301 marked two decisive steps in the process of dissolution. This proces can be traced in detail since the period down to 301 is well documented, with Hieronymus’ solid account standing behind our extant sources, especially Diodorus, whose narrative is intact down to that date.
I
Of those who were at Babylon when Alexander died the most important were Perdiccas, the senior cavalry officer and probably, since the death of Alexander’s favourite, Hephaestion, ‘chiliarch’ (in effect vizier), Meleager, the senior phalanx-leader, Ptolemy and Leonnatus (both related to the royal house), Lysimachus, Aristonous and Peucestas (who was satrap of Persis and Susiana). Others who were to play a major part later on were Seleucus, the commander of the hypaspists (a crack guards’ regiment), Eumenes of Cardia, Alexander’s secretary and the only Greek among the leading Macedonians, and Cassander, the son of Antipater. Antipater had been left by Alexander as regent in Macedonia, and Craterus, who had been sent to replace him, had already reached Cilicia. Finally there was Antigonus Monophthalmus, the One-eyed, a man (like Antipater) of the older generation, satrap of Phrygia. The struggle broke out at once and was to last in various forms until c. 270. Because the contestants, apart from Eumenes, were Macedonians, Macedonia was to play a special role in the conflict. It is perhaps not mere chance that it was the last major division of the empire to acquire a stable dynasty.
The twenty years we are now considering fall into two periods. The first, from 323 to 320, represents Perdiccas’ attempt to devise a compromise settlement which could claim legitimacy while leaving power in his hands. It ended in his violent death. The second period is longer; it covers the years from 320 to 301 and is dominated by Antigonus’ efforts to bring the whole empire, or as much of it as possible, under his control. Details are complicated. The scene shifts from Asia to Europe and back again to Asia where at Ipsus in 301 a coalition of his enemies brought about Antigonus’ defeat and death. After 301 the struggle continued with Demetrius Poliorcetes, Antigonus’ son, attempting to revive his father’s empire from a base in Greece and Macedonia but a coalition between Lysimachus and a new contestant, Pyrrhus of Epirus, brought about his fall and he died in captivity. In effect Ipsus had confirmed the existence of separate dynasties in Egypt (Ptolemy), Babylonia and northern Syria (Seleucus) and northern Anatolia and Thrace (Lysimachus). Only the fate of the homeland, Macedonia, remained undecided. Between 288 and 282 Lysimachus made a determined attempt to annex it, first in alliance with Pyrrhus and then alone but in 282 he was defeated by Seleucus at Corupedium, where he fell fighting, and after a period of near anarchy, with Gaulish invasions and rapid dynastic changes, Macedonia too at last obtained a permanent ruler in Demetrius’ son, Antigonus Gonatas.
The main territorial divisions of Alexander’s former empire were now established and were to survive with only minor changes for the next two centuries. In the present chapter we shall look briefly at the course of events which ended in this division of territories and power, and the dissolution of Alexander’s world-empire into a group of rival kingdoms and a de facto (though never properly recognized) balance of power.
Alexander’s death nearly precipitated civil war over the succession between the cavalry and the infantry sections of his army. Perdiccas proposed waiting for the birth of the unborn child of Alexander and Roxane and (if it was a boy) making it king but the phalanx led by Meleager put forward Philip II’s feebleminded bastard Arrhidaeus and thanks to Eumenes a compromise was made, appointing the two jointly. They were in due course recognized as Philip III and Alexander IV, but from the outset both were pawns in a struggle for power. Perdiccas now summoned a council of friends to assign commands. The army agreed
that Antipater should be general in Europe, Craterus ‘protector’ (prostates) of Arrhidaeus’s basileia, Perdiccas chiliarch over the chiliarchy which Hephaestion had commanded (which meant charge over the whole basileia) and Meleager Perdiccas’ subordinate (Arrian, Events after Alexander, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 156, F i, 3).
Craterus’ position in this settlement is far from clear, since basileia can mean either ‘kingdom’ or ‘kingship’ (it has the former meaning in the parenthesis on Perdiccas’ command), and the post of prostates can be interpreted in several ways. Other sources, moreover, have slightly different versions; for example, Q. Curtius (x, 7, 8–9) has Perdiccas and Leonnatus designated guardians of Roxane’s child without any mention of Arrhidaeus. On the whole it seems likely that Perdiccas’ position as ‘chiliarch’ put him above Craterus (who was absent from Babylon) but in any case Perdiccas very soon had Meleager murdered, after which Craterus’ powers seem limited to sharing Macedonia with Antipater. So perhaps his post as prostates was a temporary concession to the phalanx and Meleager.
Perdiccas was now clearly on top – though, as Arrian remarks, ‘everyone was suspicious of him and he of them’ (Events after Alexander, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 156, F i, 5). Of the rest Ptolemy received Egypt, and soon afterwards embellished his position there by cunningly sidetracking to that province the cortège containing Alexander’s embalmed body. Antigonus was given all western Asia Minor (including Greater Phrygia, Lycia and Pamphylia), Lysimachus received Thrace (which was separated from Macedonia), Leonnatus Hellespontine Phrygia (but he soon died) and Eumenes was sent to expel a local dynast Ariarathes from Cappadocia and Paphlagonia. Of these men Ptolemy, Antigonus, Eumenes and Lysimachus were to prove the most tenacious over the next decades and to play the greatest part in the conflict. Perdiccas was soon eliminated. While Craterus and Antipater collaborated under the command of the latter to suppress a Greek revolt (the so-called Lamian War ended in a crushing blow to the Greeks and especially Athens), Perdiccas took control of the kings and alienated Antipater by jilting his daughter in order to marry Alexander’s sister Cleopatra. A coalition of Antipater, Craterus, Antigonus, Lysimachus and Ptolemy was formed against him and only his murder in Egypt in 320 averted war. The first stage in the struggle was over and at a meeting of the coalition at Triparadeisus in north Syria (320) Antipater was made guardian of the kings (for Craterus had died operating against Eumenes) and removed the court to Macedonia. ‘Antigonus’, Diodorus tells us (xviii, 40, 1), ‘was declared general of Asia and assembled his forces from winter quarters to defeat Eumenes.’ The tide suggests a division of the empire with Antipater, who was general in Europe and an old man; he had never had much interest in Asia. Already therefore the attempt to maintain the empire in one set of hands had suffered a serious setback. Macedonia, Asia and Egypt were under separate control. Though the dynasties controlling the first two were later to change, the pattern of the hellenistic world was already beginning to emerge.
II
The next twenty years (320–301) are dominated by Antigonus. It was widely believed – Polybius (v, 102, 1) quotes the fact, not very appropriately, in connection with Philip V of whom it was not true – that the house of Antigonus had always aimed at universal dominion. We cannot be quite sure what was in Antigonus’ mind, but the sources certainly insist that he was never prepared to settle for less than the whole empire. The years down to 316 were devoted to hounding down and eliminating Eumenes. In 319 this was within Antigonus’ grasp but when he heard that Antipater had died having appointed one of Philip II’s officers, Polyperchon, as regent, he came to terms with Eumenes and joined Lysimachus, Ptolemy and Antipater’s son Cassander in a new alliance against Polyperchon. The latter, despite a proclamation ‘liberating the cities of Greece and dissolving the oligarchies set up by Antipater’ (Diodorus, xviii, 55, 2), failed to win support in Greece, where his move was seen as a propaganda exercise, and very soon Cassander’s forces were in the Piraeus and Athens under the control of his protégé, the Aristotelian philosopher, Demetrius of Phalerum. Meanwhile in Macedonia Philip III’s wife Eurydice declared for Cassander. When Polyperchon replied by inviting Alexander’s mother Olympias back from Epirus, she engineered the death of Philip III and Eurydice but was in turn tried and executed by the forces of Cassander, who invaded Macedonia. The legitimate house was now represented only by Alexander IV. Over in Asia Antigonus soon resumed the war against Eumenes, who scored some successes in Asia Minor, Phoenicia and Babylonia until in 316/15 he was betrayed by his troops to Antigonus, who had him tried and executed. This victory enabled Antigonus to extend his power into Iran and this made him the avowed enemy of the rest.
In the settlement of Triparadeisus Babylonia had been assigned to Seleucus. In 315 Antigonus, now back from a visit to the east and master of all the lands from Asia Minor to Iran, expelled him and he took refuge with Ptolemy. Largely at his instigation Ptolemy, Cassander and Lysimachus now served an ultimatum on Antigonus, demanding that he surrender most of his gains, restore Babylonia to Seleucus and share Eumenes’ treasure with them (Diodorus, xix, 57, 1). Antigonus can hardly have been expected to comply, nor did he. Instead he continued with his conquests, seizing southern Syria, Bithynia and Caria and he made a prudent alliance with Polyperchon. Moreover at Tyre in 314 he issued a proclamation that precipitated a thirteen years war with Cassander.
Calling together an assembly of his soldiers and those living there, he issued a decree declaring Cassander an enemy unless he destroyed the recently founded cities of Thessalonica and Cassandreia and, releasing from his custody the king (i.e. Alexander IV) and his mother Roxane, handed them over to the Macedonians and in short showed himself obedient to Antigonus, who had been constituted general and had taken over the control of the kingdom. All the Greeks too were to be free, without garrisons and self-governing (eleutherous, aphrouretous, autonomous) (Diodorus, xix, 61, 1–3).
Largely intended as propaganda this proclamation was to have far-reaching repercussions, for its last clause raised an issue which had already been put forward by Polyperchon in 319 as a weapon against Cassander (see p. 50) and was later to re-echo through the politics of the hellenistic age, until eventually the Romans took it up and adapted it to their own ends. We shall be considering it further in Chapter 7. Here we need note only that the significance was immediately evident to Ptolemy who
hearing of the resolution passed by the Macedonians with Antigonus concerning the freedom of the Greeks, himself wrote a similar declaration, being anxious that the Greeks should know that he was no less solicitous for their autonomy than was Antigonus (Diodorus, xix, 62, 1).
For Antigonus, however, it remained a cardinal principle of his Greek policy for the rest of his life and it was probably at this time and in accordance with this programme that he promoted the foundation of the League of Island Cities – the Nesiotes – in the Aegean, our knowledge of which is derived solely from inscriptions. Some scholars have attributed the foundation of this league to the Ptolemies, in 308 or even as late as 287. But a League inscription (IG, xi, 4, 103 6=Durr bach, Choix, 13) records the celebration in Delos in alternate years of festivals entitled Antigoneia and Demetrieia, and it seems likely (a) that these are federal festivals and (b) that the Demetrius and Antigonus whom they commemorate are Antigonus I and Demetrius I. If that is so, though it later fell under the Ptolemies, the League will have originated now as an instrument of Antigonid policy. The separation of Delos from Athens struck a blow at a city now under Cassander’s control.
Reacting to an invasion of Caria by Cassander (313), Antigonus now crossed the Taurus, sent various officers to intrigue in the Peloponnese and himself took action against Lysimachus in Thrace, where he intervened to assist Callatis and other Pontic cities which were in revolt (312). The same year he had an abortive meeting with Cassander on the Hellespont (Diodorus xix, 75, 6). But meanwhile Ptolemy had attacked Demetrius, whom his father had left to defend Palestine, and routed him at Gaza. Seleucus thereupon seized the chance to recover Babylon with forces provided by Ptolemy and Antigonus had to abandon fighting in the north in order to restore the situation in Syria. Both Antigonus and Ptolemy were by now ready for peace and this was agreed in 311 on the basis of the status quo. According to Diodorus (xix, 105, 1),
Cassander, Ptolemy and Lysimachus made peace with Antigonus and subscribed to a treaty, the terms of which were that Cassander should be general of Europe until Alexander, Roxane’s son, should come of age, Lysimachus should be lord of Thrace, and Ptolemy of Egypt and the cities bordering Egypt in Africa and Arabia; Antigonus should be in charge of all Asia and the Greeks should live according to their own laws. But they did not abide by this contract for long, but each one of them put forward plausible excuses for trying to acquire more territory.
The treaty of 311 was a setback to Antigonus’ ambitions but in a letter to the Greek cities, a copy of which was found at Scepsis (mod. Kurşunla Tepe), he represents it as a success and refers to the freedom of the Greeks as his main concern.
What zeal we have shown in these matters will, I think, be evident to you and to all others from the settlement itself. After the arrangements with Cassander and Lysimachus had been completed . . . Ptolemy sent envoys to us asking that a truce be made with him also and that he be included in the same treaty. We saw that it was no small thing to give up part of an ambition for which we had taken no little trouble and incurred much expense, and that too when an agreement had been reached with Cassander and Lysimachus and when the remaining task was easier. Nevertheless, because we thought that after a settlement had been reached with him the matter of Polyperchon might be arranged more quickly as no one would then be in alliance with him, because of our relationship to him [what this was is uncertain] and still more because we saw that you and our other allies were burdened by the war and its expenses, we thought it was well to yield and make the truce with him also. . . Know then that peace is made. We have provided in the treaty that all the Greeks are to swear to aid each other in preserving their freedom and autonomy, thinking that while we lived on all human calculations these would be protected, but that afterwards freedom would remain more certainly secure for all the Greeks if both they and the men in power are bound by oaths (Welles, R. C., no. I, II. 24–61 =SVA, 428= Austin, 31).
In this letter Antigonus not surprisingly makes no reference to Demetrius’ defeat at Gaza. It is of interest in that it provides evidence that Polyperchon was still active in the Peloponnese and also shows that Antigonus, now 71, is beginning to consider what is to happen after his death. More immediately, however, the swearing of oaths would enable him to call on Greek help if in the future he could plausibly allege a breach of the treaty.
By that treaty the unity of the empire had suffered a perhaps fatal blow, for by implication it recognized the existence of four independent powers – not to mention Seleucus and Polyperchon, who were both excluded from it. Shortly afterwards Cassander took the callous but logic step of assassinating Alexander IV and Roxane.
Cassander, Lysimachus and likewise Antigonus were now freed from their fear in regard to the king. For since no one now survived to inherit the kingdom, each one who was exercising rule over peoples or cities began to cherish hopes of sovereignty and to hold the territory under him as if it were a spear-won kingdom (Diodorus, xix, 105, 3–4).
Antigonus regarded the peace as a breathing-space before his next move. The events of the ten years which followed are complicated because, despite the general alignment against Antigonus, his rivals intrigued against each other and even made temporary arrangements with the common enemy. There is some evidence that the period opened with an unsuccessful attempt by Antigonus to recover the eastern satrapies, but that after being defeated by Seleucus he made a treaty with him giving him Iran and leaving him free to fight Chandragupta in India. That struggle ended about 303 with Seleucus ceding at least Gandhara and eastern Arachosia and Gedrosia. ‘Seleucus gave them to Sandracottus (Chandragupta) on terms of intermarriage and receiving in exchange five hundred elephants’ (Strabo, xv, 2, 9). These elephants were to prove a notable addition to hellenistic warfare. Meanwhile Ptolemy seized Cyprus and it was probably now that he contracted an alliance with the powerful, independent maritime city of Rhodes. Control of the Aegean was a bone of contention between Ptolemy and Antigonus, each of whom posed as the guardian of Greek liberty but when Cassander patched up a peace with Polyperchon (the price was the murder of Heracles, an alleged bastard of Alexander whom Polyperchon was using to rally support), Ptolemy and Antigonus drew together in circumstances which remain obscure. The agreement did not last. Faced with the alliance of Cassander and Polyperchon the Greek cities appealed to Ptolemy, who invaded the Peloponnese in 308 but then, having obtained little solid support, soon made peace with Cassander (though his garrisons remained installed at Corinth and other Greek cities). In 307, while Cassander was in Epirus, Demetrius sailed to Athens, expelled Demetrius of Phalerum, and set up a democracy and in 306 Antigonus sent him against Cyprus, where he won a resounding victory over the Ptolemaic governor and then over Ptolemy himself. Cyprus passed into Antigonid hands but a further sequel to this victory was even more significant.
For the first time the multitude saluted Antigonus and Demetrius as kings. Antigonus accordingly was immediately crowned by his friends, and Demetrius received a diadem from his father with a letter in which he was addressed as king. The followers of Ptolemy in Egypt on their part also, when this was reported, gave him the title of king so that they might not appear to be downcast because of their defeat. And in this way their emulation carried the practice among the other successors. For Lysimachus began to wear a diadem, and Seleucus also in his encounters with Greeks; for already before this he had dealt with the barbarians as a king. Cassander, however, although the others addressed him as a king in their letters and addresses, wrote his own letters in the same form as he had done previously (Plutarch, Demetrius, 18, 1–2).
Antigonus’ assumption of kingship was in 306, that of Ptolemy shortly afterwards in 305/4, and that of Seleucus, as we know from cuneiform texts, likewise in 305/4. A cuneiform tablet containing a Babylonian king list of the hellenistic period (see p. 26) adds to our information about this. Lines 6–7 (obv.) read:
Year 7 (Seleucid era), which is [his] first year, Seleucus [ruled as] king. He reigned 25 years. Year 31 (Seleucid era), month 6, Se[leucus] the king was killed in the land [of the] Khani.
This text, besides giving the date of Seleucus’ death (between 25 August and 24 September 281) also makes clear that his first regnal year (305/4) was the seventh year of the Seleucid era, which therefore began in 312/11 (in fact in October 312 in the Greek reckoning and in April 311 in the Babylonian). The document proves that Plutarch’s statement that Seleucus had already previously dealt with barbarians as a king is not literally true nor should his statement about Cassander be taken to imply that he refrained from using the royal title generally, since he is called ‘King Cassander’ on coins, and an inscription from Cassandreia recording what is probably the confirmation of a grant of land begins:
The king of the Macedonians Cassander gives to Perdiccas son of Coenus the land in Sinaia and that at Trapezus which was occupied by his grandfather Polemocrates and his father in the reign of Philip (II) etc. (Syll., 332).
This sudden spate of royal titles marked yet a further step in the break-up of the empire – though just what each king took his title to mean we can only speculate. It is unlikely that each general was staking out a claim to the whole empire – unless this was perhaps Antigonus’ idea. More likely, as the passage from Diodorus quoted on p. 54 suggests, they were exploiting the death of Alexander IV to claim kingship within their own particular territories – though not kingship of those territories. Ptolemy was already king of Egypt to the native population but he never calls himself king of Egypt in any Greek document. And of what kingdom – if any – was Antigonus king? The later career of Demetrius, who was for several years a king without a kingdom, is some indication that these monarchies were felt to be personal, and not closely linked with the lands where the king ruled. They constituted recognition of a claim based on high military achievement by men who through their efforts controlled ‘peoples or cities’. The exception was Macedonia and in the inscription quoted above in which Cassander calls himself ‘king of the Macedonians’, his purpose in doing so is perhaps to assert a unique position not open to any of his rivals (rather than simply to affirm his authority to validate a land-grant within the kingdom of Macedonia, as has been suggested).
Demetrius followed up his victory in Cyprus with the famous attack on Rhodes which brought him his title of Poliorcetes, the Besieger (305). This attack was a further provocation to Ptolemy, the close friend of Rhodes. The siege lasted a year and was celebrated for the siege-engines which Demetrius deployed, though unsuccessfully, in order to reduce the city. It ended in a compromise peace (304), in which the Rhodians gave 100 hostages and agreed to be ‘allies of Antigonus and Demetrius, except in a war against Ptolemy’ (Plutarch, Demetrius, 22, 4). In 304/3 Demetrius seized the Isthmus of Corinth and in 302, in preparation for war on Cassander, he resurrected the Hellenic League of Philip and Alexander ‘thinking that autonomy for the Greeks would bring him great renown’ (Diodorus, xx, 102, 1). An inscription found at Epidaurus (SVA, 446) contains the constitutive act setting up the League. In it provision was made for regular meetings of the Council and for Antigonus and Demetrius as leaders to exercise an even closer control than Philip and Alexander had done over their League of Corinth. The Epidaurus inscription is extremely fragmentary, but the information it contains can be supplemented from a Delphic inscription containing a letter written by Adeimantus of Lampsacus to Demetrius and an Athenian decree honouring Adeimantus (Moretti, i, 9; ii, 72). These inscriptions show that so long as the war with Cassander lasted, Demetrius appointed the presidium of the League personally and also that Adeimantus, known hitherto mainly as a flatterer of the king and friend of philosophers, played an important role as Demetrius’ representative at the council of the League and perhaps in proposing the institution of a festival in honour of the two kings.
The League however was not destined to last long, for in 301 a coalition consisting of Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus (who brought with him his 500 elephants) forced the combined armies of Antigonus and Demetrius (whom his father had summoned from Europe) to battle at Ipsus in Phrygia, and there inflicted a decisive defeat; Antigonus perished and Demetrius fled. In the sharing of spoils Lysimachus took most of Asia Minor as far as Taurus and Ptolemy, who had been campaigning separately in Palestine, took all the area as far north as the river Eleutherus (Nahr al-Kabir) as well as parts of Lycia and Pisidia. Ipsus marked the end of any pretence that there was still a single empire and despite the fact that Lysimachus’ kingdom straddled the straits, Asia and Europe now went different ways.
III
Between 301 and 286 Demetrius tried to restore his fortunes in Greece and for a time held Macedonia (after Cassander’s death) in spite of pressure from Pyrrhus. But from 289 onwards his position deteriorated. He lost his Aegean possessions and Athens to Ptolemy and was expelled from Macedonia by the combined forces of Lysimachus and Pyrrhus. In 285 Seleucus took him prisoner and he died of drink two years later. This episode left the possession of Macedonia still undecided. After the expulsion of Demetrius Lysimachus had first divided it with Pyrrhus and then, in 285, had contrived to annex the whole. But nemesis now overtook him. He was persuaded by his third wife, Arsinoe, to put his son Agathocles to death (to the advantage of Arsinoe’s children). Agathocles’ window Lysandra and her brother Ptolemy Ceraunus – they were half-brother and half-sister to Arsinoe, all three being children of Ptolemy – therefore incited Seleucus to challenge Lysimachus. In 282 Seleucus invaded Asia Minor and early in 281 at Corupedium Lysimachus was defeated and killed. But on crossing into Europe Seleucus, now redundant, was assassinated by his ally Ceraunus, who seized the throne of Macedonia.
Two years later (279), weakened by Lysimachus’ defeat, the country was overrun by an army of Gaulish marauders, part of a large-scale migration. Another group established a kingdom in Thrace, others reached Delphi but were destroyed by the Aetolians, and yet further bands crossed over into Asia Minor and settled in what was henceforth to be known as Galatia. What happened subsequently in Macedonia is obscure. A series of weak reigns with anarchic conditions gave Antigonus Gonatas, Demetrius’ son, who had managed to hold on to the strong-points at Corinth, Chalcis and Demetrias (his father’s foundation in the Pagasean Gulf), the opportunity for which he was looking. In 276, after winning a much publicized victory over the Gauls at Lysimacheia in 277, he established himself as king in Macedonia and Thessaly. Thus the dynasty founded by Antigonus the One-eyed gained possession of the last unpre-empted territory, the homeland of Macedonia.
Lysimacheia confirmed the result of Ipsus. The hellenistic world of territorial states was now in being, with the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in the area covered by Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran. In each monarchy the sons or (in the case of Macedonia) the grandson of Alexander’s successors were on the throne – Antiochus I, Ptolemy II and Antigonus II – and the dynastic principle was firmly established. Politically Alexander’s empire had fragmented but in many ways the new kingdoms had much in common. Before looking at the separate kingdoms, therefore, we shall in the next chapter consider to what extent the hellenistic world constituted a homogeneous whole, and how far the coexistence of Greeks and Macedonians alongside the indigenous populations created problems for both peoples.
4. The Hellenistic World:A Homogeneous Culture? (#ulink_9c32d40c-df95-51c5-8465-9f339736b57b)
I
Towards the middle of the third century the inhabitants of a Greek city lying at the site of Ai Khanum beside the river Oxus (mod. Amu Darya) on the northern frontier of Afghanistan (its name is unknown) erected in a shrine in the middle of the city a pillar inscribed with a list of some 140 moral maxims copied from a similar pillar which stood near the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, over 3000 miles away. An adjoining verse inscription reads:
These wise words of famous men of old are consecrated in holy Pytho. Thence Clearchus took them, copying them with care, to set them shining from afar in the sacred enclosure of Cineas (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422 = Austin, 192).
Cineas – his name suggests that he was probably a Thessalian – will have been the city’s founder to whom the shrine was dedicated, and Clearchus has been identified by Robert as the Aristotelian philosopher, Clearchus of Soli, a man with an interest both in Delphi and in the religion and philosophy of the Indian gymnosophists, the Persian magi and the Jewish priests. If this Clearchus was indeeed he, we have here our first indication that he made a journey to the far east and there found distant Greek communities ready to hear him lecture and, at his prompting, to inscribe an authenticated copy of Delphic wisdom in the shrine of the city’s founder. To set up Delphic maxims, often in a gymnasium, was a common practice. Examples are known from Thera (IG, xii 3, 1020) and Miletopolis in Mysia (Syll., 1268). The list at Ai Khanum is fragmentary and in fact only five maxims now survive, but comparable lists elsewhere enabled the French epigraphist, Louis Robert, to reconstitute the whole collection – a striking illustration of how an inscription, of which the greater part is lost, can occasionally be restored with virtual certainty. An interesting feature of the Ai Khanum inscription is that despite the remoteness of this city the lettering is not at all crude or provincial. It is of the highest quality and in the best tradition of the Greek lapicide’s craft, worthy of the kingdom of Bactria, which also produced some of the finest Greek coins of the hellenistic period.
This inscription was discovered in 1966, and nearby, in the gymnasium of Ai Khanum, was another, containing a dedication by two brothers, ‘Triballus and Strato, sons of Strato, to Hermes and Heracles’ (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422), who were the patron gods of the gymnasium. Subsequent excavation has revealed the full plan of the gymnasium itself, which incidentally contained a sundial of a type known, but not hitherto found. There was also a theatre holding 5000 spectators and, dating from about 150, a large administrative centre of palatial proportions, in which were found storing vessels labelled in Greek, a mosaic 5.7 metres square and, most remarkable of all, from what was evidently its library, imprinted on fine earth formed from decomposed wall-bricks, the traces of a still partially legible text from a now perished piece of papyrus, which was evidently a page in a philosophical work which appears to have been written by a member of the Aristotelian school (of which Clearchus himself was a member). These finds confirm the picture of a city in which, despite its later isolation, Greek traditions continued strong right down to the time of its destruction by the nomads of the steppes in the second half of the second century.
But Ai Khanum was not the first site to furnish epigraphical evidence for a strong hellenic presence in Bactria, for only a few years earlier two Greek inscriptions, one with an Aramaic counterpart, had been found at Kandahar (see Schlumberger, CRAI (1964), 126–40). These contained fragments of the moralizing edicts of the Mauryan king Asoka and they too were elegantly carved and in an excellent Greek, which betrayed an intimate knowledge of the vocabulary of Greek philosophy and considerable skill in adapting it to render the thoughts of a Buddhist convert. Anxious to convey his lessons to those living in what now formed part of his dominions, Asoka used Aramaic, the official language of the Persian empire, and of course Greek. More recently a further Greek inscription has been found in Kandahar and more can be expected.
This use of Greek, in the popular cosmopolitan form called the koine, the ‘common tongue’, is characteristic of the whole vast area covered by Alexander’s conquests. It pays no heed to the later frontiers and serves to bind the whole into a single cultural continuum. Its prevalence is the result not merely of political domination, but also of a great movement of colonization which began under Alexander and continued in full spate until about 250, after which it slackened off. Ai Khanum has provided clear evidence of this, for a study of the traces of habitation in a wide area around this city has shown it to be virtually unpopulated under the Achaemenid kings, but with a dense population in hellenistic times.
II
Under Alexander the agents of colonization were largely mercenaries whom he left behind to hold strategic points. Conditions were rough and lacking in civilized amenity and so (as we saw, p. 44) provoked revolt. But the finds on the Oxus and at Kandahar are not the only evidence that by the mid-third century or even earlier conditions had improved. The growth in the number of colonists had brought with it a deepening of Greek civilization, not least in Bactria, and we can occasionally trace the process. A decree passed by the assembly of Antioch-in-Persis, recognizing the international character of the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, recalls the kinship existing between the two peoples, for when Antiochus I (281–261) was anxious to reinforce the population of Antioch, the Magnesians had responded to his invitation by sending ‘men sufficient in number and outstanding in merit for the purpose’ (OGIS, 233, 1. 18). A generation later the bond was still remembered. As in the great European emigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries many went out in groups but others would have gone individually to try their fortune in new lands. The new cities of the east contained a mixture of Greeks from all parts, a motley throng from every sort of environment and social class, from the main centres of civilization and from the fringe areas.
Once in their new homes these Greeks and Macedonians sank their many differences to become the new master race – for Alexander’s notion of a joint Greco-Persian ruling class never took hold. From the outset these newcomers formed the governing minority in the areas where they settled. One of the great problems of the period is to define and analyse the shifting relations between this minority and the peoples whose lands they shared. It was not always a hostile relationship. Strabo (xi, 14, 12) describes how Cyrsilus of Pharsalus and Medius of Larissa, officers in Alexander’s army, set out to trace a cultural relationship between Armenia and Media and their native Thessaly. Their attitude was clearly open and friendly but what they were hoping to do was not to understand these people in their own environment but to prove that they were really some sort of Greeks. This, as we shall see (p. 228), is precisely what some Greeks tried to do when brought up against the phenomenon of Rome. Occasionally, especially in the early days, osmosis occurs between the different cultures. A dedication by ‘Diodotus, son of Achaeus, to King Ptolemy Soter’ (OGIS, 19) is bilingual, in Greek and demotic Egyptian, and we shall look at further similar evidence later (p. 117). It suggests some cultural interchange, but this is scanty and its importance must not be exaggerated nor is it safe to use material from one area to make generalizations applying to others. It is noteworthy that the inscription from Antioch-in-Persis mentions the sending of men from Magnesia, but not of women, presumably because they would find women on arrival, Greek or more likely barbarian. Ai Khanum too will certainly have contained a substantial proportion of non-Greeks, and probably their numbers increased with the passing of time. But it seems fairly clear, given the attitudes which led to the setting-up of the Delphic precepts by Clearchus, that in the early-third century at any rate native Bactrians will not have been admitted to the gymnasium and that, faced with a large non-Greek group around them, the usual reaction of Greeks and Macedonians was to close ranks and emphasize the Greek institutions of government, religion and education, in short their Greekness.
III
Greekness expressed itself primarily through the gymnasium, but there were also other institutions which catered for the private and social life of the citizens of hellenistic cities, both new and old. These were especially important in the new cities with their mixed populations and absence of traditions but they were also an integral part of life in the older cities. These associations are known as eranoi, thiasoi, and also by special names, such as Poseidoniastai, linking them with some particular deity worshipped as the patron of the association and the strong feeling of devotion to such bodies by their members comes out clearly from the inscriptional evidence. Here is an example from second-century Rhodes:
In the priesthood of Theophanes, the chief eranistes being Menecrates son of Cibyratas, on the 26th day of Hyacinthius, the following eranistai promised contributions for the rebuilding of the wall and the monuments which fell down in the earthquake: Menecrates son of Cibyratas [undertook] to rebuild the wall and monuments at his own expense. The money coming from the [other] sums promised will be at the society’s disposal. . . [Dion]jydus 10 . . . (here the inscription breaks off) (Syll., 1116).
The ‘walls’ are those of the clubhouse, the ‘monuments’ the graves of past members, for such guilds frequently combined the functions of a friendly society, dining club and burial club. In a city like Rhodes they were an important element in private life and in the new centres of the far east they were a means of building new loyalties in what was at first a rather drab and alien world. What is more, they were far less exclusive and purely ‘hellenic’ than the gymnasia. Though their structure and procedures often seem to imitate those of the city, they were catholic in their membership, and frequently included both Greeks and barbarians, free men and slaves, men and women. They gave opportunities for mixing which were less easy within the framework of the city institutions.
In public life the Greeks and Macedonians formed the ruling class. They were a closed circle to which natives gained access only gradually and in very small numbers – and then usually only by the difficult method of turning themselves culturally into Greeks. The creation of this ruling class was the direct outcome of the decisions taken by the armies and generals of Alexander, who after his death decisively rejected his policy of racial fusion and very soon expelled all Medes and Persians from positions of authority. The setting-up of the monarchies did not alter this attitude. It has been calculated that even in the Seleucid kingdom, which faced the greatest problems of cultural conflict, after two generations there were never more than 2.5 per cent of natives in positions of authority (out of a sample of several hundred names) and most of this 2.5 per cent were officers commanding local units (see p. 125). This was not due to incompetence or reluctance to serve on the part of the easterners, as some have argued, but to the firm determination of the Greeks and Macedonians to enjoy the spoils of victory.
When therefore we speak of the unity and homogeneity of hellenistic culture, it is of this Greco-Macedonian class we are speaking, a minority in every state made up of men from many parts of the Greek world, springing from various social origins which could be conveniently forgotten in the new environment. These immigrants, like Americans today, maintained lively memories of where they or their parents had come from but these origins had little significance, other than in sentiment, compared with the reality of their new homes and new status. The old frictions between city and city, class and class, were ironed out in the solidarity of life as a Greek minority in this new milieu. Their importance sprang from the fact that the hellenistic kings depended upon this Greco-Macedonian minority to provide them with their administration at the higher levels. Their role in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia will be our concern later, when we consider these states in greater detail. But first it is convenient to glance at those features and institutions of the hellenistic world which held the Greeks together in the alien environment of Egypt and across the vast spaces of Asia, and made them more and more indistinguishable from each other as time passed.
IV
Two points should perhaps be noted at the outset. First, the special problems presented by a Greek minority in an alien environment did not arise in continental Greece and Macedonia, in the cities of the Aegean or (any more than they always had) in the cities of western Asia Minor. These areas continued to serve as a reservoir of Greek culture as well as of manpower (so long as the wave of emigration lasted). The Greeks living in the monarchies were still in contact with the world of city-states which had hitherto furnished the background for all Greek civilization. Secondly, though Alexander’s conquests had resulted in a vast extension of hellenism over central Asia, by 303 Seleucus had ceded Gandhara, eastern Arachosia and Gedrosia to Chandragupta (above, p. 54) and subsequently Bactria became independent of the Seleucids. Hence, although Greek culture continued to survive in the eastern provinces and re-established itself in India in the second century, politically the Seleucid empire became relatively more Mediterranean-based and Antioch began to take precedence over Seleuceia-on-the-Tigris as the main Seleucid centre. The Bactrian Greeks and that branch of them who set up a kingdom in India after the fall of the Mauryan empire were increasingly cut off from the mainstream of hellenistic life, especially after the rise of the Parthians in the later second century. It seems likely that in these circumstances and in response to the threats from the marauders of the steppes there was a closer collaboration between Greeks and natives there than elsewhere. By the second century the great centres of Greek culture were located on or close to the Mediterranean – Pergamum, Alexandria, Athens, Antioch. Thus the Mediterranean Sea was itself a factor making for homogeneity in hellenistic culture, since it facilitated movement and intercommunication.
Ease of travel between the various parts of the hellenistic world was both a cause and a result of the common civilization which Greeks now shared; far more than in the past travellers of all kinds were constantly on the move. Perhaps the most obvious groups were the mercenaries. They formed an appreciable part of every hellenistic army and as the prosopography drawn up by Launey (Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, pp. 1111—271) makes clear, they came from all parts of Greece, from Macedonia and the Balkan peninsula generally, from Asia Minor, from Syria, Palestine and Arabia, from central Asia and India, from north Africa and from Italy and the west. Of the Greeks the Cretans were perhaps the most prominent. In an account of the career of his great-grandfather, whom he describes as a military expert, Strabo relates how
because of his experience in military affairs, he was appointed (sc. by Mithridates Euergetes, the king of Pontus) to enlist mercenaries and often visited not only Greece and Thrace, but also the mercenaries of Crete, that is before the Romans were yet in possession of that island, and while the number of mercenary soldiers in the island, from whom the piratical bands were also wont to be recruited, was large (Strabo, x 4, 10).
It is noteworthy that for many men piracy and mercenary service were alternative means of livelihood; we shall look at the conditions which encouraged both of these below (p. 163). But for the moment our concern is with the effects of mercenary service, which kept large numbers of more or less rootless people constantly on the move wherever wars called for their assistance. Sometimes they settled down if they could find a city ready to replenish its reduced numbers with men whom its citizens had got to know. An inscription set up probably in 219 at Dyme in western Achaea introduces a list of fifty-two names with this statement:
The following were created citizens by the city having shared in the fighting during the war and having helped to save the city; each man was selected individually (Syll., 529).
Dyme stood in an exposed position near the border with Elis and the war was evidently that against Aetolia (220–217). It is probable that the names are those of mercenaries, though they could be part of a Macedonian garrison, for one of the names, Drakas, is Macedonian. In either case the enrolment of citizens – which can be paralleled two years later from Larissa in Thessaly (Syll., 543) and may likewise have been instigated by Philip V of Macedonia, who was in close alliance with Achaea at the time – illustrates the greater possibilities now available, not only in new areas, for resettlement. As we shall see, citizenship was more flexible.
Mercenaries were the most noteworthy but by no means the only travellers. In the spring of 169 Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and the authorities in Alexandria decided
to send the Greek envoys then present at Alexandria to Antiochus to negotiate for peace. There were then present two missions from the Achaeans, one consisting of Alcithus of Aegium, son of Xenophon, and Pasiadas, which had come to renew friendly relations and another on the subject of the games held in honour of Antigonus Doson. There was also an embassy from Athens headed by Demaratus about a present (i.e. to give one or to thank Ptolemy for one) and there were two sacred missions, one headed by Callias the pancratiast (i.e. a competitor in a sort of all-in wrestling) on the subject of the Panathenaean games, and another, the manager and spokesman of which was Cleostratus, about the mysteries. Eudemus and Hicesius had come from Miletus and Apollonides and Apollonius from Clazomenae (Polybius, xxviii, 19, 2–5).
Thus we learn, quite by chance, that at this particular moment seven separate embassies or sacred delegations were present in Alexandria. If we multiply this figure to take account of all the Greek states and the important centres of Greece and the hellenistic world generally, we can form some impression of what was involved in the constant diplomatic interchanges which went on without abatement both before and after the Romans arrived on the scene. From the early-second century onwards, however, it was increasingly to Rome or to Roman generals in the field that the major embassies were directed.
Two of the embassies mentioned by Polybius as present in Alexandria in 169 were concerned with festivals. And where these included the holding of theatrical performances, they involved the participation of professional actors, the so-called ‘artistes (technitai) of Dionysus’, who regularly moved on circuit. These technitai were organized in guilds centred in Athens, at the Isthmus of Corinth, and in Teos, a city for some time under the control of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamum, and their function was to provide the specialists needed for the holding of festivals. Officially the guild at Teos was a religious body. As an inscription puts it,
Craton (sc. the recipient of an honorary decree passed by the guild) did everything pertaining to the honour and repute of Dionysus and the Muses and Pythian Apollo and the other gods and the kings and the queens and the brothers of King Eumenes (Durrbach, Choix, 75, II.11–13 = Austin, 123).
The power and influence of the guild were such that it operated almost like an independent state within the small city of Teos and after a stormy history of quarrels and despite an attempt at mediation by Eumenes II recorded on a long, but now fragmentary, inscription set up at Pergamum (Welles, R.C., no. 53), the technitai were forced to flee to Ephesus and later were removed by Attalus III to Myonnesus. They had an evil reputation and a school exercise is recorded on the theme: ‘Why are the technitai of Dionysus mostly scoundrels?’ (Aristotle, Problems, 956b, 11). Stage people leading irregular lives were naturally viewed with suspicion by the steady citizens who only set eyes on them at festival times, for indeed they moved from one festival to another, to the Delphic Pythia and Soteria, to the Museia at Thespiae, the Heracleia at Thebes, the Dionysia at Teos, the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia. Like a city they sent sacred delegates (theoroi) to the mysteries at Samothrace as well as holding their own festival. Whatever their morals, they were clearly a channel of cultural interchange between city and city.
So far we have been considering mainly organized groups, but many individuals also travelled in pursuit of their trade or profession. Traders and their importance will be looked at in more detail in Chapters 9 (#litres_trial_promo) and 11 (#litres_trial_promo) but travellers also included philosophers, like Clearchus of Soli, whose name we have seen recorded on the banks of the Oxus (p. 60), and doctors, many of whom were trained at Cos, with its associations with the great medical teacher Hippocrates and its famous temple of Asclepius, but might respond to requests for help from other friendly states. Thus an inscription dating to the late-third century found in the Asclepieum at Cos records the thanks conveyed by the people of Cnossus in Crete for the loan of a doctor to Gortyn. It provides an interesting picture of conditions in that turbulent island, where at that time, as a result of civil strife (Polybius, iv, 54, 7–9), Gortyn had come under the control of her old rival Cnossus.
The kosmoi and the city of the Cnossians greet the council and people of the Coans. Whereas the people of Gortyn sent an embassy to you about a doctor and you, with a generous show of haste, dispatched the doctor Hermias to them, and civil strife having then broken out in Gortyn and we, in accordance with our alliance having come to share in the battle which took place among the Gortynians in the city, it came about that some of our citizens and others who accompanied our side to the battle were wounded and many became exceedingly ill as a result of their wounds, whereupon Hermias, being a man of worth, on that occasion made every effort on our behalf and saved many of them from great peril and subsequently continued unhesitatingly to fulfil the needs of those who called upon him, and when a further battle took place near Phaestus and many suffered wounds and likewise many were critically ill, he made every effort in tending them and saved them from great peril, and subsequently showed himself zealous to those who called upon him (Syll., 528 = Austin, 124).
Here the somewhat repetitive account breaks off but the context of the battles described can be filled out from the record of this war in Polybius, iv, 54–5. Another example of a city honouring a doctor is the grant by Ilium to Metrodorus of Amphipolis mentioned below ( p. 149). The provision of doctors was a public responsibility in many cities. At Samos, for example, the assembly makes the appointment, and in several towns a special ‘medical tax’ (iatrikon) was levied to pay the doctor’s salary (cf. Syll., 437)
V
The central role of the gymnasium in Greek communities went with a long-standing passion for athletics and athletes of all ages also travelled around the Greek world bringing fame to their cities and themselves if they carried off prizes at international festivals. An example is provided by a late-second-century inscription found on the site of Cedreae, a small city lying under what is now Şehir Ada in the Ceramic Gulf in south-western Turkey, which at that time belonged to Rhodes.
The Confederation (or Guild) of the peoples of the Chersonese salutes Onasiteles the son of Onesistratus, victor in the furlong-race three times in the boys’ category at the Isthmia, in the beardless category at the Nemea and at the Asclepieia in Cos, in the men’s category at the Dorieia at Cnidus, at the Dioscureia and at the Heracleia, in the boys’ and ephebes’ category at the Tlapolemeia, victory in the furlong-race and the two-furlong-race in the boys’ category at the Dorieia in Cnidus, in the ephebes’ category at the Poseidania, in the furlong-race and the race in armour at the Heracleia and in the long race in the men’s category twice, in the torch-race ‘from the first point’ (?) in the men’s category at the great Halieia and twice in the small Halieia, twice at the Dioscureia, twice at the Poseidania, in the furlong-race and race in armour in the men’s category (Syll., 1067).
This record could be reproduced again and again, for victors in athletics contests, especially in the festivals adjudged ‘equal to the Olympic games’ (isolympia), were highly honoured for the prestige which they brought to their native cities.
Among professional men whose careers took them to many cities and even more to the royal courts, where the hope of employment was higher, were engineers, architects and teachers at all levels. Musicians and poets (and poetesses) too might wander from place to place in the expectation of patronage, adapting their verses to suit the place of performance. Thus a Tean envoy, Menecles, seeking concessions for his city in Crete is praised at Cnossus for giving frequent performances, during his stay there, on the cithara (a stringed instrument), singing the songs of Timotheus and Polyidus and other ancient poets ‘in a manner befitting an educated man’ and at Priansus in addition he performed a ‘Cretan cycle’ about the gods and heroes of the island, collected from many poets and historians. The Priansians accorded him special praise for his regard for culture (SGDI
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F. W. Walbank
The vast land empire that Alexander the Great left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. Alexander’s family and generals created a new order of monarchies and city-states which was to control most of the territory between the Adriatic Sea and western India for three hundred years.The term ‘hellenistic’ is commonly used to describe this world in which Greek was the lingua franca.Greeks flocked southwards and eastwards to found new settlements or to enlist in mercenary armies in search of their fortunes, confident in their status as members of a new ruling class. Inevitably there were upsets and clashes as indigenous peoples and cultures were absorbed, often unwillingly, into the encroaching wave of hellenism.With extensive use of quotations from original source material, this far-ranging study examines the political events in the hellenistic world from Alexander’s death until its incorporation in the Roman Empire. It also describes the different social systems and mores of the peoples under Greek rule, important developments in literature, science and technology and the founding of new religious movements. The author has assimilated all pertinent recent scholarship in the filed, and fashioned an absorbing and highly readable account of a vast and complex society whose ideas and achievements form the bedrock of present-day western civilization.
Copyright (#ulink_ecce77f0-1cc6-58b0-b3a9-81dc61233c35)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by Fontana 1981
Copyright © F. W. Walbank 1981, 1986, 1992
F. W. Walbank asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006861041
Ebook Edition © September 2013 ISBN: 9780007550982
Version: 2017-01-19
Dedication (#ulink_d24c1397-73a5-52fc-a40e-9a646644aa6c)
For
Dorothy
Mitzi
Christopher
John
Contents
Cover (#ua2f5cb93-b4b7-5420-929f-0c84354b8f94)
Title Page (#ude8973e7-023d-5d9c-9d06-c33c799ac25b)
Copyright (#ulink_aea5cfa6-a4d9-5175-96fb-6bb90969f35e)
Dedication (#ulink_247004e8-5737-5717-9088-e50dab454f72)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_cc4fdd24-8094-5290-be26-bf249894108f)
Preface (#ulink_745052fd-9acf-5e51-b710-4624352c2d40)
1. Introduction: The Sources (#ulink_6475ef00-0ae4-5ff5-9df9-5ed3cbac3fbe)
2. Alexander the Great (336–323) (#ulink_d017cd0a-a4d5-5162-888f-450717dcfdd9)
3. The Formation of the Kingdoms (323–276) (#ulink_f1dde72b-1502-5f26-8dfe-3bc94ede94b3)
4. The Hellenistic World: A Homogeneous Culture? (#ulink_9f27c211-bced-54c0-a9f1-484a15aa33a2)
5. Macedonia and Greece (#litres_trial_promo)
6. Ptolemaic Egypt (#litres_trial_promo)
7. The Seleucids and the East (#litres_trial_promo)
8. Inter-City Contacts and Federal States (#litres_trial_promo)
9. Social and Economic Trends (#litres_trial_promo)
10. Cultural Developments: Philosophy, Science and Technology (#litres_trial_promo)
11. The Frontiers of the Hellenistic World: Geographical Studies (#litres_trial_promo)
12. Religious Developments (#litres_trial_promo)
13. The Coming of Rome (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Maps and Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)
Maps (#litres_trial_promo)
Plates (#litres_trial_promo)
Date Chart (#litres_trial_promo)
Abbreviations (#litres_trial_promo)
Further Reading and Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index of Sources (#litres_trial_promo)
General Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Fontana History of the Ancient World (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction to the Fontana History of the Ancient World (#ulink_a4a42bb4-c403-58b7-9b52-c4aa7b52a224)
No justification is needed for a new history of the ancient world; modern scholarship and new discoveries have changed our picture in important ways, and it is time for the results to be made available to the general reader. But the Fontana History of the Ancient World attempts not only to present an up-to-date account. In the study of the distant past, the chief difficulties are the comparative lack of evidence and the special problems of interpreting it; this in turn makes it both possible and desirable for the more important evidence to be presented to the reader and discussed, so that he may see for himself the methods used in reconstructing the past, and judge for himself their success.
The series aims, therefore, to give an outline account of each period that it deals with and, at the same time, to present as much as possible of the evidence for that account. Selected documents with discussions of them are integrated into the narrative, and often form the basis of it; when interpretations are controversial the arguments are presented to the reader. In addition, each volume has a general survey of the types of evidence available for the period and ends with detailed suggestions for further reading. The series will, it is hoped, equip the reader to follow up his own interests and enthusiasms, having gained some understanding of the limits within which the historian must work.
Oswyn Murray
Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History,
Balliol College, Oxford
General Editor
Preface (#ulink_a2418f14-7139-5b8d-8aa6-b9b9da9b25a6)
When writing about the hellenistic world it is not easy to strike a balance between a chronological treatment of the political events, and the discussion of special problems – whether those peculiar to particular regions or those relevant to all areas. In this respect the present book is not alone in being something of a compromise. Furthermore its emphasis is largely on the third and early-second centuries, since the main lines were laid down then and the greatest achievements of the hellenistic world belong to that period. I have also borne in mind the fact that the later period, from the middle of the second century onwards, during which the power of Rome became increasingly dominant throughout the eastern Mediterranean, has already been treated from the Roman aspect in another volume in the series.
The manuscript and proofs have been read by Dorothy Crawford, to whose vigilance I owe many corrections; I have also profited from many valuable suggestions which she made, especially in the parts concerned with Ptolemaic Egypt. Oswyn Murray also read the manuscript and suggested several improvements, for which I am grateful. I should also like to express my debt to the published works of Anthony Long and Geoffrey Lloyd, which have been reliable guides in areas where I was less at home. Other debts are to the Coin Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for the photographs of coins and to the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge, for the rest of the photographs; in particular I wish to thank Professor Snodgrass, Mr T. Volk and Mr E. E. Jones. The photograph of the inscription from Ai Khanum is reproduced by permission of Professor A. Dupont-Sommer, given on behalf of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, Paris; I should like to thank him warmly too. Finally I am grateful to Miss Helen Fraser and the staff of Fontana Paperbacks and in particular to Miss Lynn Blowers for their help in getting the book out.
For any readers who wish to look at the original evidence quoted in the text I have provided a list at the end of the book indicating where the various items are to be found, together with further reading arranged under chapters and concentrating on books and articles in English. I have ventured to include a few titles in other languages, mainly French, where there was no satisfactory English equivalent. Unless otherwise indicated all dates are BC.
Cambridge
January 1980
1. Introduction: The Sources (#ulink_f2b903ac-4a38-58f3-91f5-76c153d5c65c)
I
For rather more than a century – from 480 to 360 BC – the city-states of Greece pursued their rivalries and feuds without serious challenge from outside. But from 359 onwards the growing power of Philip II of Macedonia threw a shadow over the Greek peninsula. In 338, at Chaeronea in Boeotia, Philip decisively defeated the armies of Thebes and Athens and through a newly constituted Council at Corinth imposed peace and his own policy on most of the cities. Already Philip had his eyes on Persia, the great continental power beyond the Aegean, whose weakness had been dramatically revealed sixty years earlier, when a body of Greek mercenaries in the pay of an unsuccessful rebel prince and led by the Athenian Xenophon had marched all the way from Mesopotamia to the sea at Trebizond (400/399). Polybius writes later:
It is easy for anyone to see the real causes and origin of the war against Persia. The first was the retreat of the Greeks under Xenophon from the upper satrapies in which, though they traversed the whole of Asia, a hostile country, none of the barbarians ventured to face them (iii, 6, 10).
Encouraged by this and by the campaign of the Spartan king Agesilaus in Asia Minor shortly afterwards, Philip planned to invade the ramshackle Persian dominions of Asia Minor in search of money and new lands – though as a pretext he alleged the wrongs done to Greece during the Persian invasions of the early-fifth century. Philip did not live to carry out his plan. In 336 he was assassinated and the projected invasion of Persia was left as part of the inheritance of his son Alexander.
Alexander reigned for only thirteen years, but during that time he completely changed the face of the Greek world. In the great colonizing age from the eighth to the sixth centuries the shores of Spain, the Adriatic lands, southern Italy and Sicily, northern Africa and the Black Sea shores had been settled with Greek maritime colonies. The new expansion was of a different order. Advancing overland with his army – a mere 50, 000 at the outset – Alexander marched through Asia Minor and Palestine to Egypt, from there to Mesopotamia and eastward through Persia and central Asia to where Samarkand, Balkh and Kabul now lie; thence he penetrated the Punjab and after defeating the Indian king Porus brought his forces partly by land and partly by sea back to Babylon, where he died.
The vast land empire which he left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. It was in fact the old Persian empire under Greek and Macedonian management and it formed the theatre within which the events of Greek history were to be enacted during the next 300 years. The Greeks who during the seventy or so years following Alexander’s death flocked southwards and eastwards to join new settlements or enlist in mercenary armies, hoping to make their fortunes, found themselves no longer insulated within the traditions of a city-state but living in any one of a variety of environments alongside native peoples of every race and nationality. The term ‘hellenistic’ – derived from a Greek word meaning ‘to speak Greek’ – is commonly used to describe this new world in which Greek was in fact the lingua franca. It carries a connotation, not so much of a diluted hellenism, but rather of a hellenism extended to non-Greeks, with the clash of cultures which that inevitably implies. There were of course still city-states in Greece and the Aegean – often powerful like Rhodes – and the relations between the cities of Greece proper and Macedonia, though often strained, were not seriously complicated by cultural differences. But within the kingdoms established by Alexander’s successors in Egypt and Asia, whether we look at the armies or at the bureaucracies, Greeks and Macedonians occupied positions of dominance over Egyptians, Persians, Babylonians and the diverse peoples of Anatolia. The relationships thus established were uneasy and far from static. From the outset there were tensions, and as the flow of Greeks dried up the relative position of Greeks and barbarians changed gradually in many ways. The pattern of this development varied from kingdom to kingdom. Greeks influenced barbarians, and barbarians Greeks. It is indeed in this clash and coming together of cultures that one of the main interests of the period lies.
From the late-third century onwards a new power appears in the hellenistic world, the Roman republic. The taking-over of one after another of the hellenistic kingdoms by Rome has already been recounted and discussed in another volume of this series (Michael Crawford, The Roman Republic) and will not be repeated here, though the cumulative effect of the first half-century of the process is discussed below in Chapter 13. The main emphasis in this book will be rather on the hellenistic kingdoms themselves and on their relations with each other and with the Greek cities in Europe and Asia. We shall be concerned with economic and social trends, with the cultural developments in the new centres set up at Alexandria and Pergamum, with the expanding (and contracting) frontiers of this new world, with its scientific achievements and with the religious experience of its peoples.
II
The evidence for the period is uneven. The career of Alexander himself presents a particular source problem. The most important surviving account of his expedition is that of Arrian, a Greek-speaking Roman senator from Bithynia in Asia Minor, who was active in the second century AD. Arrian opens his Anabasis of Alexander – the title echoes that of Xenophon’s Anabasis – with these words:
Wherever Ptolemy son of Lagus and Aristobulus son of Aristobulus are in agreement in their accounts of Alexander son of Philip, I record their statements as entirely true; where they disagree I have selected the version that seems to me more likely and at the same time more worth relating (Arrian, Anabasis, i, praef. I).
(We may note that ‘more likely’ and ‘more worth relating’ are concepts that do not necessarily coincide.) Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals, was later king of Egypt; his History, probably written many years later in Egypt, drew on Alexander’s official Journal, and Arrian was right to regard it as generally reliable. Aristobulus also accompanied the expedition, probably as a military engineer. Unlike Ptolemy he was a Greek, not a Macedonian, and wrote at least two decades after Alexander’s death. There were others who gave eyewitness accounts of the expedition. One was the official historian, Callisthenes, the nephew of Alexander’s tutor, the famous philosopher Aristotle, but his account broke off early for the sufficient reason that he was executed for treason in 327. Another was the Cretan Nearchus, who sailed the royal fleet back to Susa from the Indus, and composed a description of India and a record (which Arrian uses) of his voyage; he later fought in the wars of Alexander’s successors. Nearchus’ lieutenant Onesicritus, who was the helmsman of Alexander’s own ship on the voyage down the Jhelum (Arrian, Indica, 18, 1), also left an account but the surviving fragments do not make it easy to assess its character and it was not very influential. Finally mention should be made of the Alexandrian Cleitarchus, who though probably not a member of the expedition wrote a history of Alexander in at least twelve books. There is a vast literature on these lost sources. It is likely, but not certain, that Cleitarchus, Ptolemy and Aristobulus published their works in that order. Of the three Cleitarchus became the most popular, especially under the early Roman empire, though a discriminating writer like Arrian criticizes him (without actually naming him) for his many inaccuracies (Arrian, Anabasis, vi, 11, 8). Indirectly Cleitarchus’ history provided one element in the Romance of Alexander, which was developed in successive versions from the second century AD until the middle ages, eventually in more than thirty languages – a striking testimony to the impression made on both his immediate successors and subsequent generations by Alexander’s career and personality.
All these primary accounts are lost and our knowledge of them depends on later writers who used them and so indirectly caused them to be superseded. Apart from Arrian, the more important of these are Diodorus Siculus, a Greek who wrote a world history in the late-first century BC which, for Alexander, followed Aristobulus and Cleitarchus, Quintus Curtius (whose date and sources are both uncertain), Justinus, whose work epitomizes that of a lost Augustan historian from Gaul called Trogus Pompeius and in the second century AD Plutarch of Chaeronea, the popular philosopher and biographer, whose Life of Alexander (twinned with that of Caesar) mentions no less than twenty-four authorities – though how many of these he knew at first hand we cannot be sure. By Plutarch’s time a vast amount of material concerning Alexander was available in the writings of rhetoricians, antiquaries and gossip writers, many of whom are but names today. The value of much of this is slight.
Thus for Alexander’s career there is no lack of literary sources. The problem is to determine where they got their information from and to assess their merits and allow for their prejudices for or against the hero. For the period after Alexander’s death – the hellenistic age proper – the historian faces a very different situation. Until we can begin to use Polybius from 264 onwards, we are still, to be sure, dependent on secondary sources but they differ from those concerned with Alexander in that after Alexander’s death his empire was divided among his. generals, and writers now attached themselves to one court or another. For the history of the first fifty years of the new regimes our best tradition goes back to a great historian, Hieronymus of Cardia, who served first his fellow-citizen Eumenes, Alexander’s secretary, who fought loyally for the king’s legitimate heirs, and then, after Eumenes’ death in 316, Antigonus I, his son Demetrius I and his grandson Antigonus Gonatas (see pp. 50–9). Hieronymus’ lost account of the Wars of the Successors went at least as far as the death of Pyrrhus of Epirus in 272, and was used by Arrian for his work on Events after Alexander and, indirectly by Diodorus (books 18–20), as well as by Plutarch in several Lives (those of Eumenes, Pyrrhus and Demetrius). Unfortunately, from book 21 onwards Diodorus’ work survives only in fragments, of which the most important are from a collection of excerpts made on the orders of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the tenth century.
Other lost writers were Phylarchus, who covered the years 272–219 in twenty-eight books and, according to Polybius (who was prejudiced against him for his support of Cleomenes of Sparta, the enemy of Achaea, ) wrote in a sensational and emotional manner. Polybius has a virulent attack on his account of the Achaean sack of Mantinea in 223:
In his eagerness to arouse the pity and attention of his readers, Phylarchus treats us to a picture of women clinging with their hair dishevelled and their breasts bare, or again of crowds of both sexes together with their children and aged parents weeping and lamenting as they are led away to slavery (ii, 56, 7).
Phylarchus’ methods were not peculiar to him, but represent a type of writing well represented in hellenistic historiography. One noted forerunner was Duris of Samos, a pupil of Theophrastus, who wrote a History in the early part of the third century dealing with Macedonian and Greek events down to 280 (as well as a history of Agathocles of Syracuse). Other third-century writers were Megasthenes, who visited Pataliputra as the ambassador of Antiochus I, and wrote a book about his journey which later writers used, and the Sicilian historian Timaeus from Tauromenium (mod. Taormina), who spent some fifty years in exile in Athens and is savagely criticized by Polybius as an armchair historian who never took the trouble to visit the places he was writing about or to acquire essential political experience. It is probably to Timaeus that we owe an innovation which brought an immeasurable gain to the historian’s craft, the adoption of ‘Olympiad years’, numbered from the institution of the Olympic festival in 776 to provide an era into which events all over the Greek world (and the Roman world later) could be fitted. Thus Polybius himself announces (i, 3, 1) that ‘the date from which I propose to begin is the 140th Olympiad’ (220–216) and after telling his readers (i, 5, 1) that he will begin his introductory books from ‘the first occasion on which the Romans crossed the sea from Italy’ (264) he goes on to explain that this follows on immediately from the close of Timaeus’ history and took place in the 129th Olympiad (264–260). It was a popular practice among Greek historians to begin their history where a predecessor left off.
Polybius himself is the most important source for the years 264 to 146. His special concern was with Rome and his object was to explain ‘by what means and under what kind of constitution the Romans in less than fifty-three years succeeded in subjecting the whole inhabited world to their sole government’ (i, 1, 5). But Polybius was himself an Arcadian from Megalopolis, which was a member of the Achaean Confederation (see pp. 154 ff.) and he describes the growth of that confederation and also many other Greek events not directly relevant to Rome, such as the war between Antiochus III of Syria and Ptolemy IV of Egypt, which ended in the former’s defeat at Raphia in 217. Unfortunately only the first five books survive intact; of the remaining thirty-five we have only fragments. Polybius is a sane and balanced writer (though not entirely free from prejudice). Without his work we should be infinitely poorer. ‘His books’, wrote the German historian Mommsen, ‘are like the sun shining on the field of Roman history; where they open, the mists . . . are lifted and where they end a perhaps even more vexatious twilight descends.’ They are no less valuable to the student of the hellenistic world generally. Poseidonius of Apamea, who lived for many years at Rhodes (whence he visited Rome), and was a philosopher as well as a historian, began his Histories (of which only fragments remain) at the point where Polybius left off. His work covered the Greek east and the western Mediterranean from 146 to the time of Sulla (d. 78) and was later drawn on by the Roman historians Sallust, Caesar and Tacitus and by Plutarch. Poseidonius gave a wealth of information especially about the west, and in some ways he became a spokesman for Roman imperialism.
For a consecutive account of events – something not available for all areas nor all periods of the hellenistic age – the historian must, however, turn to secondary authors, who include (as for Alexander) Diodorus, Arrian and Plutarch, and also Appian, an Alexandrian Greek, who in the second century AD composed a history of Rome tracing separately the histories of various peoples during the time when they were being absorbed into the Roman empire. Like Diodorus, Appian made great use of Polybius, though by no means exclusively nor always at first hand. Among Latin authors we have Justinus’ epitome of the so-called Philippic Histories of the Gaul Trogus Pompeius (the title of this ‘universal’ history indicates his approach, independent of the Roman patriotic tradition) and, more importantly, Livy, who fortunately used Polybius as his primary source for eastern affairs. But Livy’s history, written under Augustus, is itself fragmentary, for only books 1 to 10 and 21 to 45 survive, taking us to 168 and the end of the Third Macedonian War (172–168). Both the geographer Strabo, also writing under Augustus, and Pausanias, who composed his periegesis of Greece in the middle of the second century AD, furnish valuable historical and topographical information, while for Jewish history several books of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (especially the Maccabees) are of relevance, as is Josephus, who wrote his Jewish Antiquities under the Flavian emperors (AD 69–96) at Rome (see further pp. 222 ff.). Later Eusebius, the bishop of Caesarea (c. AD 260–340), composed a chronicle of universal history which is important for chronology. It was translated into Latin and expanded by St Jerome.
This rapid review of fragmentary sources, all of which present many problems of accuracy and reliability, must also include Memnon of Heraclea Pontica, who wrote an important history of his native city, probably in the first century AD, and Polyaenus, whose book on military stratagems was composed a century later. With the help of these, along with other, minor sources, uneven in scope and often quoting incidents out of context, it is possible to write some kind of history of some parts of the three hundred years which constitute the hellenistic age. Fortunately this can be supplemented from other sorts of historical evidence which, it is true, generate problems of their own, but allow us to check the statements of literary historians against more immediate and normally non-literary documents. It is thanks to the regular growth in the amount of such evidence that the history of this period (and of others in antiquity) is constantly being reshaped in detail as the availability of new information leads to the revision of current hypotheses.
III
This new material falls mainly into three categories. The first consists of inscriptions on stone or marble. The classical world was addicted to inscribing information on durable material of this kind. For the period with which we are concerned, including the reign of Alexander, the majority of these inscriptions are in Greek but from Egypt we have also Egyptian inscriptions in both the hieroglyphic and the demotic forms. The famous Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, is a piece of black basalt containing a decree passed by the Council of Priests at Memphis on 27 March 196 and enumerating the good deeds of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and the honours which they proposed to pay to him (OGIS, 90). The Greek version was followed by a translation into Egyptian, which was recorded in hieroglyphic and demotic, and it was this that enabled the French scholar Champollion, from 1820 onwards, to begin the long process of unravelling the Egyptian hieroglyphics. There are also a few Latin inscriptions but most of the documents which concern Roman relations with Greece come from Greece and are in Greek. They have been conveniently assembled in R. S. Sherk, Roman Documents from the Greek East. There are also several cuneiform inscriptions from Babylonia of relevance to the history of the Seleucids.
Inscriptions were set up for a variety of reasons. A few are directly concerned with recording historical facts, such as the so-called Parian marble, of which two fragments survive and which gave an account by an unknown author of
the dates from the beginning, derived from all kinds of records and general histories, starting from Cecrops, the first king of Athens, down to the archonship of [Ast]yanax at Paros and Diognetus at Athens (264/3) (Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 239).
But the majority are preserved for other reasons. Many register official matters such as a treaty or law or agreement to exchange citizenship (sympoliteia) or the findings of an arbitration; here the purpose is to set up a public record, available to all and sundry, of decisions taken publicly by sovereign and other bodies. For the hellenistic period a special group of inscriptions records relations between Greek cities and the kings; often a letter from a king is inscribed in full followed by decisions taken in accordance with its instructions. Some examples of these will be considered below in Chapter 8. Others record decrees passed by city assemblies honouring eminent citizens of the same or some other city for services rendered – financial, political and, especially, for serving on important embassies. There are also building inscriptions recording expenditure, details of loans incurred by cities, requests for grants of immunity from reprisals (see pp. 145 ff.) by temples, cities and other bodies, and records of their concession by kings and cities, details of embassies sent to solicit collaboration in the setting-up of new religious festivals or the up-grading of established ones, or of the manumission of slaves (in which temples like that of Apollo at Delphi were regularly concerned), and a score of other categories, all having one thing in common, someone’s need to keep a permanent record.
The historian requires a special technique and experience to extract the fullest information from this epigraphic material. The exact provenance of many inscriptions is uncertain and they are usually fragmentary or partially illegible. Happily they tend to be couched in somewhat stereotyped language and the study of the vocabulary and phraseology used in various contexts at various dates enables the skilled epigraphist to suggest plausible restorations to fill lacunae on the stone. It is however vitally important to distinguish clearly between what actually stands on the stone and what is someone’s more or less convincing restoration. To make such restorations it is of course essential to be able to date an inscription at least approximately and this can be done by taking note of the letter forms and the context and character of the inscription, including in some cases the names of the persons mentioned in it. But letter forms can persist over several decades and it is by no means always possible to identify an individual mentioned in an inscription with certainty, since many Greek names are quite common and boys were often named after their grandfather. For example, a series of eighteen Megarian decrees which mention a king Demetrius were for a long time habitually referred to Demetrius I Poliorcetes, who captured Megara towards the end of the fourth century, until in 1942 a French scholar argued that the Demetrius in question was Demetrius II, who ruled in Macedonia from 239 to 229. This hypothesis substantially modified our picture of the reign of Demetrius II and his activity in Greece. Quite recently, however, it has again been argued that the attribution to Demetrius I is correct and the history of the two reigns has thus once more been thrown into, the melting-pot.
If inscriptions require special care and knowledge for their effective use, they are nevertheless among the most important sources of new information. Moreover, because of their stereotyped form it is not only possible to use one to restore gaps in another, but inscriptions falling into certain categories – building inscriptions, manumissions, decrees in honour of doctors, funerary inscriptions, records of private associations, etc. – can be used together to furnish information on such diverse subjects as price levels, the status of occupations, the incidence of slavery or the structure of royal bureaucracies and, as we have just seen, the publication of new inscriptions (or the more accurate republication of old ones) often leads to the revision or abandoning of established theories and assumptions.
IV
A second category of document important for the study of this period consists of papyri, mainly from middle Egypt and especially the Fayum, where the dry soil and climate have preserved through the centuries scraps of paper consigned to rubbish tips or reused, for example in stuffing the mummy-cases of sacred ibises, cats or crocodiles. The information contained in these papyri is in many ways different from that furnished by inscriptions. The latter have survived because they were intended to be preserved, the former because they were discarded. Papyri, too, furnish information which is usually more local in its relevance. If we ignore the fragments containing extracts from literary works, which range from the discovery nearly a century ago of Aristotle’s lost Constitution of Athens to that, more recently, of long sections of lost plays by Menander, we are dealing in the main with the waste-paper baskets of minor civil servants – correspondence, petitions and drafts of replies, summonses, depositions, records of judgements, administrative details concerning the billeting of troops, the passing on of edicts and orders, the auctioning of leases, the making of contracts and submission of tenders, the uneasy relations with the temples and public announcements like that offering a reward for information on the whereabouts of a runaway slave. The papyri already discovered include several major finds, such as the archive of Zenon of Caunus, the agent of Apollonius, the dioiketes or head of the civil administration under Ptolemy II, which gives a detailed picture of the working of a great estate, a gift from the king, on which much took place that was not perhaps typical of life generally among the Greeks in Egypt (on this see further p. 106), or the so-called Revenue Laws of Ptolemy II (cf. Select Papyri, 203) introduced by Apollonius, which contain regulations for the control of the royal oil monopoly. We have also several royal ordinances and indulgences (concessions to the populace in the form of amnesties, tax remissions and the like). An example is that of 118, in which
King Ptolemy (Euergetes II) and Queen Cleopatra (II) the sister and Queen Cleopatra (III) the wife proclaim an amnesty to all their subjects for errors, crimes, accusations, condemnations and offences of all kinds up to the 9 Pharmouthi of year 52 except to persons guilty of wilful murder or sacrilege (Select Papyri, 210).
These concessions are then elaborated for another 260 lines. Another papyrus from Tebtunis (P. Tebt., 703) contains instructions sent by the dioiketes to a newly appointed subordinate in the Egyptian countryside (see pp. 106‘7).
The papyri thus throw light on everyday life as well as on official policy and activity. But they have to be used with circumspection. Since there are some 30, 000 Greek papyri available compared with only 2000 demotic, it is clear that the conclusions they lead to are likely to be heavily weighted towards the Greek minority, a situation which can be rectified only as more work is done on the still unpublished documents in Egyptian. Furthermore, the papyrological evidence concerns administration at the local end rather than the centre of government in Alexandria, where soil conditions have prevented the survival of papyri. What we have can only be used safely for the place and time to which it belongs, since we have reason to believe that conditions changed considerably from place to place and from decade to decade. Nevertheless, here, as on the stones, there is a growing mass of evidence invaluable for the study of Ptolemaic Egypt. Elsewhere this sort of material is not usually available, though in the Dead Sea scrolls and other similar documents the caves of the Jordan valley have supplemented the written authorities, usually for a period rather later than that with which we are concerned.
Coins also provide valuable evidence for the historian. In the classical world coins were more often minted to satisfy the needs of government than to facilitate trade (though of course they incidentally did this too). Hoards of coins hidden in a crisis and never recovered afford useful means of dating, and, where dates can be attached to particular issues, it is sometimes possible to correlate minting with general policy. The location of coin finds furnishes information on currents of trade, and the relative absence of Ptolemaic coins abroad illustrates the strict monopoly enforced by the Ptolemies upon those trading with Egypt (see p. 105). The coin-types minted also throw light on policy and attitudes. Thus Alexander’s decision to strike Persian-type darics after Darius’ death clearly indicates his claim to the Persian throne whereas the opening of mints at Sicyon and Corinth had the more practical aim of financing the recruitment of mercenaries. For some time after Alexander’s death his successors issued coins on the same standard in the name of the kings, that is Philip Arrhidaeus and later Alexander IV. But towards the end of the third century they began one by one to issue coins with their own heads on the obverse, thereby signifying their rejection of a united empire and claim to independent kingship. Thus coins provide evidence for political pretensions, military ambitions and of course economic policy but they require a certain expertise on the part of the historian to master the technical problems surrounding dies and mints, weight standards and, especially, dating.
Of less importance, but by no means negligible, are the documents that have turned up in other materials or tongues. As examples I will mention two. In 1954 A. J. Sachs and D. J. Wiseman published a cuneiform tablet from Babylon containing a list of kings reigning in the Seleucid dominions from Alexander the Great to the accession of Arsacid (Parthian) rule in Mesopotamia and providing new or confirming old dates for Seleucid reigns down to about 179 (Iraq (1954), pp. 202–12). Secondly, in 1976 J. D. Ray published an archive of documents on potsherds (ostraca) consisting of drafts of letters written by a certain Hor, an Egyptian from Sebennytus, who in support of his claims in a feud quoted his own prophecy that Antiochus IV, who was invading Egypt, would leave that country by sea before ‘Year 2, Payni, final day’ (30 July 168) and, on a separate ostracon, asserted that Antiochus had fulfilled his prophecy by leaving before that date. Thus from an obscure document in a curious context we obtain a firm date for an important event not only in Seleucid and Ptolemaic relations but in Mediterranean history generally.
The use of this non-literary evidence, which is essential to our growing knowledge of the period, depends upon its availability to the historian. Some of the main publications in which inscriptions, coins and papyri are assembled can be found listed in the bibliography but these quickly become out of date and have to be supplemented from articles in journals and such annual surveys of recent publications as the learned and comprehensive Bulletin épigraphique published annually by J. and L. Robert in the French quarterly Revue des Etudes Grecques.
Evidence of this kind supplements, but does not replace, the work of the ancient writers, even when these are mediocre, for only they can give us a narrative of events and they are usually essential for a chronological framework. But inscriptions and papyri provide a new perspective and often information which prompts the historian to ask a new type of question. They give a glimpse into the working of governments and sometimes enable us to attach names to the bureaucrats themselves. Occasionally they allow families to be traced from generation to generation; they provide evidence for social mobility in a particular community and by their help we can sometimes discover details of land tenure, social hierarchies, and the economic conditions of different groups and classes. Provided we exercise caution and remain aware of the vast gaps in our knowledge, it is still possible to attempt an answer, with far more nuances than in the past, to such questions as where, in this or the other monarchy, power really lay. But, as has already been indicated, answers to these questions are valid only for the time and place to which the evidence refers. The hellenistic world was a dynamic society, one which in some ways never achieved stability but carried on in a state of tension created on the one hand by the fact that the existing balance of power was only accepted faute de mieux and not as a recognized way of organizing international relations, and on the other by a shifting and uneasy relationship between the Greco-Macedonian ruling class and the native populations. Starting from the original impact of Alexander’s career the hellenistic world gradually ran down until eventually, shorn of everything east of the Euphrates, it was incorporated into the Roman empire. When in the fourth century AD the Roman empire itself split into two halves, the hellenistic world still enjoyed a ghostly existence in Byzantium.
2. Alexander the Great (336–323) (#ulink_651215ab-8d89-590a-aab9-44923b0953f9)
I
When Alexander succeeded his father Philip II as king of Macedonia in 336, he found it a country radically changed from what it had been when Philip assumed the crown twenty-three years earlier. Hitherto a backward frontier kingdom on the fringe of Greece proper, Philip had transformed Macedonia into a powerful military state with a tried army and well-chosen frontiers, dominating Greece through the League of Corinth (see p. 13) and all set for the invasion of Persia. The cultural level of the population had also risen. In a speech which Arrian (Anabasis, vii, 9, 2) puts into his mouth, Alexander described Philip’s transformation of the Macedonian people in these terms:
Philip found you vagabonds and poor, most of you clothed in sheepskins, pasturing a few sheep on the mountains and putting up a poor fight in defence of these against the Illyrians, Triballians and Thracians on your borders. He gave you cloaks to wear instead of sheepskins and brought you down out of the mountains into the plains, making you a match in battle for the barbarians who were your neighbours, so that now you trusted in your own courage rather than in strongholds. He turned you into city-dwellers and civilized you by the gift of good laws and customs.
When one has disallowed the rhetoric, this passage fairly describes the conversion of a pastoral people into settled farmers and town-dwellers, wearing woven clothing and enjoying the benefits of an ordered life. The population had also expanded. It has been calculated by G. T. Griffith on the basis of recorded troop figures that Philip’s economic policy brought about an increase of over 25 per cent in the numbers of men available for the army between 334, when Alexander mobilized 27, 000 Macedonians for his Persian expedition and for service in Greece (with some 3000 men already in Asia and perhaps 20, 000 old and young for home defence), and 323, when the figures reached about 50, 000 (including a margin for casualties meanwhile sustained in Asia).
Philip’s army had won him control over Greece, but he could not afford to leave it idle. No sooner had he established peace there than he planned to invade Persia. The idea was not new. Ten years earlier the Athenian publicist Isocrates had addressed a speech to Philip urging this very course.
I am going to advise you to become the leader both of Greek unity and of the expedition against the barbarians; it is advantageous to employ persuasion with Greeks and a useful thing to use force against barbarians. That is more or less the essence of the whole matter (Isocrates, Philip, 10).
Isocrates continues a little later in the same speech:
What opinion do you imagine everyone will form of you if you try to destroy the whole Persian kingdom or, failing that, to annex as much territory as you can, and to seize Asia, as some are urging you, from Cilicia to Sinope, and if as well you found cities in this region and settle in them there those men who are now wandering around through lack of their everyday needs, and doing outrage to whomsoever they fall in with? (Isocrates, ibid., 120).
It is likely that Philip saw Asia as a source of wealth and new lands in which to settle the many exiles and dispossessed people who were at this time a general threat to both Greece and Macedonia, given that there were states with sufficient wealth to hire them as mercenaries. Whether the territorial limits suggested by Isocrates formed part of Philip’s original plan we cannot tell. Isocrates later admitted that his advice merely chimed in with Philip’s own inclinations, and perhaps what matters most is that such ideas were in the air. Philip, however, saw his enterprise in a much more obviously Macedonian context than Isocrates had envisaged. When in 336 Philip was assassinated, an advance force of 10, 000 men was already across the Hellespont. Thus on his accession Alexander found the Persian War half-begun but it had his wholehearted approval, for by it he hoped to win personal glory – and also to strengthen his position vis-à-vis the senior advisers whom Philip had left him (for he was only twenty). His first two years (336–4) were spent securing his northern frontiers in Thrace and Illyria and suppressing a revolt in Greece. Then in spring 334 he crossed over into Asia with a modest force of about 37, 000 men, of whom 5000 were cavalry. There were 12, 600 Greeks (7600 sent by the League and 5000 mercenaries), about 7000 tribal levies from the Balkans, nearly 2000 light-armed and cavalry scouts from Thrace and Paeonia and the remaining 15–16, 000 were Macedonians and Thessalians. Europe he left in the charge of his general Antipater with an army of 12, 000 infantry and 1500 cavalry – about as many Macedonians as he took with him (Diodorus, xviii, 17, 3 and 5). His finances were shaky and on arriving in Asia he planned to live off the country.
Alexander’s army was to prove especially effective because of its balanced combination of arms. A great burden lay on the light-armed Cretan and Macedonian archers, Thracians and Agrianian javelin-men. But the striking force was the cavalry and, should the cavalry-charge leave the issue still undecided, the infantry phalanx, 9000 strong, armed with 15–18 foot spears and shields, and the 3000 hypaspists of the royal battalions would deal the final blow. The army was accompanied by surveyors, engineers, architects, scientists, court officials and historians. From the start Alexander seems to have envisaged an operation with no clear limits.
After a romantic visit to Troy he won his first battle at the river Granicus near the Sea of Marmara, and as a gesture sent 300 suits of armour from the spoils as a dedication to Athena at Athens by ‘Alexander, son of Philip, and the Greeks (except the Spartans) from the barbarians who inhabit Asia’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 16, 7). His intention, underlined by the omission of all reference to the Macedonians, was clearly to emphasize the ‘panhellenic’ aspect of the campaign. At Dium in Macedonia on the other hand he set up brazen statues of twenty-five Macedonians who fell in the first encounter (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 16, 4). The victory gave access to western Asia Minor and by the spring of 333 Alexander was master of the western seaboard, most of Caria, Lycia and Pisidia, and could press ahead through Gordium (where tradition told of his loosing – or cutting – the famous Gordian knot, a feat which could only by performed by the man who was to rule Asia) to Ancyra and thence into Cilicia. In autumn 333 he encountered Darius himself at Issus (near Iskenderun) and by a second great victory laid open the route into Syria. There Tyre held out for seven months, but Alexander did not relax the siege, and meanwhile received peace proposals from Darius, whose family had fallen into his hands at Issus. Darius offered him a ransom of 10, 000 talents for his family, the cession of all lands west of the Euphrates and a marriage alliance (Arrian, Anabasis, ii, 25, 1) but Alexander’s ambitions had now clearly expanded and he rejected the offer. By the winter of 332 all Syria and Palestine was in his hands and he was in Egypt, where he founded a new city, Alexandria, before making a journey through the desert to consult the famous oracle of Amon at Siwah. His strategic object at this time seems to have been to seize the whole sea-coast and so protect his base in Greece and Macedonia from any possible naval attack. For he had already taken a bold step: he had ‘decided to disband his navy both from lack of money at the time and also seeing that his fleet was not capable of an action against the Persian navy’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 20, 1). Perhaps too he mistrusted the Greeks who manned it. In fact, the death of Darius’ admiral Memnon in 333 had deprived the Persian fleet of most of its bite, and on land a Persian counter-attack in Asia Minor in winter 333/2 had been defeated.
In the summer of 331 Alexander once again met Darius’ army, this time at Gaugamela beyond the Tigris, not far from Nineveh. It was the decisive battle of the war and again Alexander was victorious, pursuing the retreating forces for thirty-five miles and then quickly advancing to occupy Babylon. Seizing the royal treasures, which amounted to 50, 000 gold talents, he advanced further into Persia proper, where he took Persepolis and Pasargadae. The burning of Xerxes’ palace at Persepolis was perhaps intended as a symbolic end to the war of revenge, the panhellenic war; such at least is Arrian’s view (Anabasis, iii, 18, 11), though other writers explain the incident, less probably, as arising out of a drunken escapade, inspired by a courtesan. At any rate, ‘on reaching Ecbatana Alexander sent back to the sea the Thessalian cavalry and the rest of the allies, paying each the agreed pay in full and himself making a largess of 2000 talents’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iii, 19, 5). Henceforth Alexander was to be waging a personal war. Placing the treasure under the control of Harpalus and leaving Parmenion, one of Philip’s generals, to control communications, he now pressed on at high speed after Darius. But Darius had been deposed by a usurper, Bessus, and Alexander found him stabbed and dying near Shahrud. Nothing now stood in the way of his claim to be the Great King, and a dedication of arms and bulls’ skulls at Lindus, probably in 330, was accompanied by the record:
King Alexander having defeated Darius in battle and become lord of Asia sacrificed to Lindian Athena in accordance with a prophecy in the priesthood of Theogenes, son of Pistocrates (Timachidas, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 532, c. 38).
The wording shows that Alexander’s new pretensions were now conveyed to the Greeks at home.
Crossing the Elburz mountains the king now advanced into Hyrcania, which lay to the south of the Caspian Sea, and after a short westward diversion towards the region of Amol, he accepted the surrender of Darius’ Greek mercenaries. He then marched east through Aria and Drangiana where at Phradah he found an excuse to eliminate the now irksome Parmenion. Parmenion’s son, Philotas, the commander of the élite Companion cavalry, was here accused of plotting against Alexander’s life and having been found guilty by the Macedonians was executed. At once a secret messenger was dispatched to Media to ensure the assassination of his father:
possibly because. . . Parmenion was already a grave danger, if he survived when his own son had been put to death, being so highly thought of both by Alexander himself and throughout all the army (Arrian, Anabasis, iii, 26, 4).
In the winter of 330/29 Alexander continued from Phradah along the Helmand into the Paropamisadae, where he founded Alexandria-by-the-Caucasus before crossing the Hindu Kush northwards into Bactria in pursuit of Bessus, who fled beyond the Oxus. There Bessus was deposed by the Sogdian leader Spitamenes and was taken prisoner by the Macedonian general Ptolemy; he was flogged, mutilated and in due course executed at Ecbatana. As Great King, Alexander thus in true Persian fashion avenged Darius, his predecessor.
Meanwhile he had crossed the Jaxartes to attack and defeat the Scythians with the aid of catapults and had founded Alexandria Eschate, ‘the farthest’, on the site of modern Leninabad in Tadzhikistan but it took him till autumn 328 to crush the national rising led by Spitamenes. A marriage with Roxane, the daughter of a Sogdian baron, Oxyartes, helped to reconcile his opponents in those outlying areas. His stay thereabouts was marked by incidents within his own camp which indicated a growth in royal absolutism and will be considered below (pp. 38–9).
In summer 327 Alexander recrossed the Hindu Kush and took his forces in two divisions over separate passes into India, and the following spring after some remarkable feats of warfare, including the capture of the almost impregnable pinnacle of Aornus (Pir-Sar), he crossed the Indus at Attock. The ruler of this area near the Jhelum and Chenab, the powerful prince Taxiles, now offered him elephants and troops in return for help against his rival Porus and on the left bank of the Hydaspes (modern Jhelum) Alexander won his last great victory against Porus, who now became his nominal ally. How much of India beyond the Punjab was known to Alexander is uncertain but he would have marched yet further east had not his troops mutinied. Reluctantly he agreed to return. On the Jhelum he built a fleet of 800 to 1000 ships and proceeded downstream to the Indus and so to the Indian Ocean, fighting and massacring as he went. At Patala, at the head of the delta, he built docks and a harbour and explored the two arms of the river. Then at last in October 325 he set off with part of his forces through Gedrosia (mod. Baluchistan) while the fleet under Nearchus sailed along the coast. An officer, Craterus, had already been sent with the baggage and siege train, the elephants and the sick and wounded, via Kandahar and the Helmand valley, whence he was to join Alexander on the river Minab in Carmania. Here eventually Alexander’s forces were reunited after he had suffered appalling losses in Gedrosia.
Both while he was in India and after his return to Mesopotamia Alexander carried out a drastic policy of dismissing and even executing many of his satraps.
Alexander is said to have grown at this time more ready to listen to any accusations, as if they were wholly reliable and to punish severely those who were convicted of slight errors because he felt they might, in the same frame of mind, commit heavier crimes (Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 4, 3).
Whether in fact this campaign is to be regarded as a somewhat severe but justifiable disciplining of errant governors or a reign of terror inflicted by a despot is a matter on which historians disagree but Arrian’s comments are the more telling in that he usually judges the king favourably. The Persian satraps in Paropamisadae, Carmania, Susiana and Persis are all known to have perished and at least three generals had already been brought from Media to Carmania, there convicted of extortion and executed. It was in this context that on his arrival at Susa, Alexander discovered that Harpalus, his treasurer, had fled with 6000 mercenaries and 5000 talents to Athens. He was later arrested, but escaped to Crete, where he was murdered.
Alexander’s stay in Susa was marked by a great feast held to celebrate the conquest of the Persian empire and also to encourage a new policy – that of fusing Macedonians and Persians into a master race. Alexander, his friend Hephaestion, and 80 officers all took Persian wives (almost all of whom were discarded after Alexander’s death). This policy led to several acts which aroused bitter resentment among the Macedonians, for instance the arrival of 30, 000 Asian youths who had been given a Macedonian military training, and the incorporation of orientals from Bactria, Sogdiana and Arachosia into the Companion cavalry. These and other steps designed to iron out the distinctions between conquerors and conquered came to a head at Opis in 324, when all but the royal bodyguard mutinied. Whereupon Alexander – for, says Arrian (Anabasis, vii, 8, 3) ‘he had grown worse-tempered at that time and oriental subservience had made him less disposed than before to the Macedonians’ – had the thirteen ringleaders executed and dismissed the rest. The opposition collapsed, and a vast banquet was held to celebrate the reconciliation. At this ‘Alexander’ prayed for all sorts of blessings and especially for harmony and fellowship in the empire between Macedonians and Persians’ (Arrian, Anabasis vii, 11, 9), indicating very clearly his concept of a joint condominium of the two peoples (though not of others too, as some scholars have thought). The same year Alexander sent two requests to Greece. First a decree was brought by Nicanor of Stagira to Europe and proclaimed at Olympia, requiring the Greek cities to receive back all exiles and their families (except for the Thebans). The second, a sequel to Hephaestion’s death at Ecbatana, was a request that he be honoured as a hero and (perhaps at the same time) that Alexander himself should be accorded divine honours. What these demands implied will be discussed below.
The following spring (323) Alexander received embassies from various parts of the Mediterranean world at Babylon, and busied himself with plans for exploration (which included the Caspian) but in June he suddenly fell ill after a prolonged banquet and drinking bout and on 13 June he died at Babylon, in his thirty-third year, after a reign of twelve years and eight months.
II
Alexander’s career has necessarily been sketched only in outline; it gives rise to many problems which cannot be considered here. It is however of special interest to consider to what extent his actions foreshadow and point forward to institutions and attitudes characteristic of the hellenistic world of which he was in some sense the initiator. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to some such aspects of Alexander’s life.
(a) First, the change in Alexander’s attitude towards Persia and his attempt to transform his army from a primarily Macedonian force, which still exercised the residual powers of the Macedonian people, into a cosmopolitan international force owing loyalty only to himself, in many ways anticipates the military foundation on which the personal monarchies of the hellenistic age rested. By 323 ‘King Alexander’ was the personal ruler of a vast spear-won empire which had little to do with Macedonia. His successors likewise were to carve out kingdoms for themselves with the help of armies bound to them only by personal bonds.
(b) Similarly, there was an increase in Alexander’s autocracy foreshadowing that of the hellenistic kings. In distancing himself from Macedonia and its national traditions Alexander had moreover necessarily assumed an autocratic power. The growth of this can be traced in a series of events which aroused the army’s hostility and often involved the elimination of his opponents. The first such incident occurred in 330 at Phradah, when Philotas’ execution was used as a pretext to have Parmenion assassinated. The next was at Maracanda (Samarkand) in 328, when Alexander murdered Black Cleitus, one of the Companions – the group constituting the king’s intimate advisers – and a leading cavalry officer, after provocation in a drunken brawl. Alexander subsequently reacted with a theatrical display of remorse but was persuaded by the philosopher Anaxarchus that the king stood above the law (Plutarch, Alexander, 52, 4).
In order that he might feel less shame for the murder, the Macedonians decreed that Cleitus had been justly put to death (Curtius, viii, 2, 12).
In the hellenistic monarchies (except Macedonia) the king’s decrees normally had the force of law and the king could do no wrong.
The third incident took place the next year at Bactra (mod. Balkh) and was the result of Alexander’s policy of surrounding himself with Persians as well as Macedonians. The presence of both at court led inevitably to difficulties, since the two peoples had very different traditions concerning the relationship between king and subject. To Macedonians the king was the first among his peers, to Persians he was the master and they were his slaves and the outward sign of this was an act of obeisance ( proskynesis), which a Macedonian or Greek was prepared to perform only to a god. Its exact character is controversial: some believe it to have involved physical prostration, others argue that it consisted merely in the blowing of a kiss from the upright, bowed or prostrate position. Whatever its precise form it was repulsive to Greeks and Macedonians when performed before a man, and when at Bactra in 327 Alexander tried to persuade the Macedonians to follow the Persians in according him this gesture, the Greek Callisthenes opposed him. There are two versions of what happened. According to the first, there was a debate between Anaxarchus and Callisthenes on Alexander’s proposal, in which the latter ‘while irritating Alexander exceedingly, found favour with the Macedonians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 1), and the whole plan was dropped. According to the second, Alexander sent round a loving-cup, which each was to take, offer proskynesis, and finally receive a kiss from the king; Callisthenes omitted the proskynesis and was denied the kiss (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 12, 3–5). Whatever the truth of the details – both versions could be true – the incident led to Callisthenes’ destruction, for he was soon afterwards accused of being privy to a murder-conspiracy by some of the royal pages.
Aristobulus declares that they [sc. the conspirators] said that it was Callisthenes who had urged them to the plot; and Ptolemy agrees. But most authorities do not say so, but rather that through his dislike for Callisthenes . . . Alexander easily believed the worst about him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 14, 1).
Callisthenes was tortured and executed; the sources disagree only on the details. The whole incident smacks of the tyrant’s court.
(c) Alexander’s authoritarianism revealed itself, as that of his successors was also to do, in his relations with the Greeks. The expedition, as planned by Philip, had as its excuse the avenging of the wrongs suffered by the Greeks at the hands of the Persians. At the outset Alexander had been at pains to emphasize the panhellenic aspects of the war (see p. 31 for the panoplies sent to Athens after Granicus) but unfortunately our evidence is not sufficiently clear to allow us to say what status was accorded by Alexander to the ‘liberated’ Greek cities of Asia Minor. According to Arrian
he ordered the oligarchies everywhere to be dissolved, democracies to be set up, each city to receive back its own laws and to cease paying the taxes they had paid to the Persians (Anabasis, i, 18, 2).
But an inscription from Priene (Tod, 185) shows Alexander interfering extensively in the city’s affairs and although the Prieneans are declared ‘free and autonomous’ and released from the payment of ‘contributions’ – the word used, syntaxis, suggests that these were payments made hitherto to Alexander for the prosecution of the war rather than tribute paid to Persia – it is not clear just what ‘free and autonomous’ meant to the king. Some scholars have argued that the Greek cities of Asia Minor became members of the League of Corinth. This seems to have been true of the cities of the Aegean islands for an inscription from Chios, dealing with Alexander’s restoration of exiles there (probably in 332), declares that ‘of those who betrayed the city to the barbarians. . . all still remaining there shall be deported and tried before the Council of the Greeks’ (Tod, 192), which suggests Chian membership of the League of Corinth. But there is no firm evidence to determine whether the same was also true of the cities of Asia Minor. In practice they certainly had to do what Alexander ordered, like Ephesus where he restored the democracy but ‘gave orders to contribute to the temple of Artemis such taxes as they had paid to the Persians’ (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 10).
This, however, also applied to the cities of the League, as the events of 324 clearly show. Faced with a problem of rootless men in Asia – unemployed mercenaries, political exiles, and settlers who (like 3000 from Bactria) had abandoned their new colonies and were on their way back to Greece – Alexander published an edict authorizing their return. According to Diodorus (xviii, 8, 4) he stated in this that ‘we have written to Antipater (who was in charge in Europe) about this, that he shall use compulsion against any cities that are unwilling to take back their exiles’. To ensure the maximum publicity for this decree, which, as an inscription from Mytilene (Tod, 201) shows, applied to Asia and Europe alike, Nicanor, Aristotle’s adopted son, was sent to Olympia to have read out to the Greeks assembled for the games a statement that ‘all exiles were to return to their countries, excepting those guilty of sacrilege and murder’ (Diodorus, xvii, 109, 1). A Samian inscription (Syll., 312) shows that Alexander had already previously made a similar announcement to the army. Though Diodorus says that the decree was welcomed, it certainly caused complications and even chaos over property, confiscated and sold, in every city (as inscriptions make clear) and it can hardly have pleased Antipater. It is a measure of Alexander’s disregard for the rights of the cities that he could take such a step without consulting them. In this, as in so much else, his actions were arbitrary and authoritarian. Traditional Greek rights were disregarded.
(d) Both Alexander and, later on, the hellenistic kings reinforced their autocratic power with claims to divinity. About the same time as he ordered the return of the exiles Alexander published a further demand in Greece, which met with a mixed reception. According to Aelian ( Varia historia, ii, 19), ‘Alexander sent instructions to the Greeks to vote him a god’ and this is borne out by other sources, none of which, however, mentions the exact context in which this request was sent. However, according to the Athenian orator Hypereides (Funeral Speech, 6, 21, delivered 323), the Athenians had been forced
to see sacrifices accorded to men, the statues, altars and temples of the gods disregarded, while those of men were sedulously cared for, and the servants of these men honoured as heroes.
The reference must be to the worship of Alexander and to the heroic honours which he had accorded to his dead friend Hephaestion. In the spring of 323 Alexander was visited at Babylon by embassies from Greece ‘wreathed in the manner of sacred envoys arriving to honour some god’ (Arrian, Anabasis, vii, 23, 2). In view of this evidence and a number of other passages, often ironical like the report of Damis’ motion at Sparta – ‘if Alexander wishes to be a god, let him be a god’ (Plutarch, Moralia, 219E) – it seems likely that the request was sent about the same time as the demand for the restoration of exiles, though there is little to be said for Tarn’s view in Alexander the Great, Vol. II, pp. 370–3, that ‘his divinity was intended by Alexander to give a political sanction to the latter request, which no existing powers authorized him to make’.
The request for divine honours seems more likely to have been a final step in the direction in which Alexander’s thoughts had been moving for some time. His father Philip had been honoured at Eresus on Lesbos by the erection of altars to Zeus Philippios (Tod, 191, 11. 5–6), a statue to him stood in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus (Arrian, Anabasis, i, 17, 11) – though this need not necessarily imply a cult – and at Aegae in Macedonia for ‘because of the greatness of his rule he had counted himself alongside the twelve gods’ (Diodorus, xvi, 95, 1). Recently an inscription has been found which attests the existence of a cult to him at Philippi. As for Alexander himself, he had been recognized as a Pharaoh, and so as a divine being (see p. 217), and early in 331 he had visited the oracle of Amon at Siwah in the Libyan desert, where, Callisthenes reported, ‘the priest told the king that he, Alexander, was the son of Zeus’ (Strabo, xvii, 1, 43), a statement generally interpreted to mean that the priest greeted Alexander as ‘son of Amon’. Shortly afterwards, and quite independently, the oracles at Didyma and Erythrae put out the same story ‘concerning Alexander’s descent from Zeus’ (Strabo, ibid.). To Greeks and Macedonians it was common practice to identify foreign gods with their own and Callisthenes called Amon Zeus, just as Pindar had done in his hymn to Amon, where he addressed him as ‘Amon, lord of Olympus’, and in a Pythian ode (4, 16) where he speaks of Zeus Amon. That Alexander encouraged the connection with Zeus, as his son or (like Philip) identified with him, can be seen from a silver decadrachm issued later to celebrate his victory over Porus, which depicts Alexander on horseback charging Porus on an elephant and on the reverse shows a figure of Zeus, wearing a strange amalgam of dress and wielding a thunderbolt in his right hand, which has also been identified with Alexander.
A further stage in the advance towards deification can be traced in the scheme, already discussed above (pp. 38–9), to introduce proskynesis at Bactra. In order to raise the topic, Anaxarchus, the amenable philosopher from Abdera, asserted that
it would be far more just to consider Alexander as a god than Dionysus and Heracles;. . . there could be no doubt that when Alexander had passed away men would honour him as a god; how much more just was it then that they should so honour him in his lifetime rather than when he was dead, and the honours would be no use to him (Arrian, Anabasis, iv, 10, 6–7).
But however attractive to Alexander, this argument went down badly with the Macedonians, as we have seen, and the plan to introduce proskynesis had to be shelved, largely in the light of Callisthenes’ speech in opposition. The final stage came with the request of 323, as a result of which several Greek cults of Alexander appeared – at Athens, probably at Sparta, and perhaps elsewhere. But Alexander’s death followed soon afterwards and any cults established seem to have been shortlived, at any rate on the Greek mainland. Cults established in Asia Minor, like the festival of the Alexandreia attested in an inscription found on the island of Thasos, seem often to date from his original campaigns of 334/3 and not to be a response to the message of 323. In their case the cult was often accompanied by the setting-up of a new dating era (as in Priene and Miletus), both being a spontaneous expression of gratitude for ‘liberation’. But the Greeks of the mainland needed no liberator and there cults were instituted only in response to pressure and soon disappeared. The difference is noteworthy. It is the Asian tradition which serves to throw light on the character of hellenistic ruler-cult during the next two centuries (see pp. 212 ff).
(e) Finally we must consider Alexander’s cities. Throughout the lands covered by his march he founded Alexandrias, not seventy, as Plutarch (On Alexander’s Fortune, 1, 5, p.328e) alleged, but a substantial number, perhaps about a score in all, mainly east of the Tigris, where hitherto urban centres were rare. Most of these foundations are merely names in lists, official names moreover, which were not always those by which they were later known. They were intended to serve a variety of purposes, some to guard strategic points, passes or fords, others to supervise wider areas; they presupposed an adequate territory to maintain the colonists and, preferably, a local population who could be pressed into agricultural work. Some were later to develop into centres of commerce, while others withered and perished. It seems certain that the bulk of the settlers were Greek mercenaries. This can be deduced from calculations based on recorded troop movements and is confirmed by remarks in our sources. To take the latter first, Diodorus reports that the Greeks whom Alexander had settled in the upper satrapies (especially Bactria)
were sick for Greek training and the Greek way of life and having been relegated to the frontiers of the kingdom they put up with this from fear so long as Alexander was alive, but when he died they revolted (xviii, 7, 1).
They were in fact 23, 000 in number and had come out East to make their fortunes – their fate was to be disarmed by the Macedonians and massacred for plunder. The picture of reluctant settlers is confirmed from a speech which Arrian put into the mouth of the Macedonian Coenus when the troops in the Punjab mutinied rather than march further east. After mentioning the sending home of the Thessalians from Bactria, he continues:
Of the rest of the Greeks some have been settled in the cities which you have founded, and they do not all remain there willingly; others including Macedonians, sharing in your toils and dangers, have in part perished in battle, while some have become invalids from wounds and have been left scattered here and there throughout Asia (Arrian, Anabasis, v, 27, 5).
Firm numbers elude us but Griffith has calculated (The Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World, pp. 20 ff.) that in the course of his expedition Alexander received at least 60, 000 (and more probably 65, 000) fresh mercenaries, and that he left behind him as garrisons or settlers a minimum of 36, 000, which together with the numbers not recorded and casualties from battle or sickness must have reached a total equal to that of the new recruits. Eventually, at Babylon,
having sent home the older of his soldiers to their native land (Diodorus (xvii, 109, 1) puts their numbers at 10, 000) he ordered 13, 000 infantry and 2000 horse to be selected for retention in Asia, thinking that Asia could be held by an army of moderate size, because he had distributed garrisons in many places and had filled the newly founded cities with colonists eager to maintain things as they were (Curtius, x, 2, 8).
The Bactrian revolt shows how far Alexander had miscalculated the temper of these settlers.
Not all, however, broke loose. And though many of the cities (like Bactra) must have incorporated a strong native element, they maintained their Greek organization and later under the Seleucids they were reinforced by the establishment of new settlements. The character of these will be considered below (pp. 130 ff.). Here we may conclude this brief consideration of Alexander’s programme, which foreshadowed the many later foundations of his hellenistic successors, by noting that his first Alexandria, that founded on the Nile in spring 331, and his only settlement west of the Tigris, survived to become one of the most famous centres of the Roman empire and indeed of later times.
3. The Formation of the Kingdoms (323–276) (#ulink_800ebdc8-3f34-5890-a0ae-8d795c1d84a9)
On his death Alexander left an empire stretching from the Adriatic to the Punjab and from Tadzhikistan to Libya. But much of it was loosely held and parts of northern Asia Minor had never come under Macedonian control at all. Whether, had he lived longer, Alexander could have organized and co-ordinated this inchoate area effectively is a moot question. Without him even the survival as a whole seemed unlikely. The history of the next fifty years – from 323 until 276 – is of a struggle between Alexander’s generals and their sons and successors to take what they could for themselves. For a time that could have meant the whole. But the assumption of the royal title by several of the contestants from 306 onwards and the defeat and death of Antigonus at Ipsus in 301 marked two decisive steps in the process of dissolution. This proces can be traced in detail since the period down to 301 is well documented, with Hieronymus’ solid account standing behind our extant sources, especially Diodorus, whose narrative is intact down to that date.
I
Of those who were at Babylon when Alexander died the most important were Perdiccas, the senior cavalry officer and probably, since the death of Alexander’s favourite, Hephaestion, ‘chiliarch’ (in effect vizier), Meleager, the senior phalanx-leader, Ptolemy and Leonnatus (both related to the royal house), Lysimachus, Aristonous and Peucestas (who was satrap of Persis and Susiana). Others who were to play a major part later on were Seleucus, the commander of the hypaspists (a crack guards’ regiment), Eumenes of Cardia, Alexander’s secretary and the only Greek among the leading Macedonians, and Cassander, the son of Antipater. Antipater had been left by Alexander as regent in Macedonia, and Craterus, who had been sent to replace him, had already reached Cilicia. Finally there was Antigonus Monophthalmus, the One-eyed, a man (like Antipater) of the older generation, satrap of Phrygia. The struggle broke out at once and was to last in various forms until c. 270. Because the contestants, apart from Eumenes, were Macedonians, Macedonia was to play a special role in the conflict. It is perhaps not mere chance that it was the last major division of the empire to acquire a stable dynasty.
The twenty years we are now considering fall into two periods. The first, from 323 to 320, represents Perdiccas’ attempt to devise a compromise settlement which could claim legitimacy while leaving power in his hands. It ended in his violent death. The second period is longer; it covers the years from 320 to 301 and is dominated by Antigonus’ efforts to bring the whole empire, or as much of it as possible, under his control. Details are complicated. The scene shifts from Asia to Europe and back again to Asia where at Ipsus in 301 a coalition of his enemies brought about Antigonus’ defeat and death. After 301 the struggle continued with Demetrius Poliorcetes, Antigonus’ son, attempting to revive his father’s empire from a base in Greece and Macedonia but a coalition between Lysimachus and a new contestant, Pyrrhus of Epirus, brought about his fall and he died in captivity. In effect Ipsus had confirmed the existence of separate dynasties in Egypt (Ptolemy), Babylonia and northern Syria (Seleucus) and northern Anatolia and Thrace (Lysimachus). Only the fate of the homeland, Macedonia, remained undecided. Between 288 and 282 Lysimachus made a determined attempt to annex it, first in alliance with Pyrrhus and then alone but in 282 he was defeated by Seleucus at Corupedium, where he fell fighting, and after a period of near anarchy, with Gaulish invasions and rapid dynastic changes, Macedonia too at last obtained a permanent ruler in Demetrius’ son, Antigonus Gonatas.
The main territorial divisions of Alexander’s former empire were now established and were to survive with only minor changes for the next two centuries. In the present chapter we shall look briefly at the course of events which ended in this division of territories and power, and the dissolution of Alexander’s world-empire into a group of rival kingdoms and a de facto (though never properly recognized) balance of power.
Alexander’s death nearly precipitated civil war over the succession between the cavalry and the infantry sections of his army. Perdiccas proposed waiting for the birth of the unborn child of Alexander and Roxane and (if it was a boy) making it king but the phalanx led by Meleager put forward Philip II’s feebleminded bastard Arrhidaeus and thanks to Eumenes a compromise was made, appointing the two jointly. They were in due course recognized as Philip III and Alexander IV, but from the outset both were pawns in a struggle for power. Perdiccas now summoned a council of friends to assign commands. The army agreed
that Antipater should be general in Europe, Craterus ‘protector’ (prostates) of Arrhidaeus’s basileia, Perdiccas chiliarch over the chiliarchy which Hephaestion had commanded (which meant charge over the whole basileia) and Meleager Perdiccas’ subordinate (Arrian, Events after Alexander, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 156, F i, 3).
Craterus’ position in this settlement is far from clear, since basileia can mean either ‘kingdom’ or ‘kingship’ (it has the former meaning in the parenthesis on Perdiccas’ command), and the post of prostates can be interpreted in several ways. Other sources, moreover, have slightly different versions; for example, Q. Curtius (x, 7, 8–9) has Perdiccas and Leonnatus designated guardians of Roxane’s child without any mention of Arrhidaeus. On the whole it seems likely that Perdiccas’ position as ‘chiliarch’ put him above Craterus (who was absent from Babylon) but in any case Perdiccas very soon had Meleager murdered, after which Craterus’ powers seem limited to sharing Macedonia with Antipater. So perhaps his post as prostates was a temporary concession to the phalanx and Meleager.
Perdiccas was now clearly on top – though, as Arrian remarks, ‘everyone was suspicious of him and he of them’ (Events after Alexander, Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, 156, F i, 5). Of the rest Ptolemy received Egypt, and soon afterwards embellished his position there by cunningly sidetracking to that province the cortège containing Alexander’s embalmed body. Antigonus was given all western Asia Minor (including Greater Phrygia, Lycia and Pamphylia), Lysimachus received Thrace (which was separated from Macedonia), Leonnatus Hellespontine Phrygia (but he soon died) and Eumenes was sent to expel a local dynast Ariarathes from Cappadocia and Paphlagonia. Of these men Ptolemy, Antigonus, Eumenes and Lysimachus were to prove the most tenacious over the next decades and to play the greatest part in the conflict. Perdiccas was soon eliminated. While Craterus and Antipater collaborated under the command of the latter to suppress a Greek revolt (the so-called Lamian War ended in a crushing blow to the Greeks and especially Athens), Perdiccas took control of the kings and alienated Antipater by jilting his daughter in order to marry Alexander’s sister Cleopatra. A coalition of Antipater, Craterus, Antigonus, Lysimachus and Ptolemy was formed against him and only his murder in Egypt in 320 averted war. The first stage in the struggle was over and at a meeting of the coalition at Triparadeisus in north Syria (320) Antipater was made guardian of the kings (for Craterus had died operating against Eumenes) and removed the court to Macedonia. ‘Antigonus’, Diodorus tells us (xviii, 40, 1), ‘was declared general of Asia and assembled his forces from winter quarters to defeat Eumenes.’ The tide suggests a division of the empire with Antipater, who was general in Europe and an old man; he had never had much interest in Asia. Already therefore the attempt to maintain the empire in one set of hands had suffered a serious setback. Macedonia, Asia and Egypt were under separate control. Though the dynasties controlling the first two were later to change, the pattern of the hellenistic world was already beginning to emerge.
II
The next twenty years (320–301) are dominated by Antigonus. It was widely believed – Polybius (v, 102, 1) quotes the fact, not very appropriately, in connection with Philip V of whom it was not true – that the house of Antigonus had always aimed at universal dominion. We cannot be quite sure what was in Antigonus’ mind, but the sources certainly insist that he was never prepared to settle for less than the whole empire. The years down to 316 were devoted to hounding down and eliminating Eumenes. In 319 this was within Antigonus’ grasp but when he heard that Antipater had died having appointed one of Philip II’s officers, Polyperchon, as regent, he came to terms with Eumenes and joined Lysimachus, Ptolemy and Antipater’s son Cassander in a new alliance against Polyperchon. The latter, despite a proclamation ‘liberating the cities of Greece and dissolving the oligarchies set up by Antipater’ (Diodorus, xviii, 55, 2), failed to win support in Greece, where his move was seen as a propaganda exercise, and very soon Cassander’s forces were in the Piraeus and Athens under the control of his protégé, the Aristotelian philosopher, Demetrius of Phalerum. Meanwhile in Macedonia Philip III’s wife Eurydice declared for Cassander. When Polyperchon replied by inviting Alexander’s mother Olympias back from Epirus, she engineered the death of Philip III and Eurydice but was in turn tried and executed by the forces of Cassander, who invaded Macedonia. The legitimate house was now represented only by Alexander IV. Over in Asia Antigonus soon resumed the war against Eumenes, who scored some successes in Asia Minor, Phoenicia and Babylonia until in 316/15 he was betrayed by his troops to Antigonus, who had him tried and executed. This victory enabled Antigonus to extend his power into Iran and this made him the avowed enemy of the rest.
In the settlement of Triparadeisus Babylonia had been assigned to Seleucus. In 315 Antigonus, now back from a visit to the east and master of all the lands from Asia Minor to Iran, expelled him and he took refuge with Ptolemy. Largely at his instigation Ptolemy, Cassander and Lysimachus now served an ultimatum on Antigonus, demanding that he surrender most of his gains, restore Babylonia to Seleucus and share Eumenes’ treasure with them (Diodorus, xix, 57, 1). Antigonus can hardly have been expected to comply, nor did he. Instead he continued with his conquests, seizing southern Syria, Bithynia and Caria and he made a prudent alliance with Polyperchon. Moreover at Tyre in 314 he issued a proclamation that precipitated a thirteen years war with Cassander.
Calling together an assembly of his soldiers and those living there, he issued a decree declaring Cassander an enemy unless he destroyed the recently founded cities of Thessalonica and Cassandreia and, releasing from his custody the king (i.e. Alexander IV) and his mother Roxane, handed them over to the Macedonians and in short showed himself obedient to Antigonus, who had been constituted general and had taken over the control of the kingdom. All the Greeks too were to be free, without garrisons and self-governing (eleutherous, aphrouretous, autonomous) (Diodorus, xix, 61, 1–3).
Largely intended as propaganda this proclamation was to have far-reaching repercussions, for its last clause raised an issue which had already been put forward by Polyperchon in 319 as a weapon against Cassander (see p. 50) and was later to re-echo through the politics of the hellenistic age, until eventually the Romans took it up and adapted it to their own ends. We shall be considering it further in Chapter 7. Here we need note only that the significance was immediately evident to Ptolemy who
hearing of the resolution passed by the Macedonians with Antigonus concerning the freedom of the Greeks, himself wrote a similar declaration, being anxious that the Greeks should know that he was no less solicitous for their autonomy than was Antigonus (Diodorus, xix, 62, 1).
For Antigonus, however, it remained a cardinal principle of his Greek policy for the rest of his life and it was probably at this time and in accordance with this programme that he promoted the foundation of the League of Island Cities – the Nesiotes – in the Aegean, our knowledge of which is derived solely from inscriptions. Some scholars have attributed the foundation of this league to the Ptolemies, in 308 or even as late as 287. But a League inscription (IG, xi, 4, 103 6=Durr bach, Choix, 13) records the celebration in Delos in alternate years of festivals entitled Antigoneia and Demetrieia, and it seems likely (a) that these are federal festivals and (b) that the Demetrius and Antigonus whom they commemorate are Antigonus I and Demetrius I. If that is so, though it later fell under the Ptolemies, the League will have originated now as an instrument of Antigonid policy. The separation of Delos from Athens struck a blow at a city now under Cassander’s control.
Reacting to an invasion of Caria by Cassander (313), Antigonus now crossed the Taurus, sent various officers to intrigue in the Peloponnese and himself took action against Lysimachus in Thrace, where he intervened to assist Callatis and other Pontic cities which were in revolt (312). The same year he had an abortive meeting with Cassander on the Hellespont (Diodorus xix, 75, 6). But meanwhile Ptolemy had attacked Demetrius, whom his father had left to defend Palestine, and routed him at Gaza. Seleucus thereupon seized the chance to recover Babylon with forces provided by Ptolemy and Antigonus had to abandon fighting in the north in order to restore the situation in Syria. Both Antigonus and Ptolemy were by now ready for peace and this was agreed in 311 on the basis of the status quo. According to Diodorus (xix, 105, 1),
Cassander, Ptolemy and Lysimachus made peace with Antigonus and subscribed to a treaty, the terms of which were that Cassander should be general of Europe until Alexander, Roxane’s son, should come of age, Lysimachus should be lord of Thrace, and Ptolemy of Egypt and the cities bordering Egypt in Africa and Arabia; Antigonus should be in charge of all Asia and the Greeks should live according to their own laws. But they did not abide by this contract for long, but each one of them put forward plausible excuses for trying to acquire more territory.
The treaty of 311 was a setback to Antigonus’ ambitions but in a letter to the Greek cities, a copy of which was found at Scepsis (mod. Kurşunla Tepe), he represents it as a success and refers to the freedom of the Greeks as his main concern.
What zeal we have shown in these matters will, I think, be evident to you and to all others from the settlement itself. After the arrangements with Cassander and Lysimachus had been completed . . . Ptolemy sent envoys to us asking that a truce be made with him also and that he be included in the same treaty. We saw that it was no small thing to give up part of an ambition for which we had taken no little trouble and incurred much expense, and that too when an agreement had been reached with Cassander and Lysimachus and when the remaining task was easier. Nevertheless, because we thought that after a settlement had been reached with him the matter of Polyperchon might be arranged more quickly as no one would then be in alliance with him, because of our relationship to him [what this was is uncertain] and still more because we saw that you and our other allies were burdened by the war and its expenses, we thought it was well to yield and make the truce with him also. . . Know then that peace is made. We have provided in the treaty that all the Greeks are to swear to aid each other in preserving their freedom and autonomy, thinking that while we lived on all human calculations these would be protected, but that afterwards freedom would remain more certainly secure for all the Greeks if both they and the men in power are bound by oaths (Welles, R. C., no. I, II. 24–61 =SVA, 428= Austin, 31).
In this letter Antigonus not surprisingly makes no reference to Demetrius’ defeat at Gaza. It is of interest in that it provides evidence that Polyperchon was still active in the Peloponnese and also shows that Antigonus, now 71, is beginning to consider what is to happen after his death. More immediately, however, the swearing of oaths would enable him to call on Greek help if in the future he could plausibly allege a breach of the treaty.
By that treaty the unity of the empire had suffered a perhaps fatal blow, for by implication it recognized the existence of four independent powers – not to mention Seleucus and Polyperchon, who were both excluded from it. Shortly afterwards Cassander took the callous but logic step of assassinating Alexander IV and Roxane.
Cassander, Lysimachus and likewise Antigonus were now freed from their fear in regard to the king. For since no one now survived to inherit the kingdom, each one who was exercising rule over peoples or cities began to cherish hopes of sovereignty and to hold the territory under him as if it were a spear-won kingdom (Diodorus, xix, 105, 3–4).
Antigonus regarded the peace as a breathing-space before his next move. The events of the ten years which followed are complicated because, despite the general alignment against Antigonus, his rivals intrigued against each other and even made temporary arrangements with the common enemy. There is some evidence that the period opened with an unsuccessful attempt by Antigonus to recover the eastern satrapies, but that after being defeated by Seleucus he made a treaty with him giving him Iran and leaving him free to fight Chandragupta in India. That struggle ended about 303 with Seleucus ceding at least Gandhara and eastern Arachosia and Gedrosia. ‘Seleucus gave them to Sandracottus (Chandragupta) on terms of intermarriage and receiving in exchange five hundred elephants’ (Strabo, xv, 2, 9). These elephants were to prove a notable addition to hellenistic warfare. Meanwhile Ptolemy seized Cyprus and it was probably now that he contracted an alliance with the powerful, independent maritime city of Rhodes. Control of the Aegean was a bone of contention between Ptolemy and Antigonus, each of whom posed as the guardian of Greek liberty but when Cassander patched up a peace with Polyperchon (the price was the murder of Heracles, an alleged bastard of Alexander whom Polyperchon was using to rally support), Ptolemy and Antigonus drew together in circumstances which remain obscure. The agreement did not last. Faced with the alliance of Cassander and Polyperchon the Greek cities appealed to Ptolemy, who invaded the Peloponnese in 308 but then, having obtained little solid support, soon made peace with Cassander (though his garrisons remained installed at Corinth and other Greek cities). In 307, while Cassander was in Epirus, Demetrius sailed to Athens, expelled Demetrius of Phalerum, and set up a democracy and in 306 Antigonus sent him against Cyprus, where he won a resounding victory over the Ptolemaic governor and then over Ptolemy himself. Cyprus passed into Antigonid hands but a further sequel to this victory was even more significant.
For the first time the multitude saluted Antigonus and Demetrius as kings. Antigonus accordingly was immediately crowned by his friends, and Demetrius received a diadem from his father with a letter in which he was addressed as king. The followers of Ptolemy in Egypt on their part also, when this was reported, gave him the title of king so that they might not appear to be downcast because of their defeat. And in this way their emulation carried the practice among the other successors. For Lysimachus began to wear a diadem, and Seleucus also in his encounters with Greeks; for already before this he had dealt with the barbarians as a king. Cassander, however, although the others addressed him as a king in their letters and addresses, wrote his own letters in the same form as he had done previously (Plutarch, Demetrius, 18, 1–2).
Antigonus’ assumption of kingship was in 306, that of Ptolemy shortly afterwards in 305/4, and that of Seleucus, as we know from cuneiform texts, likewise in 305/4. A cuneiform tablet containing a Babylonian king list of the hellenistic period (see p. 26) adds to our information about this. Lines 6–7 (obv.) read:
Year 7 (Seleucid era), which is [his] first year, Seleucus [ruled as] king. He reigned 25 years. Year 31 (Seleucid era), month 6, Se[leucus] the king was killed in the land [of the] Khani.
This text, besides giving the date of Seleucus’ death (between 25 August and 24 September 281) also makes clear that his first regnal year (305/4) was the seventh year of the Seleucid era, which therefore began in 312/11 (in fact in October 312 in the Greek reckoning and in April 311 in the Babylonian). The document proves that Plutarch’s statement that Seleucus had already previously dealt with barbarians as a king is not literally true nor should his statement about Cassander be taken to imply that he refrained from using the royal title generally, since he is called ‘King Cassander’ on coins, and an inscription from Cassandreia recording what is probably the confirmation of a grant of land begins:
The king of the Macedonians Cassander gives to Perdiccas son of Coenus the land in Sinaia and that at Trapezus which was occupied by his grandfather Polemocrates and his father in the reign of Philip (II) etc. (Syll., 332).
This sudden spate of royal titles marked yet a further step in the break-up of the empire – though just what each king took his title to mean we can only speculate. It is unlikely that each general was staking out a claim to the whole empire – unless this was perhaps Antigonus’ idea. More likely, as the passage from Diodorus quoted on p. 54 suggests, they were exploiting the death of Alexander IV to claim kingship within their own particular territories – though not kingship of those territories. Ptolemy was already king of Egypt to the native population but he never calls himself king of Egypt in any Greek document. And of what kingdom – if any – was Antigonus king? The later career of Demetrius, who was for several years a king without a kingdom, is some indication that these monarchies were felt to be personal, and not closely linked with the lands where the king ruled. They constituted recognition of a claim based on high military achievement by men who through their efforts controlled ‘peoples or cities’. The exception was Macedonia and in the inscription quoted above in which Cassander calls himself ‘king of the Macedonians’, his purpose in doing so is perhaps to assert a unique position not open to any of his rivals (rather than simply to affirm his authority to validate a land-grant within the kingdom of Macedonia, as has been suggested).
Demetrius followed up his victory in Cyprus with the famous attack on Rhodes which brought him his title of Poliorcetes, the Besieger (305). This attack was a further provocation to Ptolemy, the close friend of Rhodes. The siege lasted a year and was celebrated for the siege-engines which Demetrius deployed, though unsuccessfully, in order to reduce the city. It ended in a compromise peace (304), in which the Rhodians gave 100 hostages and agreed to be ‘allies of Antigonus and Demetrius, except in a war against Ptolemy’ (Plutarch, Demetrius, 22, 4). In 304/3 Demetrius seized the Isthmus of Corinth and in 302, in preparation for war on Cassander, he resurrected the Hellenic League of Philip and Alexander ‘thinking that autonomy for the Greeks would bring him great renown’ (Diodorus, xx, 102, 1). An inscription found at Epidaurus (SVA, 446) contains the constitutive act setting up the League. In it provision was made for regular meetings of the Council and for Antigonus and Demetrius as leaders to exercise an even closer control than Philip and Alexander had done over their League of Corinth. The Epidaurus inscription is extremely fragmentary, but the information it contains can be supplemented from a Delphic inscription containing a letter written by Adeimantus of Lampsacus to Demetrius and an Athenian decree honouring Adeimantus (Moretti, i, 9; ii, 72). These inscriptions show that so long as the war with Cassander lasted, Demetrius appointed the presidium of the League personally and also that Adeimantus, known hitherto mainly as a flatterer of the king and friend of philosophers, played an important role as Demetrius’ representative at the council of the League and perhaps in proposing the institution of a festival in honour of the two kings.
The League however was not destined to last long, for in 301 a coalition consisting of Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus (who brought with him his 500 elephants) forced the combined armies of Antigonus and Demetrius (whom his father had summoned from Europe) to battle at Ipsus in Phrygia, and there inflicted a decisive defeat; Antigonus perished and Demetrius fled. In the sharing of spoils Lysimachus took most of Asia Minor as far as Taurus and Ptolemy, who had been campaigning separately in Palestine, took all the area as far north as the river Eleutherus (Nahr al-Kabir) as well as parts of Lycia and Pisidia. Ipsus marked the end of any pretence that there was still a single empire and despite the fact that Lysimachus’ kingdom straddled the straits, Asia and Europe now went different ways.
III
Between 301 and 286 Demetrius tried to restore his fortunes in Greece and for a time held Macedonia (after Cassander’s death) in spite of pressure from Pyrrhus. But from 289 onwards his position deteriorated. He lost his Aegean possessions and Athens to Ptolemy and was expelled from Macedonia by the combined forces of Lysimachus and Pyrrhus. In 285 Seleucus took him prisoner and he died of drink two years later. This episode left the possession of Macedonia still undecided. After the expulsion of Demetrius Lysimachus had first divided it with Pyrrhus and then, in 285, had contrived to annex the whole. But nemesis now overtook him. He was persuaded by his third wife, Arsinoe, to put his son Agathocles to death (to the advantage of Arsinoe’s children). Agathocles’ window Lysandra and her brother Ptolemy Ceraunus – they were half-brother and half-sister to Arsinoe, all three being children of Ptolemy – therefore incited Seleucus to challenge Lysimachus. In 282 Seleucus invaded Asia Minor and early in 281 at Corupedium Lysimachus was defeated and killed. But on crossing into Europe Seleucus, now redundant, was assassinated by his ally Ceraunus, who seized the throne of Macedonia.
Two years later (279), weakened by Lysimachus’ defeat, the country was overrun by an army of Gaulish marauders, part of a large-scale migration. Another group established a kingdom in Thrace, others reached Delphi but were destroyed by the Aetolians, and yet further bands crossed over into Asia Minor and settled in what was henceforth to be known as Galatia. What happened subsequently in Macedonia is obscure. A series of weak reigns with anarchic conditions gave Antigonus Gonatas, Demetrius’ son, who had managed to hold on to the strong-points at Corinth, Chalcis and Demetrias (his father’s foundation in the Pagasean Gulf), the opportunity for which he was looking. In 276, after winning a much publicized victory over the Gauls at Lysimacheia in 277, he established himself as king in Macedonia and Thessaly. Thus the dynasty founded by Antigonus the One-eyed gained possession of the last unpre-empted territory, the homeland of Macedonia.
Lysimacheia confirmed the result of Ipsus. The hellenistic world of territorial states was now in being, with the Antigonids in Macedonia, the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Seleucids in the area covered by Syria, Mesopotamia and Iran. In each monarchy the sons or (in the case of Macedonia) the grandson of Alexander’s successors were on the throne – Antiochus I, Ptolemy II and Antigonus II – and the dynastic principle was firmly established. Politically Alexander’s empire had fragmented but in many ways the new kingdoms had much in common. Before looking at the separate kingdoms, therefore, we shall in the next chapter consider to what extent the hellenistic world constituted a homogeneous whole, and how far the coexistence of Greeks and Macedonians alongside the indigenous populations created problems for both peoples.
4. The Hellenistic World:A Homogeneous Culture? (#ulink_9c32d40c-df95-51c5-8465-9f339736b57b)
I
Towards the middle of the third century the inhabitants of a Greek city lying at the site of Ai Khanum beside the river Oxus (mod. Amu Darya) on the northern frontier of Afghanistan (its name is unknown) erected in a shrine in the middle of the city a pillar inscribed with a list of some 140 moral maxims copied from a similar pillar which stood near the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, over 3000 miles away. An adjoining verse inscription reads:
These wise words of famous men of old are consecrated in holy Pytho. Thence Clearchus took them, copying them with care, to set them shining from afar in the sacred enclosure of Cineas (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422 = Austin, 192).
Cineas – his name suggests that he was probably a Thessalian – will have been the city’s founder to whom the shrine was dedicated, and Clearchus has been identified by Robert as the Aristotelian philosopher, Clearchus of Soli, a man with an interest both in Delphi and in the religion and philosophy of the Indian gymnosophists, the Persian magi and the Jewish priests. If this Clearchus was indeeed he, we have here our first indication that he made a journey to the far east and there found distant Greek communities ready to hear him lecture and, at his prompting, to inscribe an authenticated copy of Delphic wisdom in the shrine of the city’s founder. To set up Delphic maxims, often in a gymnasium, was a common practice. Examples are known from Thera (IG, xii 3, 1020) and Miletopolis in Mysia (Syll., 1268). The list at Ai Khanum is fragmentary and in fact only five maxims now survive, but comparable lists elsewhere enabled the French epigraphist, Louis Robert, to reconstitute the whole collection – a striking illustration of how an inscription, of which the greater part is lost, can occasionally be restored with virtual certainty. An interesting feature of the Ai Khanum inscription is that despite the remoteness of this city the lettering is not at all crude or provincial. It is of the highest quality and in the best tradition of the Greek lapicide’s craft, worthy of the kingdom of Bactria, which also produced some of the finest Greek coins of the hellenistic period.
This inscription was discovered in 1966, and nearby, in the gymnasium of Ai Khanum, was another, containing a dedication by two brothers, ‘Triballus and Strato, sons of Strato, to Hermes and Heracles’ (Robert, CRAI (1968), 422), who were the patron gods of the gymnasium. Subsequent excavation has revealed the full plan of the gymnasium itself, which incidentally contained a sundial of a type known, but not hitherto found. There was also a theatre holding 5000 spectators and, dating from about 150, a large administrative centre of palatial proportions, in which were found storing vessels labelled in Greek, a mosaic 5.7 metres square and, most remarkable of all, from what was evidently its library, imprinted on fine earth formed from decomposed wall-bricks, the traces of a still partially legible text from a now perished piece of papyrus, which was evidently a page in a philosophical work which appears to have been written by a member of the Aristotelian school (of which Clearchus himself was a member). These finds confirm the picture of a city in which, despite its later isolation, Greek traditions continued strong right down to the time of its destruction by the nomads of the steppes in the second half of the second century.
But Ai Khanum was not the first site to furnish epigraphical evidence for a strong hellenic presence in Bactria, for only a few years earlier two Greek inscriptions, one with an Aramaic counterpart, had been found at Kandahar (see Schlumberger, CRAI (1964), 126–40). These contained fragments of the moralizing edicts of the Mauryan king Asoka and they too were elegantly carved and in an excellent Greek, which betrayed an intimate knowledge of the vocabulary of Greek philosophy and considerable skill in adapting it to render the thoughts of a Buddhist convert. Anxious to convey his lessons to those living in what now formed part of his dominions, Asoka used Aramaic, the official language of the Persian empire, and of course Greek. More recently a further Greek inscription has been found in Kandahar and more can be expected.
This use of Greek, in the popular cosmopolitan form called the koine, the ‘common tongue’, is characteristic of the whole vast area covered by Alexander’s conquests. It pays no heed to the later frontiers and serves to bind the whole into a single cultural continuum. Its prevalence is the result not merely of political domination, but also of a great movement of colonization which began under Alexander and continued in full spate until about 250, after which it slackened off. Ai Khanum has provided clear evidence of this, for a study of the traces of habitation in a wide area around this city has shown it to be virtually unpopulated under the Achaemenid kings, but with a dense population in hellenistic times.
II
Under Alexander the agents of colonization were largely mercenaries whom he left behind to hold strategic points. Conditions were rough and lacking in civilized amenity and so (as we saw, p. 44) provoked revolt. But the finds on the Oxus and at Kandahar are not the only evidence that by the mid-third century or even earlier conditions had improved. The growth in the number of colonists had brought with it a deepening of Greek civilization, not least in Bactria, and we can occasionally trace the process. A decree passed by the assembly of Antioch-in-Persis, recognizing the international character of the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, recalls the kinship existing between the two peoples, for when Antiochus I (281–261) was anxious to reinforce the population of Antioch, the Magnesians had responded to his invitation by sending ‘men sufficient in number and outstanding in merit for the purpose’ (OGIS, 233, 1. 18). A generation later the bond was still remembered. As in the great European emigration to the United States in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries many went out in groups but others would have gone individually to try their fortune in new lands. The new cities of the east contained a mixture of Greeks from all parts, a motley throng from every sort of environment and social class, from the main centres of civilization and from the fringe areas.
Once in their new homes these Greeks and Macedonians sank their many differences to become the new master race – for Alexander’s notion of a joint Greco-Persian ruling class never took hold. From the outset these newcomers formed the governing minority in the areas where they settled. One of the great problems of the period is to define and analyse the shifting relations between this minority and the peoples whose lands they shared. It was not always a hostile relationship. Strabo (xi, 14, 12) describes how Cyrsilus of Pharsalus and Medius of Larissa, officers in Alexander’s army, set out to trace a cultural relationship between Armenia and Media and their native Thessaly. Their attitude was clearly open and friendly but what they were hoping to do was not to understand these people in their own environment but to prove that they were really some sort of Greeks. This, as we shall see (p. 228), is precisely what some Greeks tried to do when brought up against the phenomenon of Rome. Occasionally, especially in the early days, osmosis occurs between the different cultures. A dedication by ‘Diodotus, son of Achaeus, to King Ptolemy Soter’ (OGIS, 19) is bilingual, in Greek and demotic Egyptian, and we shall look at further similar evidence later (p. 117). It suggests some cultural interchange, but this is scanty and its importance must not be exaggerated nor is it safe to use material from one area to make generalizations applying to others. It is noteworthy that the inscription from Antioch-in-Persis mentions the sending of men from Magnesia, but not of women, presumably because they would find women on arrival, Greek or more likely barbarian. Ai Khanum too will certainly have contained a substantial proportion of non-Greeks, and probably their numbers increased with the passing of time. But it seems fairly clear, given the attitudes which led to the setting-up of the Delphic precepts by Clearchus, that in the early-third century at any rate native Bactrians will not have been admitted to the gymnasium and that, faced with a large non-Greek group around them, the usual reaction of Greeks and Macedonians was to close ranks and emphasize the Greek institutions of government, religion and education, in short their Greekness.
III
Greekness expressed itself primarily through the gymnasium, but there were also other institutions which catered for the private and social life of the citizens of hellenistic cities, both new and old. These were especially important in the new cities with their mixed populations and absence of traditions but they were also an integral part of life in the older cities. These associations are known as eranoi, thiasoi, and also by special names, such as Poseidoniastai, linking them with some particular deity worshipped as the patron of the association and the strong feeling of devotion to such bodies by their members comes out clearly from the inscriptional evidence. Here is an example from second-century Rhodes:
In the priesthood of Theophanes, the chief eranistes being Menecrates son of Cibyratas, on the 26th day of Hyacinthius, the following eranistai promised contributions for the rebuilding of the wall and the monuments which fell down in the earthquake: Menecrates son of Cibyratas [undertook] to rebuild the wall and monuments at his own expense. The money coming from the [other] sums promised will be at the society’s disposal. . . [Dion]jydus 10 . . . (here the inscription breaks off) (Syll., 1116).
The ‘walls’ are those of the clubhouse, the ‘monuments’ the graves of past members, for such guilds frequently combined the functions of a friendly society, dining club and burial club. In a city like Rhodes they were an important element in private life and in the new centres of the far east they were a means of building new loyalties in what was at first a rather drab and alien world. What is more, they were far less exclusive and purely ‘hellenic’ than the gymnasia. Though their structure and procedures often seem to imitate those of the city, they were catholic in their membership, and frequently included both Greeks and barbarians, free men and slaves, men and women. They gave opportunities for mixing which were less easy within the framework of the city institutions.
In public life the Greeks and Macedonians formed the ruling class. They were a closed circle to which natives gained access only gradually and in very small numbers – and then usually only by the difficult method of turning themselves culturally into Greeks. The creation of this ruling class was the direct outcome of the decisions taken by the armies and generals of Alexander, who after his death decisively rejected his policy of racial fusion and very soon expelled all Medes and Persians from positions of authority. The setting-up of the monarchies did not alter this attitude. It has been calculated that even in the Seleucid kingdom, which faced the greatest problems of cultural conflict, after two generations there were never more than 2.5 per cent of natives in positions of authority (out of a sample of several hundred names) and most of this 2.5 per cent were officers commanding local units (see p. 125). This was not due to incompetence or reluctance to serve on the part of the easterners, as some have argued, but to the firm determination of the Greeks and Macedonians to enjoy the spoils of victory.
When therefore we speak of the unity and homogeneity of hellenistic culture, it is of this Greco-Macedonian class we are speaking, a minority in every state made up of men from many parts of the Greek world, springing from various social origins which could be conveniently forgotten in the new environment. These immigrants, like Americans today, maintained lively memories of where they or their parents had come from but these origins had little significance, other than in sentiment, compared with the reality of their new homes and new status. The old frictions between city and city, class and class, were ironed out in the solidarity of life as a Greek minority in this new milieu. Their importance sprang from the fact that the hellenistic kings depended upon this Greco-Macedonian minority to provide them with their administration at the higher levels. Their role in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Asia will be our concern later, when we consider these states in greater detail. But first it is convenient to glance at those features and institutions of the hellenistic world which held the Greeks together in the alien environment of Egypt and across the vast spaces of Asia, and made them more and more indistinguishable from each other as time passed.
IV
Two points should perhaps be noted at the outset. First, the special problems presented by a Greek minority in an alien environment did not arise in continental Greece and Macedonia, in the cities of the Aegean or (any more than they always had) in the cities of western Asia Minor. These areas continued to serve as a reservoir of Greek culture as well as of manpower (so long as the wave of emigration lasted). The Greeks living in the monarchies were still in contact with the world of city-states which had hitherto furnished the background for all Greek civilization. Secondly, though Alexander’s conquests had resulted in a vast extension of hellenism over central Asia, by 303 Seleucus had ceded Gandhara, eastern Arachosia and Gedrosia to Chandragupta (above, p. 54) and subsequently Bactria became independent of the Seleucids. Hence, although Greek culture continued to survive in the eastern provinces and re-established itself in India in the second century, politically the Seleucid empire became relatively more Mediterranean-based and Antioch began to take precedence over Seleuceia-on-the-Tigris as the main Seleucid centre. The Bactrian Greeks and that branch of them who set up a kingdom in India after the fall of the Mauryan empire were increasingly cut off from the mainstream of hellenistic life, especially after the rise of the Parthians in the later second century. It seems likely that in these circumstances and in response to the threats from the marauders of the steppes there was a closer collaboration between Greeks and natives there than elsewhere. By the second century the great centres of Greek culture were located on or close to the Mediterranean – Pergamum, Alexandria, Athens, Antioch. Thus the Mediterranean Sea was itself a factor making for homogeneity in hellenistic culture, since it facilitated movement and intercommunication.
Ease of travel between the various parts of the hellenistic world was both a cause and a result of the common civilization which Greeks now shared; far more than in the past travellers of all kinds were constantly on the move. Perhaps the most obvious groups were the mercenaries. They formed an appreciable part of every hellenistic army and as the prosopography drawn up by Launey (Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, pp. 1111—271) makes clear, they came from all parts of Greece, from Macedonia and the Balkan peninsula generally, from Asia Minor, from Syria, Palestine and Arabia, from central Asia and India, from north Africa and from Italy and the west. Of the Greeks the Cretans were perhaps the most prominent. In an account of the career of his great-grandfather, whom he describes as a military expert, Strabo relates how
because of his experience in military affairs, he was appointed (sc. by Mithridates Euergetes, the king of Pontus) to enlist mercenaries and often visited not only Greece and Thrace, but also the mercenaries of Crete, that is before the Romans were yet in possession of that island, and while the number of mercenary soldiers in the island, from whom the piratical bands were also wont to be recruited, was large (Strabo, x 4, 10).
It is noteworthy that for many men piracy and mercenary service were alternative means of livelihood; we shall look at the conditions which encouraged both of these below (p. 163). But for the moment our concern is with the effects of mercenary service, which kept large numbers of more or less rootless people constantly on the move wherever wars called for their assistance. Sometimes they settled down if they could find a city ready to replenish its reduced numbers with men whom its citizens had got to know. An inscription set up probably in 219 at Dyme in western Achaea introduces a list of fifty-two names with this statement:
The following were created citizens by the city having shared in the fighting during the war and having helped to save the city; each man was selected individually (Syll., 529).
Dyme stood in an exposed position near the border with Elis and the war was evidently that against Aetolia (220–217). It is probable that the names are those of mercenaries, though they could be part of a Macedonian garrison, for one of the names, Drakas, is Macedonian. In either case the enrolment of citizens – which can be paralleled two years later from Larissa in Thessaly (Syll., 543) and may likewise have been instigated by Philip V of Macedonia, who was in close alliance with Achaea at the time – illustrates the greater possibilities now available, not only in new areas, for resettlement. As we shall see, citizenship was more flexible.
Mercenaries were the most noteworthy but by no means the only travellers. In the spring of 169 Antiochus IV of Syria invaded Egypt and the authorities in Alexandria decided
to send the Greek envoys then present at Alexandria to Antiochus to negotiate for peace. There were then present two missions from the Achaeans, one consisting of Alcithus of Aegium, son of Xenophon, and Pasiadas, which had come to renew friendly relations and another on the subject of the games held in honour of Antigonus Doson. There was also an embassy from Athens headed by Demaratus about a present (i.e. to give one or to thank Ptolemy for one) and there were two sacred missions, one headed by Callias the pancratiast (i.e. a competitor in a sort of all-in wrestling) on the subject of the Panathenaean games, and another, the manager and spokesman of which was Cleostratus, about the mysteries. Eudemus and Hicesius had come from Miletus and Apollonides and Apollonius from Clazomenae (Polybius, xxviii, 19, 2–5).
Thus we learn, quite by chance, that at this particular moment seven separate embassies or sacred delegations were present in Alexandria. If we multiply this figure to take account of all the Greek states and the important centres of Greece and the hellenistic world generally, we can form some impression of what was involved in the constant diplomatic interchanges which went on without abatement both before and after the Romans arrived on the scene. From the early-second century onwards, however, it was increasingly to Rome or to Roman generals in the field that the major embassies were directed.
Two of the embassies mentioned by Polybius as present in Alexandria in 169 were concerned with festivals. And where these included the holding of theatrical performances, they involved the participation of professional actors, the so-called ‘artistes (technitai) of Dionysus’, who regularly moved on circuit. These technitai were organized in guilds centred in Athens, at the Isthmus of Corinth, and in Teos, a city for some time under the control of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamum, and their function was to provide the specialists needed for the holding of festivals. Officially the guild at Teos was a religious body. As an inscription puts it,
Craton (sc. the recipient of an honorary decree passed by the guild) did everything pertaining to the honour and repute of Dionysus and the Muses and Pythian Apollo and the other gods and the kings and the queens and the brothers of King Eumenes (Durrbach, Choix, 75, II.11–13 = Austin, 123).
The power and influence of the guild were such that it operated almost like an independent state within the small city of Teos and after a stormy history of quarrels and despite an attempt at mediation by Eumenes II recorded on a long, but now fragmentary, inscription set up at Pergamum (Welles, R.C., no. 53), the technitai were forced to flee to Ephesus and later were removed by Attalus III to Myonnesus. They had an evil reputation and a school exercise is recorded on the theme: ‘Why are the technitai of Dionysus mostly scoundrels?’ (Aristotle, Problems, 956b, 11). Stage people leading irregular lives were naturally viewed with suspicion by the steady citizens who only set eyes on them at festival times, for indeed they moved from one festival to another, to the Delphic Pythia and Soteria, to the Museia at Thespiae, the Heracleia at Thebes, the Dionysia at Teos, the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia. Like a city they sent sacred delegates (theoroi) to the mysteries at Samothrace as well as holding their own festival. Whatever their morals, they were clearly a channel of cultural interchange between city and city.
So far we have been considering mainly organized groups, but many individuals also travelled in pursuit of their trade or profession. Traders and their importance will be looked at in more detail in Chapters 9 (#litres_trial_promo) and 11 (#litres_trial_promo) but travellers also included philosophers, like Clearchus of Soli, whose name we have seen recorded on the banks of the Oxus (p. 60), and doctors, many of whom were trained at Cos, with its associations with the great medical teacher Hippocrates and its famous temple of Asclepius, but might respond to requests for help from other friendly states. Thus an inscription dating to the late-third century found in the Asclepieum at Cos records the thanks conveyed by the people of Cnossus in Crete for the loan of a doctor to Gortyn. It provides an interesting picture of conditions in that turbulent island, where at that time, as a result of civil strife (Polybius, iv, 54, 7–9), Gortyn had come under the control of her old rival Cnossus.
The kosmoi and the city of the Cnossians greet the council and people of the Coans. Whereas the people of Gortyn sent an embassy to you about a doctor and you, with a generous show of haste, dispatched the doctor Hermias to them, and civil strife having then broken out in Gortyn and we, in accordance with our alliance having come to share in the battle which took place among the Gortynians in the city, it came about that some of our citizens and others who accompanied our side to the battle were wounded and many became exceedingly ill as a result of their wounds, whereupon Hermias, being a man of worth, on that occasion made every effort on our behalf and saved many of them from great peril and subsequently continued unhesitatingly to fulfil the needs of those who called upon him, and when a further battle took place near Phaestus and many suffered wounds and likewise many were critically ill, he made every effort in tending them and saved them from great peril, and subsequently showed himself zealous to those who called upon him (Syll., 528 = Austin, 124).
Here the somewhat repetitive account breaks off but the context of the battles described can be filled out from the record of this war in Polybius, iv, 54–5. Another example of a city honouring a doctor is the grant by Ilium to Metrodorus of Amphipolis mentioned below ( p. 149). The provision of doctors was a public responsibility in many cities. At Samos, for example, the assembly makes the appointment, and in several towns a special ‘medical tax’ (iatrikon) was levied to pay the doctor’s salary (cf. Syll., 437)
V
The central role of the gymnasium in Greek communities went with a long-standing passion for athletics and athletes of all ages also travelled around the Greek world bringing fame to their cities and themselves if they carried off prizes at international festivals. An example is provided by a late-second-century inscription found on the site of Cedreae, a small city lying under what is now Şehir Ada in the Ceramic Gulf in south-western Turkey, which at that time belonged to Rhodes.
The Confederation (or Guild) of the peoples of the Chersonese salutes Onasiteles the son of Onesistratus, victor in the furlong-race three times in the boys’ category at the Isthmia, in the beardless category at the Nemea and at the Asclepieia in Cos, in the men’s category at the Dorieia at Cnidus, at the Dioscureia and at the Heracleia, in the boys’ and ephebes’ category at the Tlapolemeia, victory in the furlong-race and the two-furlong-race in the boys’ category at the Dorieia in Cnidus, in the ephebes’ category at the Poseidania, in the furlong-race and the race in armour at the Heracleia and in the long race in the men’s category twice, in the torch-race ‘from the first point’ (?) in the men’s category at the great Halieia and twice in the small Halieia, twice at the Dioscureia, twice at the Poseidania, in the furlong-race and race in armour in the men’s category (Syll., 1067).
This record could be reproduced again and again, for victors in athletics contests, especially in the festivals adjudged ‘equal to the Olympic games’ (isolympia), were highly honoured for the prestige which they brought to their native cities.
Among professional men whose careers took them to many cities and even more to the royal courts, where the hope of employment was higher, were engineers, architects and teachers at all levels. Musicians and poets (and poetesses) too might wander from place to place in the expectation of patronage, adapting their verses to suit the place of performance. Thus a Tean envoy, Menecles, seeking concessions for his city in Crete is praised at Cnossus for giving frequent performances, during his stay there, on the cithara (a stringed instrument), singing the songs of Timotheus and Polyidus and other ancient poets ‘in a manner befitting an educated man’ and at Priansus in addition he performed a ‘Cretan cycle’ about the gods and heroes of the island, collected from many poets and historians. The Priansians accorded him special praise for his regard for culture (SGDI
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F. Walbank
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Историческая литература
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Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: The vast land empire that Alexander the Great left to his successors was without parallel in Greek history. Alexander’s family and generals created a new order of monarchies and city-states which was to control most of the territory between the Adriatic Sea and western India for three hundred years.The term ‘hellenistic’ is commonly used to describe this world in which Greek was the lingua franca.Greeks flocked southwards and eastwards to found new settlements or to enlist in mercenary armies in search of their fortunes, confident in their status as members of a new ruling class. Inevitably there were upsets and clashes as indigenous peoples and cultures were absorbed, often unwillingly, into the encroaching wave of hellenism.With extensive use of quotations from original source material, this far-ranging study examines the political events in the hellenistic world from Alexander’s death until its incorporation in the Roman Empire. It also describes the different social systems and mores of the peoples under Greek rule, important developments in literature, science and technology and the founding of new religious movements. The author has assimilated all pertinent recent scholarship in the filed, and fashioned an absorbing and highly readable account of a vast and complex society whose ideas and achievements form the bedrock of present-day western civilization.