ELE, CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY
VII PART 1 THE BE LEENIS TIC WORLD
THE CAMBRIDGE ANCIENT HISTORY
SECOND EDITION
VOLUME VII PART I
The Hellenistic World
Edited by
F. W. WALBANK F.s.a.
Emeritus Professor, formerly Professor of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology, University of Liverpool
A. E. ASTIN
Professor of Ancient History, The Queen's University, Belfast
M. W. FREDERIKSEN R. M. OGILVIE
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First published 1928 Second edition 1984 Ninth printing 2006
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication data The Cambridge ancient history Vol. 7 Pt. 1: The Hellenistic world 1. History, Ancient I. Walbank, F. W. 930 d57
ISBN 0 521 23445 X hardback
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CONTENTS
List of maps List of text-figures
Preface
1 Sources for the period by F. W. WaLBANK, Emeritus Professor, formerly Professor of
Ancient History and Classical Archaeology, University of Liverpool
1 Lost writers ut Surviving writers ut Other sources: (a) Inscriptions
(b) Papyri and ostraca (c) Coins (d) Archaeology
2 The succession to Alexander by EDOUARD WILL, Professor of Ancient History, University of Nancy IT
1 From the death of Alexander to Triparadisus (323-321)
ul The period of Antigonus Monophthalmus (321-301) (a) From Triparadisus to the death of Eumenes (321-316)
(b) The first phase of the struggle against Antigonus
(316-311)
page
(c) The second phase of the struggle against Antigonus
(311-301)
3. Monarchies and monarchic ideas by F. W. WALBANK
I
II Ill Iv
v VI VII VIE 1x
The new political pattern
The character of Hellenistic monarchy
The machinery of monarchical government Sources for the concept of the ideal king The Hellenistic picture of the king Monarchy and religion
Ruler-cult
Dynastic cult
Conclusion
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CONTENTS
4 The formation of the Hellenistic kingdoms page 101 by EpOuARD WILL 1 The adventures of Demetrius Poliorcetes (301-286) 1ol
II
From the apogee of Lysimachus to the re-establishment of Antigonus Gonatas (286~276)
5 Ptolemaic Egypt by Sin Eric Turner, formerly Emeritus Professor of Papyrology, University College London
II
III IV
Preliminary note on the papyrus sources
Ptolemy I
Administration, economy and society under Philadelphus and Euergetes
From Euergetes I to Euergetes II
Religion, literature, art
6 Syria and the East by DomENIco Must, Professor of Greek History, University of Rome I (La Sapienza)
I
II Ill IV Vv VI VII
VIII
Organization, the monarchy, the court
Geographical description of the Seleucid kingdom Administrative divisions and personnel
Military and naval aspects
Tax system and economic life
Relations with the Greek cities
Relations with Iran. Retreat from further Asia. Growth of the Parthians. Greeks in Bactria and India
Conclusion
Appendix: The date of the secession of Bactria and Parthia from the Seleucid kingdom
7 Macedonia and Greece by F. W. WALBANK
I
IL TIE IV
Vv VI VII VIII IX
Antigonus Gonatas and Pyrrhus Antigonus and Macedonia
Macedonia and Greece in 272
The rise of Aetolia
The Chremonidean War
The results of the Chremonidean War Aratus of Sicyon and the Achaean League Antigonus, Corinth and Aratus
Agis IV of Sparta
Antigonus’ last years
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118
118 119
133
159 167
175
175 181
184 189
193 204
210
216
219
221
221 224 229 232 236 240 243
246 252 255
CONTENTS
8 Cultural, social and economic features of the Hellenistic
world by J. K. Davies, Rathbone Professor of Ancient History and Classical
Archaeology, University of Liverpool
I
II III Iv
Vv VI VII VIII
Sources and approaches
Demographic problems
The degree of economic interplay: artefacts and institutions Piracy and its ramifications
Change and continuity
Royal policies and regional diversities
The polis transformed and revitalized
The limits of the polis
9 Hellenistic science: its application in peace and war
9a Hellenistic science by G. E. R. Luoyp, Fellow of King's College and Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science, University of Cambridge
Introduction
1 Physics
u1 Mathematics and its applications ur Geography and astronomy 1v Medicine and the life sciences
9h War and siegecraft
by YVON GARLAN, Professor of Ancient History, University of Haute-
Bretagne, Rennes II
9¢ Agriculture
by Dororuy J. THomPSON, Fellow of Girton College, University of
Cambridge
gd Building and townplanning by F. E. WIntrER, Professor of Fine Art, University of Toronto
(a) Hellenistic townplanning (b) Hellenistic building materials and techniques (c) Hellenistic buildings
to Agathocles by K. MEISTER, Professor of Ancient History, Technische Universitat, Berlin
I II Il IV Vv
VI
Agathocles’ rise and seizure of power
Developments in Sicily between 316/15 and 310
The African campaigns (310-307)
Events in Sicily (310-304)
Agathocles’ reign as king (304-289/8). His policies towards Italy in the East. His plan for a new Carthaginian war General assessment
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321 323 330 337 347
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371
371 372 375
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384 390 393 400
405 409
vill
11 The
Minor
CONTENTS
Syrian-Egyptian Wars and the new kingdoms of Asia
by H. HEINEN, Professor of Ancient History, University of Trier
I II Ill IV
VII
Introduction Ptolemy II and the first Syrian Wars (282-246) Ptolemy HI and the Third Syrian War (246-241) The rise of the states of Asia Minor (a) The Celts , (b) Bithynia (c) Pontus (d) Cappadocia (e) Pergamum (f) Rhodes Antiochus IH, Ptolemy IV and the Fourth Syrian War Ptolemaic rule in Coele-Syria The aims of Ptolemaic policy towards the Seleucid empire
12 Macedonia and the Greek leagues
by.F. I I It IV v VI VII
Vill
W. WALBANK
The reign of Demetrius II
Antigonus Doson: the first years
Cleomenes’ revolution
The Carian expedition
The Achaean approach to Macedonia
The Achaean disintegration
Cleomenes’ defeat. The Hellenic League. The death of Antigonus Doson
The Social war
Hellenistic dynasties Genealogical tables Chronological table (323-217 B.C.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abbreviations A General
B Sources
ono
Ancient authors and works on these
Epigraphy
Excavation reports: descriptions of sites
Numismatic publications
Art, monuments, ceramics, jewellery and other objects
C The Diadochi and the establishment of the kingdoms
D_ Greece, Macedonia, the Balkans, Thrace and the Black Sea a. Macedonia, Epirus and Illyria
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4l2 413 420 421 422 425 426 426 426 432 433 440 442
446
446 453 458 459 461 463
467 473
482 484 493
533 519 521 521 523 528 53° 533 535
538 538
CONTENTS
. Greece and the wars with Macedonia Thessaly, Boeotia and central Greece . Athens Achaea and Aetolia Sparta and Messenia . The Aegean, Crete and Cyprus . Thrace and the Black Sea
ro moenog
ix
page 540 54! 54! 542 $43 544 544
The Seleucid kingdom, Asia Minor, the Middle East, the Far East,
the wars of Syria and Egypt
General
Asia Minor
The Celts (Galatians)
Pergamum
Rhodes
Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, the Syrian-Egyptian Wars Iran, Parthia, the Persian Gulf, Bactria, India
sypt . Bibliographies of Egyptologists
Papyri and ostraca
Inscriptions
General
Pre-Ptolemaic Egypt
Religion
Army and navy
. Administration, society, economic structure Law and the administration of justice
Art and literature
- Coins
Chronology
cers re mPa TP mo me aA oe
Agathocles a. Sources i. Literary
ii. Coins
iii. Archaeological material b. General
Social, cultural and economic features Monarchy
Hellenistic science, warfare, agriculture, building
a. Science i. Ancient authors and works on these ii. Modern works
b. Warfare
c. Agriculture
d. Building and townplanning
Addenda
Index
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554 $54 555 562 563 563 564 565 566 $72 $73 573 574
574 574 575 575 575 §77 587 591 591 595 598 599 599
yee
603
Cn Aun AWN
w
~ = O'S OA Am
™
MAPS
The Hellenistic world in the late fourth century The eastern Mediterranean ¢. 275 B.C.
Egypt
Hellenistic Asia
The Greek mainland and the Aegean
South Italy, Sicily and North Africa
The Syrian-Egyptian Wars
Mainland Greece
TEXT-FIGURES
Eccentric motion
Epicyclic motion
The simplest case of the equivalence of eccentric and epicyclic motions
The inequalities of the seasons explained by the eccentric hypothesis Hero’s dioptra
The armillary astrolabe
Plan of the fort of Euryalus
Restoration of Philo’s arsenal, Piraeus
Restoration of the Hieron, Samothrace
Restoration of the Bouleuterion, Miletus
Restoration of the interior of the Bouleuterion, Miletus
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342 342
343 343 344 345 360 374 376 378 379
PREFACE
This volume opens at Babylon in the aftermath of Alexander’s death in 3.23; it closes a little over a hundred years later in 217 with the Peace of Naupactus (between Philip V of Macedonia and his Greek allies and the Aetolian Confederation) and another Peace, in Asia, between Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV, following the latter’s victory at the battle of Raphia. Both dates are significant. The first is a more realistic beginning to the new Hellenistic age than the battle of Ipsus in 301 (which was implied by opening Volume vit at that date in the first edition of this work), while the second is famous as the year which Polybius singled out as the beginning of a process of symploke, that interweaving of affairs throughout the whole civilized world which was (in his view) to culminate in its domination within a little over fifty years by Rome. In the first edition, Volume vu covered not only Hellenistic history from 301 to 217 but also that of Rome from the earliest times down to the end of the First Punic War in 241. The vast amount of new material which has become available since 1928, both for Greece and the Hellenistic East (including the Far East) and for Italy, has made it necessary to divide the volume into two parts, with Roman history reserved for the second of these. Nor is that the only difference. The present volume lays less emphasis on military detail and more on social and economic problems than did its predecessor. But general surveys, whether of particular kingdoms or of the whole area of Hellenistic civilization do not provide a substitute for a chronological narrative of events, for without such a framework a general sketch may well fail to convey the sense of historical development. Accordingly, after a preliminary chapter surveying the sources available for the period by Professor F. W. Walbank, the volume opens with an account of the first twenty years from 323 down to 301 by Professor E. Will — a period dominated by the attempt of Antigonus I to uphold the principle of a single empire (under his control) and his failure to accomplish this in the face of rival generals who, even before they combined to destroy him at Ipsus, had themselves assumed the title of king. From this time onwards until the Roman conquest, monarchy was to be the dominant political
xi
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xii PREFACE
institution throughout the eastern Mediterranean (and to some extent in Sicily) and in Chapter 3 its antecedents, the political machinery which it devised and the ideology which supported it are discussed by Professor Walbank. Already before Ipsus, Prolemy I and Seleucus I had etablished themselves firmly in Egypt and Asia respectively, where they founded dynasties which were to last into the first century; but the possession of Macedonia was still disputed. In Chapter 4 Professor Will carries the history of the struggle between the Diadochi down to the accession of Antigonus Gonatas to the throne of Macedonia in 276; in Chapter 7 Professor Walbank takes the history of Macedonia and Greece down to Gonatas’ death, and discusses the growth of the Achaean and Aetolian Confederations and the character of the Macedonian state in the Hellenistic period. Two chapters, by Sir Eric Turner and Professor D. Musti, describe the Ptolemaic and Seleucid kingdoms respectively, and here no attempt has been made to restrict discussion to the third century: the development of Ptolemaic Egypt is traced down to the second century and beyond — though with particular emphasis on the reigns of Philadelphus and Euergetes J — and the Seleucid kingdom is treated as a single, evolving, political institution with special attention paid to social and economic factors, to the relationship between Greeks and non- Greeks, and to that between central government and theGreek cities. The problem of the secession of Bactria and Parthia and the chronology of these events is treated in an appendix. These separate studies of three of the main political units which went to make up the Hellenistic world are followed by a central chapter in which Professor J. K. Davies describes the main cultural, social and economic feature of the Hellenistic age as a whole, assesses the role of the po/is in this period and examines the factors which worked for and against its continuing importance in the Hellenistic scene.
In a general history such as this it was not feasible to include a full critical account of the art, literature and philosophical speculations of the period. That is not because these activities and achievements do not stand very high indeed in any overall assessment of the Hellenistic age; indeed, relevant material from all these areas is integrated into the discussion throughout the volume. But limitations of space ruled out the kind of detailed treatment which a reader will more naturally seek in more specialized works.! One aspect in which Hellenistic thought proved especially creative has, however, been given special attention in Chapter 9: the role of science and its application in peace and war. Here Professor G. E. R. Lloyd discusses the impressive achievements of the Hellenistic age in physics, geography and astronomy, medicine and the
! See, for example, the Cambridge History of Classical Literature 1: Greece (forthcoming); M. Robertson, A History of Greek Art (2 vols., Cambridge, 1967); A. A. Long 1974: (H 132).
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PREFACE xiil
life sciences, and Professor Y. Garlan progress in the techniques of war and siegecraft, a field in which the application of scientific discoveries produced noteworthy changes in the way war was waged; given the preponderant rdéle of warfare throughout the period, this was something that affected the lives of everybody. In the same chapter, Dr D. J. Thompson describes and assesses the technical level of agriculture in the various parts of the Hellenistic world and the changes introduced in the new environment of the kingdoms; she concludes that they were minimal. Professor F. E. Winter rounds off this chapter with an account of building and townplanning, in which he describes the methods and materials used during the period of three centuries which saw so many cities founded and built, and was outstanding for the originality of its innovations.
After these chapters devoted to particular areas and aspects of the Hellenistic world and life in it, chapters 10 to 12 revert mainly to narrative. In Chapter 10, Professor Meister describes Agathocles’ career in Sicily, leaving subsequent events affecting Greeks and Carthaginians in the West (including Pyrrhus’ Italian and Sicilian adventures) to the more suitable context of Volume vu.z. In a chapter (11) mainly concerned with the Syrian-Egyptian wars which run like a thread through the fabric of Seleucid and Ptolemaic relations during the whole of the third century, Professor H. Heinen also describes the growth of the smaller kingdoms of Asia Minor, the increasingly important rdle of Pergamum and Rhodes, and the invasions of the Celts, whose inroads and intrusive settlements brought panic to the peoples of Greece and Asia Minor a century after they had first terrified the Romans. The fortunes of the cities of the Black Sea have not been included here, since they receive discussion in an earlier volume (v1) and will be mentioned again in relation to Pompey’s campaigns in Volume 1x. Finally, in Chapter 12, Professor Walbank carries the history of Macedonia and Greece proper down to 217 with an account of the reigns of Demetrius II, Antigonus Doson and Philip V as far as the conclusion of the so- called Social War.
A word on the bibliography seems in order. This is arranged in sections dealing with specific topics, which sometimes correspond to individual chapters but more often combine the contents of several chapters. References in the footnotes are to these sections (which are distinguished by capital letters) and within these sections each book or article has assigned to it a number which is quoted in the footnotes. In these, so as to provide a quick indication of the nature of the work referred to, the author’s name and the date of publication are also included in each reference. Thus ‘Tarn 1948, 1.52: (A.58)’ signifies ‘W. W. Tarn, Alexander the Great (Cambridge, 1948), vol 1, p. 52, to be
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XIV PREFACE
found in section a of the bibliography as item 58’. The number of footnotes and the extent of documentation varies somewhat from chapter to chapter, since it has been left largely to each author to treat his subject as he thought best. The text was complete by the middle of 1982; though a few later publications are mentioned, work which appeared after that date could not normally be taken into account and only exceptionally does it figure in the bibliography.
Planned originally in 1977 in conjunction with Volumes vut.2 and vitt, the work has suffered two blows in the successive deaths of two of the three original editors, M. W. Frederiksen and R. M. Ogilvie; in place of the former the Syndics appointed Professor A. E. Astin. It is also with regret that we record the death of one of the contributors, Sir Eric Turner; the proofs of his chapter have been read by Dr Dorothy J. Thompson. Five chapters and one section of Chapter 9 were written in languages other than English. Chapters 2 and 4 have been translated from French by Francis McDonagh, chapter 6 has been translated from Italian by Dinah Livingstone, Chapter 9b from French by Mrs Janet Lloyd and Chapters 10 and 11 from German by John Powell. The index has been compiled by Jenny Morris.
Two volumes of plates are being published to accompany Volumes vir parts 1 and 2 and vit, dealing with the Hellenistic World and Early Rome respectively. The first of these contains material relevant to the present volume and references to the plates in it will be found in several chapters.
From the earliest stages in the planning of this volume and throughout its production the editors, past and present, enjoyed the fullest collaboration and encouragement from the staff of the Cambridge University Press, who have been patient in accepting delays and quick to suggest or approve solutions to such problems as have arisen from time to time. We should like to record our gratitude both for this help and for the readiness with which it was always made available.
F.W.W. A.E.A.
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CHAPTER 1
SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD
F. W. WALBANK
From the hundred years following Alexander’s death the work of no single contemporary historian has survived other than fragmentarily. Yet the period had been fully covered both in universal histories and in specialized works dealing with particular kings, peoples or regions. In the latter category there are forty-six authors known to have written about the Hellenistic period: all are lost. On the causes of this holocaust one can only speculate. Most works had of course been written in the contemporary Greek idiom (the so-called £ozne), which did not appeal to later scholars (and copyists). Then again, many works may never have existed in sufficient numbers of copies to render them safe against the ravages of time; this was especially likely to be true of local historians. But above all the sheer bulk and length of many works alienated the average reader, and the appearance of résumés, abridgements and even lists of contents created the conditions for a kind of literary Gresham’s law to operate, so that the inferior products drove the original out of circulation and hence eventually out of existence.
The disappearance of primary sources is the main problem for the historian of the third century. But there are others. The years from 323 to 217 saw an unparalleled expansion of the Greek world as a result of which Greeks, Macedonians and the peoples of Asia Minor were brought into close contact with the inhabitants of Egypt, Phoenicia, Palestine, Mesopotamia, Iran and central Asia. Everywhere Greeks settled and established a modus vivendi of some kind or other with the original populations. But the voice of the non-Greeks is rarely heard. All our sources are in Greek or are derived from Greek. Manetho the Egyptian priest and Berosus the Babylonian were encouraged to write the earlier history of their peoples down to the time of Alexander’s death in Greek (for Greeks did not normally learn foreign languages); but we possess no Egyptian or Babylonian account of the period of Alexander’s successors (the Diadochi) nor any history of Seleucid Asia written from the point of view of a Persian or a Babylonian, nor of Ptolemaic Egypt from that of a native Egyptian. The Jews, it is true, have left us their own version of the Hasmonean risings of the second century (in the
I
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2 I SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD
Maccabees), but only three chapters of Josephus’ Antiquities (x11.1-3) concern the century from Ptolemy’s occupation of Egypt to the loss of Coele-Syria at Panium in 200. Furthermore, within the Graeco- Macedonian milieu itself all our accounts are written from the point of view of the dominant classes in society. The voices of the natives and those of the poor are equally silent; in many places such as Egypt natives and poor tended to be the same people.
The limitations of the source tradition do not end there. For the period after 300 there is no consecutive account of historical events in the eastern Mediterranean basin (other than the brief résumé in Justinus (see p. 7)) until we come to Polybius’ description of the rise of the Achaean League and of the Cleomenean War in Book 11 of his Histories. Such important events as the Chremonidean War in Greece and the early wars between Egypt and Syria have to be reconstructed from odd scraps of information eked out with inscriptions and papyri.
Of the lost writers of the period’ 323 to 217 five stand out as especially important. There is strong evidence that it is these five who have predominantly stamped their character and their version of events on the surviving tradition; and it is possible to gain some impression of the contents and characteristics of their work from later writers who have drawn on them. In this chapter I shall begin by examining these lost writers. I shall then go on to consider those historians whose works survive, either wholly or in part, and how these relate to the primary sources. That done, I propose to discuss briefly some of the other sorts of information available to the historian.
I. LOST WRITERS
By far the most important of the lost historians is Hieronymus of Cardia (died ¢. 250), whose political and military career, first under Alexander (whose archivist he was), then under Eumenes and, after his death, under Antigonus I, Demetrius I and Antigonus Gonatas, gave him a broad military experience and reinforced his judgement as a historian. His Héstories (their exact title is uncertain) covered the period of Alexander’s successors (cf. Diod. xvuI.42) from 323 probably down to Pyrrhus’ death in 272, and were the chief source of Diodorus xvi1i-xx, which constitutes our only sustained and continuous narrative for the period down to the battle of Ipsus. But Hieronymus is not Diodorus’ only source, nor is it certain whether Diodorus used him directly or through an intermediary (though the former is more likely). Hieron-
1 FGrH 154; cf. Hornblower 1981: (B 21).
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LOST WRITERS 3
ymus’ merits were widely recognized and he was a source? for Plutarch’s Lives of Eaumenes, Demetrius and Pyrrhus, for Nepos’ Life of Eumenes, for Arrian’s account of the successors of Alexander, and for Trogus (in Books xiI-xIv of Justinus’ summary). As far as the abbreviated version in these later writers allows us to judge, his work was serious and intelligent, and he saw the full significance of what was happening as Alexander’s empire fell apart, giving way to the separate kingdoms, the rise of which formed the main theme of his story. Pausanias (1.9.8) accuses him of bias towards Antigonus, whom he served, a charge which can hardly be sustained, though Antigonus does receive considerable attention. Of all the lost primary sources Hieronymus’ Histories undoubtedly constitute the most serious casualty.
Hieronymus directed his work in part against that of Duris of Samos (c. 340—-c. 260),3 a pupil of Theophrastus who for many years was tyrant in his native island of Samos. His Macedonica covered Macedonian affairs from 370/69 probably down to 281/80, the year in which Seleucus I died (shortly after Lysimachus) and Ptolemy II seized Samos and brought Duris’ tyranny to an end. Duris’ work, which was used alongside Hieronymus’ both by Diodorus and by Plutarch in his Lives of Eumenes, Demetrius and Pyrrhus, was hostile in tone towards the Macedonians, but its main purpose was to entertain the reader and it aimed at creating sensational impressions and specialized in lurid episodes and scenes designed to arouse the reader’s emotions. The same characteristics were displayed by Duris’ Life of Agathocles,4 which was based on second-hand sources and concentrated on exposing the tyrant’s wickedness. Diodorus made some use of this biography for his account of affairs in the West. For Italy, Sicily and the western Mediterranean the most important of the lost sources was, however, Timaeus of Tauromenium (c. 350-255),° who spent fifty years in exile at Athens, where he wrote his history of the western Greeks down to the death of Pyrrhus. This work was Diodorus’ main source for his account of Agathocles. Timaeus was painstaking and accurate and he probably devised the system of chronology based on Olympiad years which Polybius later adopted (Polyb. x11.11.1). He lacked a developed critical sense, but Polybius’ virulent polemic against him (especially in Book x11) is exaggerated and unjust.
For the mainland of Greece the most important writer was the
2 Plut. Eam. 11, Diod. xvitt.42z and Nepos, Exum. 5.4-5 give very similar accounts of conditions in the blockaded town of Nora (which Hieronymus visited as Antigonus’ ambassador: Diod. XVIII.50.4). Stratagems of Eumenes and Antigonus recorded in Polyaenus probably also go back to Hieronymus.
3 FGrH 76; cf. Lévéque 1957, 2: (C 46); Kebric 1977, 51-4: (B 23).
4 See ch. 10, p. 384.
5 FGrH 566; cf. Brown 1958: (B 7); Momigliano 1966, 1.22-53: (B 25)-
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4 I SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD
Athenian (or Naucratite) Phylarchus,§ who covered the years between Pyrrhus’ death in 272 and that of Cleomenes III of Sparta in 219, and whose Histories in twenty-eight books thus began where Hieronymus left off. Though he savagely criticizes Phylarchus for emotional writing (rather like Duris) (Polyb. 11.56-63) and was clearly irritated by his partisanship for Cleomenes, Polybius nevertheless used him in Book for his own account of Peloponnesian events down to the death of Antigonus Doson; he was also Plutarch’s source in his Lives of Axis and Cleomenes (Cleom. 5, 28, 30), and was drawn on by Athenaeus and followed (probably) by Trogus Pompeius. Polybius’ main source for Greek events before his main narrative opened in 220 was, however, the thirty books of the Memoirs of his fellow-Achaean, Aratus of Sicyon (271-213), which were designed as an apologia covering his career down to 220, including the controversial volte-face when he called in the Macedonians to destroy Cleomenes. Rough in style and marred by significant omissions, Aratus’ Memoirs were certainly less reliable than Polybius asserts (11.40.4). Nevertheless, where their version can be recovered they provide a salutary corrective to Phylarchus.
There were of course other third-century historians. Demosthenes’ nephew Demochares (¢. 360-275); composed a work in at least twenty- one books, mainly on Athens. Diyllus of Athens wrote a history in twenty-six books ending with the death of Cassander’s son Philip; Proxenus was the author of a flattering biography of Pyrrhus, which drew on his Memoirs; and, for events in the West, there were the Syracusans Antander, who wrote a monograph on his brother, the tyrant Agathocles, and Callias, who wrote twenty-two books on the same subject.’ Both of these were laudatory in tone and their influence on existing works has been slight.
II. SURVIVING WRITERS
The earliest historian of the period to have survived in substantial amounts, and the only one of outstanding merit, is Polybius of Megalopolis (¢. z200—c. 118).9 He pursued a public career as a statesman of the Achaean League down to 168 when, after the defeat of Perseus of Macedonia, he was compelled along with a thousand other Achaeans to
o to Rome, where he was detained until 150. During these eighteen g > j & g
8 FGrH 81; cf. Gabba 1957: (B 13); Africa 1961: (D 118).
7 FGrH 231; cf. Walbank 1933: (D 73).
8 FGrH 75 (Demochares), 73 (Diyllus), 703 (Proxenus), 565 (Antander), 564 (Callias); on Antander see Walbank 1968-9, 482-3: (G 10).
§ Books 1-v survive intact, XVII, XIX, XXVI, XXxvit and XL (index volume) were lost by the tenth century and no genuine fragments survive; the remaining books consist of extracts. See Walbank, 1957, 1967 and 1979 (Commentary): (B 37); 1972: (B 38); 1977: (B 39).
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years he became the friend and teacher of P. Scipio Aemilianus (XxXXI.23—30) and set about the composition of his Histories, originally designed to cover the years 220 to 167 in thirty books, in which he proposed to explain, primarily for Greek readers, “how and thanks to what kind of constitution’ (1.1.5) the Romans had during that period become masters of the whole of the civilized world, the oecumene. Later (probably after Scipio’s death in 129) he added a further ten books going down to 146 and intended, he says (11.4.6), to enable his readers to judge of the character and acceptability of the Roman empire. An important factor in his decision was; however, his desire to celebrate Scipio’s achievements and to recount his own experiences at Carthage, exploring the Atlantic (in a ship provided by Scipio), and as intermediary between the Romans and the defeated Achaeans after the sack of Corinth in 146. For the main part of his Histories (as distinct from the introductory Books 1 and 11) Polybius drew on information derived from the careful questioning of eye-witnesses; but for the period down to 217, which included the rise of the Achaean League (in Book 11) and, after 220, the Social War in Greece and the Fourth Syrian War between Antiochus III and Ptolemy IV (in Books Iv and v), he was obliged to use written sources. Among these, as we have seen, were Aratus and Phylarchus for mainland history. There is in fact some evidence that the account of the rise of Achaea (11.37-70) and the crisis created by the war with Cleomenes was originally a separate work (or the draft for one), which he included in the Histories only at a very late date. Polybius’ description (in Books rv and v) of the revolts against Antiochus III and the Fourth Syrian War goes back to excellent sources, but these cannot be identified. For later events Polybius was widely used by Livy, Diodorus and Dio Cassius; but for the period down to 217 he is our only continuous source.
After Polybius’ death there is a gap of almost a century before we come to another historian directly relevant to the military and political history of this period. We should indeed take some note of Agathar- chides of Cnidus,!° who may have been a former slave who rose to the position of royal tutor at the Ptolemaic court ¢. 116, and composed two histories. One was a work in ten books On Asia, dealing with Alexander’s successors, the other consisted of forty-nine books On Enxrope, relating events in Greece from Alexander’s death perhaps down to the fall of the Macedonian monarchy in 168. Agatharchides also wrote a book On the Erythraean Sea, which can be largely reconstructed from extracts in Photius and passages in Diodorus based on it. This monograph contained interesting information about the Ptolemaic
10 FGrH 86; cf. Peremans 1967: (B 27); Gozzoli 1978: (B 18).
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elephant-hunts, on the gold-mines near the frontier of Egypt and Ethiopia and on similar topics. But neither this work nor the histories, of which little survives, made much impression upon the tradition. Mention should also be made of the Lives of Phocion and Eumenes by Cornelius Nepos, a contemporary of Cicero in the first century B.c.; but they are of small historical value.
The most important source after Polybius is Diodorus of Agyrium™ in Sicily, who wrote his world history, the Bibliotheca Historica, at the time of Caesar and Augustus. Books xvui—xx1 deal with the century down to 217, but the full text goes only to the end of Book xx (the battle of Ipsus), the later books being made up of excerpts from the collection of Constantine Porphyrogenitus (tenth century a.D.), quotations from other authors including Photius, and passages taken from a now lost set of excerpts published in the seventeenth century (the Ec/ogae Hoesch- elianae). Apart from occasional remarks, mainly of a moralizing nature, Diodorus is normally content to reproduce his sources, keeping to one author for a long period (with an occasional cross-reference to a divergent view in a second source). Hence the value of any passage in Diodorus is limited to that of its source (if known). As we have seen, for the period here being considered Diodorus reproduced Hieronymus, Duris and Timaeus, and his text provides our main access to those writers. The influence of Hieronymus is evident from the attention which Diodorus gives to Eumenes, Antigonus I and Cassander among the early kings. Whether Diodorus used these sources directly is not certain, though likely. A theory that Agatharchides was an intermediary has gained some popularity, but cannot be proved — though the use of Agatharchides has been demonstrated in some parts of Diodorus. From Book xxi onward the surviving fragments are taken mainly from the parts dealing with Roman history; here Diodorus’ main sources were Philinus of Acragas, a pro-Carthaginian historian, for the First Punic War and after that Polybius and Posidonius. Diodorus’ chronological scheme marks a retrograde step after Polybius’ use of Olympiad years; he employs a framework based on Roman consul years and Athenian archon years (available only as far as Book xx, where the full text stops); but his dates are often inconsistent and must be treated with caution.
Another historian who used Hieronymus (and, for the West, Timaeus) is Trogus Pompeius,!? a Vocontian Gaul from Vasio, who wrote a universal history in forty-four books entitled Historiae Philip-
1 For bibliography see Will 1967, 11.472-3: (A 67); cf. Biziére 1974: (B 4). On Diodorus’ chronological scheme see L. C. Smith 1961: (c 66): Olympiad years are mentioned occasionally in Books x1x and xx.
12 See Will 1967, 11.493—4: (A 67); for Timagenes as Trogus’ main source see Schwab 1834: (B 33); cf. von Gutschmid 1882: (B 19); also Walbank 1981, 351~6: (B 40).
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picae (a title perhaps derived from Theopompus’ Phi/ippica, and certainly indicating a non-Roman slant to the work). Of this there survive only the prologi (list of contents) and an epitome made by M. Junianus Justinus, who wrote at some date before or during the lifetime of St Augustine, who mentioned him. The books of Trogus relevant to the period 323-217 are xIli—xvit and xxtI—xxIx (Books xviI-xx1 being devoted to the Roman war against Pyrrhus, the early history of Carthage and events in Sicily down to Agathocles’ rise to power). Whether Trogus used his sources direct or drew on some sort of compilation has been much debated. His account of the Diadochi clearly goes back directly or indirectly to Hieronymus; but who lies behind his history of the later decades of the century is obscure. One view makes Trogus’ main source the History of Kings by the Alexandrian Timagenes, who came to Rome in the mid first century, quarrelled with Augustus and became an associate of Asinius Pollio. This hypothesis, which has won some support, encounters serious obstacles, not least Timagenes’ attested hostility to Rome, which is not evident in Trogus. But whatever his source or sources and despite the garbled character in which his work has reached us in Justinus’ abridgement, Trogus is important as the only authority for many otherwise unknown events.
The importance of Plutarch (¢. A.D. 50—¢. 120)!8 as a source is not easily over-valued. This philosopher and polymath, who passed his life moving mainly between his home city of Chaeronea in Boeotia and the sacred shrine of Delphi, where he held a priesthood, was no genius but he was immensely learned, and he had an eye for what was significant. His Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans were intended to exemplify virtue and stigmatize vice in the characters portrayed, and to assist in the promotion of partnership between the two races in the running of a common empire. The Lives are not history but they are full of the stuff of history, and where they are available they bring life and personality to all the main actors upon the stage of history. The characters of the Diadochi as we believe we know them — of Antigonus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, Perdiccas, Eumenes and Demetrius Poliorcetes — are largely transmit- ted, perhaps in part created, by Plutarch. His Lives draw on a large number of sources, not always identifiable. Those of Phocion, Eumenes, Demetrius and Pyrrhus are relevant to the period of the Diadochi. As we saw, they make great use of Hieronymus and Duris. For the second half of the century those of Agis and Cleomenes were based mainly on Phylarchus, who was sympathetic to the revolutionary kings, while the Arratus draws largely on its hero’s own Memoirs. The Philopoemen, only marginally relevant for this period, was derived mainly from Polybius,
13 Cf. Russell 1973: (B 31); on the Philopoemen see Walbank 1979, 111.780-1 (B 37).
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but whether from the Histories (additions in that case being due to elaboration by Plutarch himself) or from the historian’s independent biography of his predecessor, is uncertain.
Arrian (L. Flavius Arrianus) (¢. a.p. 89—after 146),!4a Bithynian from Nicomedia, was like Plutarch interested in both philosophy and history; but, unlike Plutarch, he followed an active career in the imperial service, holding a consulship, provincial governorship and military commands, thus exemplifying the partnership which Plutarch sought to promote from the seclusion of his study. Eventually he retired to Athens, where he held the eponymous archonship in 145/6. Arrian’s most important historical work was his Anabasis of Alexander, but the one which concerns the period under consideration, and that only for its first few years, is his Events after Alexander. This history, in ten books, has survived only as a summary in Photius, reinforced by two tenth-century palimpsests containing part of Book vir and an Oxyrhynchus papyrus (PST x11.1284) describing part of a battle of 320 between Eumenes and Neoptolemus. A comparison with Diodorus renders it virtually certain that for this work, which covered only the brief years from Alexander’s death to Antipater’s crossing into Europe in 320 (following the agreement at Triparadisus), Arrian used Hieronymus, though he probably supplemented him from some other unidentified source.
Appian of Alexandria (late first century a.p.—before A.D. 165), roughly Arrian’s contemporary, composed a history of the Roman empire on a novel plan, describing in twenty-four books the history of each separate people down to the time it was brought within the controlling power of Rome. His merits, like those of Diodorus, are very much those of his sources; and for the century down to 217 B.c. what survives has little to offer the historian, except that his Syrian History (51-70) contains a version of the early years of the Seleucid kingdom from the time of Alexander onwards. Appian’s sources are obscure, Hieronymus and perhaps Timagenes’ History of Kings being among the more important.
Apart from these more substantial sources, information of various kinds (and weight) can be gleaned from a number of other writers. The negotiations at Babylon which followed Alexander’s death are most fully described by Q. Curtius Rufus (x.5ff.); his rhetorically elaborated account probably draws on Cleitarchus, but he also uses Hieronymus. For the Lamian War at the very outset of the period there is evidence in
14 See Stadter, 1980: (B 35). The Bithyniaca contains only one anecdote from the pre-Roman period and the Parthica a brief account of the Parthian break away from the Seleucids under Antiochus II. For the Events after Alexander see FGrH 156 ¥1—-11 and the reconstruction in Stadter, ibid. 144-52, 235 1.46, Stadter, ibid. 148-9, suggests that the source used to supplement Hieronymus was Ptolemy, if his work was published soon after 320 (so Errington 1969, 233-42: (D 54)).
1 Cf. Will 1967, 11.469-71: (A 67); Gabba 1958, 1-40: (B 14).
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the Funeral Speech of Hyperides and the Lives of Demosthenes and Hyperides which have come down among Plutarch’s works. Pausanias is in- valuable for information on sites and localities and has some useful passages dealing with the Diadochi, Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Seleucus, and with Pyrrhus. Pliny’s Natural History and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists contain several valuable accounts, for example Athenaeus’ description (v.196a—203b; from Callixeinus) of the great procession held in Alexan- dria (probably in 271/70) to celebrate the Ptolemaieia festival. Photius gives résumés of Books 1x to xvi of a local history by Memnon of Heraclea, a work based partly on the third-century history of his compatriot Nymphis (c. 310—after 245), which contributes substantially to the history of the area around the Bosphorus and the Black Sea, especially during the years between Corupedium (281/80) and Anti- ochus I’s accession.!6 Memnon’s own date is somewhere between Julius Caesar and the emperor Hadrian. The lexicographers Stephanus of Byzantium and the Suda also make a contribution of value; the latter, for example, is our sole source for an alliance made between Ptolemy I, Antigonus I and Demetrius Poliorcetes against Cassander, probably in 309/8. For military matters the writers on stratagems are a useful supplementary source. The consular Sex. Julius Frontinus, writing under Domitian, records stratagems of Antigonus I, Antigonus II, Antigonus III, Eumenes of Cardia, Ptolemy I, Ptolemy Ceraunus and Pyrrhus, and the Macedonian rhetorician Polyaenus, in a hasty compi- lation made for L. Verus, included a number of examples relevant to this period, of which a dozen (probably taken from Duris and Timaeus) concern Agathocles alone. Often, however, it is not possible to be sure which Antiochus or Seleucus Polyaenus is writing about.
Diogenes Laertius’ compendium on the lives and doctrines of the philosophers (probably composed in the first half of the third century of our era) is also useful for political history, since many philosophers (e.g. Demetrius of Phalerum, Menedemus of Eretria) followed political careers either within the kingdoms or in their shadow. Finally, for the chronology of the period mention should be made of the verse Chronica compiled by Apollodorus of Athens (b. ¢. 180 B.c.) and dedicated to Attalus IJ of Pergamum and of the Chronicles of Porphyry (a.p. 234~early 4th century), who was Plotinus’ successor as head of the Neoplatonic school at Athens. This study was utilized by his younger contemporary, Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Chronica, a work of which Part 1 has survived in an Armenian translation and Part 11 in the Latin version of St Jerome.”
These works exemplify the wide variety of sources, not in themselves
18 FGrH 434 (Memnon); 432 (Nymphis). 17 On Eusebius see Helm 1956: (B 20).
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histories, which can be tapped for historical information. As regards histories proper, some six hundred monographs on cities and peoples are known; not all but many of these contain material relevant to the period 323-217. There are also sources of special relevance to particular fields of study such as the progress of science, and these are listed and discussed in their appropriate place. Naturally, too, contemporary literature contains references to contemporary events. Theocritus’ seventeenth idyll is a eulogy of Ptolemy II and his fifteenth gives a vivid picture of life in Alexandria on the occasion of the festival of Adonis.
III, OTHER SOURCES
Only the literary sources can furnish a consecutive narrative. But this is often flat and jejune; nor does a mere sequence of events round off the historian’s interests. It is therefore to other fields that he must turn for fresh evidence if he hopes to revise and amplify the literary record and to deepen our ideas about why events happened as they did. Such new evidence is fortunately available and it is constantly increasing in quantity. It falls into one or other of the following categories: inscriptions, papyri and ostraca, coins, excavation records and material remains.!8 They will be discussed here in that order.
(a) Inscriptions
From the mid seventh century onwards Greek cities had used durable material, in particular stoneand marble, to record information which for whatever reason they needed to publish and keep available. In the Hellenistic period, with the widespread development of new cities, the areas where inscriptions were set up grew in number and came to embrace (as well as continental Greece and the West) north-west Greece and Macedonia, Thrace, Asia Minor, Syria, the Black Sea coast, Mesopotamia, and places further east as far as Bactria and Parapamisadae — though the number of finds remains uneven and depends to a considerable extent on the zeal for their recovery shown in the various modern states in which those areas are now situated.
The use of inscriptions is subject to several limitations. First, one cannot always establish the date and provenance of an inscription. A stone may have been moved, or its contents may give no indication of its
18 Particular mention should be made of the vast amount of archaeological work, including the discovery and publication of important inscriptions, from the Greek cities of the Black Sea in modern Bulgaria, Rumania and the Soviet Union, if only because most of it is still inaccessible to scholars unfamiliar with Bulgarian, Rumanian and Russian. For a survey and references down to 1958 see Danoff 1962: (D 156). See also the Bibliography p (h).
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date, while lettering can be an unsure guide within a century or so; moreover, inscriptions were sometimes recopied at a later date. Where known names (e.g. that of a king) are mentioned, it may be uncertain which of two or more homonymous persons is meant; for dynastic names tend to be repeated, and ordinary men often carry their grandfather’s name.
While it is rare to find an inscription wholly intact, plausible restoration is possible because inscriptions are usually couched in stereotyped phrases characteristic of a particular chancellery, city or other milieu, and the professional epigraphist can often work wonders in restoring the original text. Restorations by more imaginative and less knowledgeable and disciplined editors can, however, be dangerously misleading, and even the best restoration is not the same thing as having the words on the stone. On the whole there is good reason to regard inscriptions as more reliable than statements in historians. Most inscriptions were contemporary documents, being set up as records of decisions on factual matters; the risk of exposure would be high, were city decrees, royal letters or arbitration decisions to appear in a falsified form. But inscriptions do not always give the full story, and what a city or a king writes on stone as the background to a decision or a decree must be judged like any other public pronouncement, that is as a political statement.
Despite these qualifications, however, inscriptions constitute our main source of fresh information about the Hellenistic world. Their importance is all the greater when they can be studied in groups dealing with the same topic, especially when as far as possible these include all available examples. Evidence of this kind is particularly useful in throwing light on social phenomena such as, for instance, piracy or mercenary service, both of which are prominent in the life of Hellenistic society. There are also many forms of international contact and association which are most effectively illuminated and elucidated from inscriptions. Many, for example, record decrees honouring foreign judges sent in response to a request to judge internal disputes or to arbitrate between cities, usually on questions of boundaries and the possession of territory. Others record grants of asy/ia — immunity from reprisals and so, by extension, virtual immunity from arbitrary or piratical attack — to temples or cities (or both), and yet others the authorization of grants of what is really potential citizenship to the citizens of some other city, in the form of ésopoliteia.
Many inscriptions are concerned with the international festivals which aroused so much interest and played so important a role in the life of the Hellenistic world. They may show a city acceding to a request for the recognition of some newly instituted festival, the Ask/epieia at Cos or
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the festival of Artemis Leucophryene at Magnesia-on-the Maeander, or appointing sheorodokoi to receive and entertain sacred delegates sent by the city holding the festival to announce its imminence throughout the Greek world. Where festivals included musical and dramatic contests they were attended by actors and other performers, as well as by the athletes who competed in the games. Inscriptions yield information about the rewards granted to the latter by their cities and about the activities of the sechnitai of Dionysus, the professional performers organized in guilds which sometimes seem to operate almost like independent states. Doctors loaned by one city to another in time of war or epidemic also have their services rewarded, along with envoys, travelling poets and musicians, and rich men who earn civic gratitude (and sometimes more tangible advantages) by their large gifts of money either to ransom prisoners, endow a festival or (in some Black Sea cities) pay danegeld to a threatening barbarian neighbour. A whole range of inscriptions throws light on the doings of the ephebes within the cities and on the gymnasium and its officials and teachers. One may also ascertain the status of cities situated within a monarchy or on its fringes by a comparison of their decrees with those of free cities and by studying the magistracies and forms of procedure which the inscriptions reveal. Collections of royal letters or treaties likewise throw light on the relations between kings and other states and on political history generally.19 A phenomenon such as ruler-cult is also illuminated by the evidence of inscriptions.
A great deal of epigraphical material from the great panhellenic sanctuaries throws light on the social and economic conditions in which the temples were put up and maintained. From Delos, for example, the accounts of the Aieropoioi, the magistrates responsible for temple administration, provide information on the building and restoration of many shrines and other edifices, such as the sacred houses of Zeus Cynthius and Athena Cynthia built on Mt Cynthus early in the third century; and the inventories of the temples of Artemis and Apollo record the contents of the treasuries, the names of donors and the dates of gifts. From building accounts, such as those from the fourth and third centuries at Epidaurus, the historian can trace the procedures and the economic basis of temple building.?°
The failure of the literary tradition to provide a firm chronology for the period between 300 and 220 (see above, p. 2) can be in some degree compensated from epigraphical material. One of the two surviving fragments of a chronicle from Paros covers the years 336/5 to 299/8 (originally it went down to 264/3);?1 unfortunately this document is of
19 See RC for royal letters; SA 1 and m1. 2 Cf. Burford 1969: (J 192). 21 FGrH 239.
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no real help for the third century. What is more important, Attic inscriptions, which are frequently dated by archon years, have been used to further the reconstruction of the list of archons which breaks off in Diodorus with the end of his complete text in 300 — though it is carried down to 292/1 by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (Din. 9).?* This enterprise has generated formidable controversies and its goal is still very far from being achieved, though as new inscriptions turn up, the options which remain open for archons not yet firmly anchored in position grow progressively fewer. Comparable work has been done on the Delphic archons** and on the Boeotian federal archons between 250 and 171 (based on twenty-six military catalogues engraved on a wall at Hyettus).*4 There are two problems here: first, the reconstitution of such a list, and secondly its use for general dating, which depends on the possibility of correlating inscriptions datable in terms of the Athenian or Delphian magistrates with particular events which fit into a general historical context. This is often possible in the case of Athenian material, and the Delphic archon list has a special value inasmuch as it is a means of dating decrees of the Amphictyonic Council. In these the number of Aetolian votes has been shown to increase in proportion to the growth in the number of states in central Greece which the confederacy controlled at any particular time. It thus becomes possible to trace the extension of territory under the confederacy, though this is subject to two qualifications: first, one cannot always equate new votes with the accession of particular areas, and secondly until the list of archons is complete the chronology remains in some degree fluid (see further, ch. 7, PP- 233-4).
These are a few examples of how particular categories of inscriptions can illuminate areas of history in which the literary record is deficient. But frequently an individual inscription standing alone can be correlated with known events so that it either sets them in a new context or assists in dating them more closely. One or two specific examples will illustrate this point. Our knowledge of the refounding of the Hellenic League by Antigonus I and Demetrius I in 302 would be meagre without the (admittedly fragmentary) text of the actual treaty founding the League, discovered at Epidaurus (SV.A 446), together with the further information afforded by an Athenian honorary decree for Adeimantus of Lampsacus, who is now known to have served as one of the five original proedroi of the organization, and to have sent a letter to Demetrius
2 For recent proposed archon lists see Meritt 1977 (D 95) and Habicht 1979, 113-46: (D 91); but no dates between 261 and 230 are quite certain.
23 See Daux 1936: (p 77); Flaceliére 1937: (D 105); Nachtergael 1977: (E 113); Ehrhardt 19735, 124~38: (D 14).
* Etienne and Knoepfler 1976: (D 78).
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concerning the ratification of its constitution by the Delphic Amphic- tyony.®> Three inscriptions from Athens dating from the archonship of Nicias of Otryne (266/5) (SIG 385-7) throw light on the Athenian capture of the Museum Hill during Olympichus’ liberation of Athens from Demetrius, probably in 287, an event known otherwise only from two short passages in Pausanias (1.26.1-3, 29.13). An Athenian decree honouring Callias of Sphettus which was passed around the turn of the year 270/69 provides information about the liberation of Athens from Demetrius and also about a hitherto unrecorded peace made in its train between Demetrius and Ptolemy.”6 An essential piece of evidence for the Chremonidean War is the Athenian inscription containing the decree causing it, which was proposed by Chremonides in the year of Peithidemus (268/7);?? this can be supplemented by a further decree honouring the Athenian general Epichares, which is recorded on an inscription from Rhamnus (SEG xxiv.154). Another inscription from Rhamnus throws light on the situation in Attica during the Demetrian War in 236/5 (SE 1.25). Finally, a dossier of documents from Labraunda in Caria brings information about the dynast Olympichus of Alinda, which updates his relations with Philip V to the beginning of the latter’s reign and throws light on Antigonus Doson’s Carian expedition. These examples all concern Macedonia and Greece; but the history of Syria and Egypt has also been illuminated by epigraphical evidence. For example, the annexation of Cyrene by Ophellas on behalf of Ptolemy I was probably the occasion for the publication of the so-called ‘charter of Cyrene’, in fact a diagramma of Ptolemy 1.28 An inscription from Laodicea-on-the-Lycus® provides evidence which may involve redating the ‘elephant battle’ of Antiochus I against the Galatians to 270. Events in Seleucid and Ptolemaic history can also be further elucidated from inscriptions in languages other than Greek. The First Syrian War (274-271) between Antiochus I and Ptolemy II would be virtually unknown but for a cuneiform tablet from Babylon and a hieroglyphic stele celebrating Ptolemy’s victory from Heroopolis (Pithom).* Ptolemy III’s return to Alexandria from his invasion of Mesopotamia in 246 is recorded on the ‘Canopus decree’, a trilingual inscription of which three copies survive.3? Pithom yields yet a further document
25 See ch. pp. 58-9.
26 Shear 1978: (Cc 62); Habicht 1979: (D 91). Shear dates the liberation of Athens to 286, Habicht to 287. 27 SIG 434-5 =SVA 111.476; see ch. 7, p. 236.
28 Crampa 1969: (B Go); see ch. 12, p. 460 and n. 38.
29 SEG 1x.1; see ch. 2, p. 36 withn. 28.
30 See Worrle 1975, 59ff.: (B £77); also ch. 11, p. 423 and n. 26.
31 BM 92689; cf. 8. Smith, Babylonian Historical Texts (London, 1924) 1 5o0ff.; for the Pithom stele see ch. 11, p. 417 with n. 7; Sethe 1904: (F 126), and Bibliography F 116-19.
% OGIS 56; see ch. 11, 421 with n. 20.
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which adds substantially to our knowledge of what happened after the battle of Raphia (217). This is the stele inscribed in Greek, demotic and hieroglyphic and recording a decree passed by the synod of priests at Memphis on 15 November 217, which refers to a punitive expedition into Coele-Syria lasting twenty-one days, which Ptolemy carried out after the battle. Finally, we may consider two documents of great importance inscribed in cuneiform. One is a Babylonian chronicle published in 1932, the other a king-list contained on a Babylonian cuneiform tablet which was published in 1974.54 The former gives a synopsis of events between 321 and 307 and the latter a list of dates for the reigns of the kings of Babylon from Alexander down to Antiochus IV, using the Babylonian calendar; this list, which appears to be reliable and based on good evidence, allows a much closer dating of events in Seleucid history.
The study of Greek epigraphical material has been facilitated by the publication of inscriptions over many years in collections arranged according to geographical and, as far as is feasible, chronological criteria. The main works are listed in the bibliography; mention may be made here of the volumes of JG in both the original form and the revised edition in smaller format ([G?). Some volumes originally planned have for various reasons never appeared and in their place one must consult other publications. Prominent among these are Die Inschriften von Olympia, Inscriptions de Délos, Fouilles de Delphes: Inscriptions, Inscriptiones antiquae orae septentrionalis Ponti Euxini, Inscriptiones graecae in Bulgaria repertae; but there is a fuller list in A.G. Woodhead, The Study of Greek Inscriptions.>° Later material is published in Supplementum epigraphicum graecum and there are several volumes containing a corpus of inscriptions from particular sites and areas, e.g. Caria, Sardis, Ilium, Pergamum, Priene, Miletus, Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, Didyma, Cos, Lindus, Cyrene, Histria, Scythia, Egypt, Syria. Mention must also be made of the annual surveys of new material in J. and L. Robert’s Bulletin épigraphique published in Revue des Etudes Grecques. L. Robert’s Hellenica in thirteen volumes (Paris, 1940-65) and his many other publications together constitute a contribution without parallel not only to epigraphical studies but also to numismatics and to Hellenistic history in general. There are useful selections of historically important inscriptions in Dittenberger’s Sylloge inscriptionum graecarum® and his Orientis graeci inscriptiones selectae, in L. Moretti’s Iscrizioni storiche ellenistiche, and (in English translation) M. M. Austin’s The Hellenistic World. New
3 See ch. 11, pp. 437-9. * Furlaniand Momigliano 1932, 462-84: (£ 24); BM 35603 with Sachs and Wiseman 1954: (E 49). 35 Woodhead 1981, 103-7: (B 176).
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inscriptions are published regularly in excavation reports and in many specialist journals such as Hesperia.
(b) Papyri and ostraca
A second source of contemporary material which, like inscriptions, is constantly growing in volume, is provided by papyri and (in smaller numbers) by ostraca. Professor Turner has prefaced his chapter on Ptolemaic Egypt with a note (see below, p. 118—19) emphasizing the limitations which hamper the historian who tries to use papyri and correcting the false impression that most existing papyri have by now been published. We can in fact expect the flow of publication to continue for many decades and also hope that as more specialists in demotic are available the present disparity in the number of published Greek and demotic texts will be redressed, to the advantage of all students of Ptolemaic Egypt. The present section is intended to supplement the comments in ch. 5 with some general remarks on the use of papyri by the historian.
The area for which papyriand ostraca are of use is far more limited than that served by inscriptions. For the century following Alexander’s death they throw light mainly on the Egyptian countryside and, of course, on the relations between its inhabitants and the representatives of govern- ment at various levels. As one descends in the social scale demotic becomes more important as the language of communication, since the lower officials are more likely to be Egyptian. That is one reason why the preponderance of Greek papyri hitherto published creates an un- balanced picture. As regards the contents of papyri, here too there is a contrast with inscriptions. Whereas many of the latter are official records of decrees, grants, letters, treaties and other matters of direct political importance, papyri, though occasionally containing material of that kind, for the most part consist of discarded notes, drafts and documents throwing light on social, fiscal and economic matters, which have survived as mummy wrapping or in rubbish dumps preserved in the dry sand of Upper Egypt. Ostraca were used largely as tax receipts, but might also be a convenient vehicle for memoranda and the like.
Papyri furnish a wealth of information for Egypt such as we possess from no other part of the ancient world. Within the period under consideration the greatest number fall between c. 259 and ¢. 215.98 For this period of rather less than half a century — for which, as it happens, our literary sources are especially unsatisfactory — we are informed (though intermittently) about prices and wages, normal daily food rations, the extreme limits of wealth and poverty, the size of land
% See ch. 5, p. 118.
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PAPYRI AND OSTRACA 17
holdings, the composition of families, customs dues, the size and capacity of river craft, the time taken to transport commodities and what it cost, rates of interest, crop yields, the rents of farms and houses, the area of villages, the various categories of land occupation, and above all the thousand and one ways in which government in all its ramifications impinged on the lives of peasants and settlers.3” Most of this material is undated. There is not a great deal from the towns, at any rate in the early Ptolemaic period, but the powerful and important temples — many of them built or extended by the Ptolemies — have left a wealth of demotic material, some of which is especially interesting for the glimpse it gives of relations between the Greeks and native Egyptians. Alexandria and the Delta have provided virtually nothing since the damp soil there has prevented the survival of papyrus.
Though only exceptionally relevant to political and military history, papyri have made some contributions — and for certain periods contributions of great importance — in that field. Among literary papyri so far discovered a few contain extracts from historical works. There are for instance the fragment of Arrian’s Events after Alexander found at Oxyrhynchus (see above, p. 8), and a first-century papyrus (P. Oxy. 2399) containing a fragment of an unidentified historian writing about Agathocles.38 Another discovery, which has provoked violent con- troversy, is of a fragmentary Copenhagen papyrus (P. Haun. 6) containing, it would appear (for the document is hard to decipher) six short résumés of incidents of Ptolemaic history during the period of the Third and Fourth Syrian Wars.39 These include a reference to a certain Ptolemaios Andromachou (or Ptolemaios Andromachos — both words are in the genitive), to the battle of Andros, to the murder of an unnamed person (Ptolemy ‘the son’?) at Ephesus, to an Egyptian advance as far as the Euphrates, and finally to an Aetolian Theodotus (perhaps a man already known from Polybius). This brief document may bea scrap from a set of notes taken by someone reading a historical work. The divergent views about its contents reflect the dearth of reliable information available from this period of Ptolemaic history.
One such almost blank area is that of the Second Syrian War, for which an ostracon and several papyri have produced substantial evidence. The ostracon, from Karnak, appears to refer to Ptolemy II’s invasion of Syria in 258/7, a topic which also figures in P. Haun. 6; and two papyri, P. Cairo Zen. 67 and P. Mich. Zen. 100, show that in 258/7
37 Cf. Preaux 1978, 1.106: (A 48).
% See ch. 10, p. 384.
39 Cf. P. Haun. 6; see ch. 11, nn. 19 and 44; new readings in Bulow-Jacobsen 1979: (£ 13); and Habicht 1980: (£ 28). See Will 1979, 1?.237-8: (A 67); Bengtson 1971, 11-14: (B 48).
# See ch. 11, n. 13, for bibliography; and ch. 5, pp. 135-6, for the problems presented by this document. On P. Haun. 6 see the previous note.
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18 I SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD
Halicarnassus was Ptolemaic and that Ptolemaic naval construction was going on during that year — two facts of considerable interest in the reconstruction of an obscure conflict. The end of the war is also illuminated by several papyri which attest the establishment of cleruchic settlements in the Egyptian countryside in late 253, and by a famous document, P. Cairo Zen. 59251, containing a letter from the doctor Artemidorus who escorted the princess Berenice to the borders of Palestine in 252 for her marriage with Antiochus II, as a seal to the peace settlement. For the Third Syrian (Laodicean) War too there is an important papyrus, the so-called P. Gurob, which is usually taken to be an official communiqué sent by Ptolemy III to the court at Alexandria, describing the Egyptian advance as far as Antioch at the outset of the war in 246.
These and a few other papyri throw light on specific historical situations. But apart from these there is a vast amount to be learnt from the prosopographical information contained in papyri and this, sup- plemented by names taken from inscriptions, has been made available in the volumes of the Prosopographia Ptolemaica.*! These provide material illustrating not only political events but also, what is no less important, the administrative structure of the Ptolemaic kingdom and its military organization both in Egypt and abroad.
(c) Coins
Coins provide a further useful source of information on the early Hellenistic period. Greek coins of this time fall broadly into three groups: there are royal issues minted by the kings in their own mints, coins produced for the kings in cities under their control, and coins minted by cities on their own behalf. The right to mint was an important aspect of sovereignty. Royal issues usually carry a portrait on the obverse, though not necessarily that of the monarch issuing the coins. Lysimachus and Ptolemy I both struck coins with the head of Alexander; and later many cities around the Hellespont and the Propontis followed this practice. Lysimachus’ head was also featured widely after his death. Some coins bearing his head were still being minted under the Roman Empire, reminding us of the protracted life of Maria Theresa dollars. But beginning with Demetrius Poliorcetes it became normal (except at Pergamum) to represent the reigning king (and occasionally his consort) on his own coins. Some of these portraits were assigned the charac- teristics of gods, for example the horns of Ammon worn by Alexander, or the sun’s rays shining from his head on gold coins of Ptolemy III. In
41 Ed. W. Peremens and E. van ’t Dack (Louvain, 1950-75) = Pros. Ptol.
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COINS 19
this way, and also in the subjects represented on the reverse, coins can throw light on royal pretensions and royal cult — though this is commoner under the Roman Empire than in the Hellenistic period. Coins were an important medium for royal propaganda. A king could celebrate his achievements in words or by easily understood symbols or by a special commemorative issue. Thus a coin of Demetrius Poliorcetes shows a personified Nike (Victory) on a ship’s prow to commemorate his naval victory over Ptolemy at Salamis in Cyprus in 306.4? A study of both separate finds and of the coins contained in hoards can extend knowledge of the economic and monetary policy of cities and monarchs. A good example is that of a hoard, hidden away about 220 at what is now Biiyiikgekmece and containing silver coins of two sorts, first a number of pseudo-‘Lysimachi’ (that is, silver tetradrachms of 17g bearing Lysimachus’ head) overstruck with a countermark of Byzantium and Chalcedon, and secondly specimens of two later issues (one from each city) based on a different ‘Phoenician’ standard with a tetradrachm of 13:93 g.43 These coins have been convincingly interpreted as evidence for a monetary alliance between the two cities and the imposition of a currency monopoly within their territory at a date shortly before 220, when, as we know from Polybius (1v.38—53), Byzantium was under pressure from the Galatians in the kingdom of Tylis, and in consequence sought to impose customs dues on all goods exported from the Black Sea, until the Rhodians compelled her by war to abandon the practice. The use of coins as evidence, like that of inscriptions, is not, however, without its difficulties. The historian must start with an open mind about why the coin is there at all. It may have been issued to attract or assist commerce, but equally its existence may merely indicate a need by the responsible authority to make payments, for public works perhaps or more often to meet the costs of war. The function of a coin might vary too according to the metal of which it was made. Judging by their condition when found in hoards and by the figures given by Livy of coined money carried in Roman triumphs of the second century, gold coins were commonly hoarded, not circulated. Silver was the normal medium of international trade, and bronze sufficed for everyday needs and usually had an extremely limited area of circulation. Further, it is not always easy to discover where a coin was struck. As we have seen, some royal heads (e.g. Alexander, Lysimachus) help with neither provenance nor date, since they occur posthumously on a wide range of coins, for many of which the only means of identification may be the monogram of the issuing city, and that cannot always be interpreted. On the other 42 See Plates vol., pl. ob.
43 Thompson 1935 4: (B 266); cf. L. Robert in N. Firatli, Sté/es funéraires de Byzance (Paris, 1964) 86 n. 5; Seyrig 1968: (B 262).
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20 I SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD
hand, given a large number of Lysimachus coins, it is sometimes possible to use a gradual divergence in features from the original type to establish a chronological sequence. Style, however, is always a risky criterion, especially when used to determine the provenance of a coin, since different cities sometimes employed the same engraver for the dies.
It is not always possible to be sure to what standard a particular coin is minted, since weights were only approximate and could be affected by wear in circulation. In general there were two main systems covering the Greek world at this period. Alexander’s adoption of the Attic standard was followed by Lysimachus and later by the Antigonids and Seleucids, with the result that over much of the Hellenistic world, including Athens, Macedonia, Asia Minor and the Seleucid territories as far as Bactria north of the Hindu-Kush, there was a single silver standard with a tetradrachm weighing ¢.17g, and the emissions of the various states were accepted almost interchangeably. In fourth-century pre- Alexander Egypt too the Attic standard obtained, as is shown by the large quantities of imitation Athenian tetradrachms struck by the last Pharaonic and Persian régimes, from ¢.375 onwards.44 After some experimentation Ptolemy I eventually settled on the lighter so-called Phoenician or Cyrenean system with a tetradrachm of 14:25 g, and this standard was also used in Carthage, Cyprus, Syria and Phoenicia and in Syracuse under Hiero II. In continental Greece, however, there were many local currencies with restricted circulation and using different standards.‘
The dating of issues of coinage is one of the most difficult and most important tasks for the historian using numismatic material. Where coins do not themselves carry a regnal year, the best evidence comes from die-studies and from the collation of hoards. By comparing the amount of wear in the dies and by identifying the use of the same dies for coins with a different obverse (or reverse), it becomes possible to establish sequences of issues. The existence of a relevant hoard furnishes a further criterion for, since an approximate date for the burial of the hoard is usually that of the least worn issues in it, it is possible by comparing the amount of wear of the other issues it contains to establish their relative chronology. The numismatist has other means of dating, such as the quantity of dies known of a particular issue: this may allow conclusions concerning the length of time a particular issue lasted, but clearly there are many variables in such an equation.
In practice the numismatist will as often draw on ‘historical’ evidence to date the coins as the other way round. But once he has framed a hypothesis that fits the known historical events and the
44 See Buttrey 1982: (F 389). 4 Cf. Giovannini 1978, 8-14: (B 224); and see below, ch. 8, pp. 276-9.
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ARCHAEOLOGY 21
numismatic evidence, this can be used to fill out the total picture. The revision and refining of hypotheses is part of the normal process of historical research and here the numismatist is only marginally worse off than the historian who uses other material such as inscriptions and papyri.
The study of numismatics is facilitated by the publication of hoards, by detailed surveys of the currencies of particular areas and by the publication of the coins contained in great public and private collec- tions, especially those covered by the Sy/loge Nummorum Graecorum.*®
(d) Archaeology
Information derived from inscriptions and coins can often be sup- plemented by the results of excavation; indeed many inscriptions and coins are uncovered in the course of excavation and can only be fully exploited by the historian who studies them in their archaeological context. Knowledge about the cities of mainland Greece and western Asia Minor which play a large role in the history of the Hellenistic period has been greatly expanded as a result of excavation reports. These are available not merely for such centres as Athens (especially the agora), Corinth, Argos and Thebes, for the great cities of western Asia Minor such as Pergamum, Sardis, Smyrna, Ephesus, Priene, Miletus and, from the islands, Cos and Rhodes, but also for more remote spots like Pella in Macedonia, Scythopolis in Palestine, the cities of the Black Sea coast, Icarus (Failaka) in the Persian Gulf or the unidentified city at Ai Khanum in Afghanistan.4? Public buildings, walls, temples, theatres, harbour installations and the street pattern have all been unearthed by the spade, and add to the historian’s understanding of the way of life of the city dweller and the dangers he sometimes faced. In addition, by carrying investigations into the surrounding area it is also possible sometimes to throw light on the relations between the po/is and its chora, especially if inscriptions are also available. In Egypt the remains of temples built or enlarged in Ptolemaic times — for instance the vast remains at Tentyra (Denderah), Thebes (Karnak), Esneh, Edfu and Kom Ombo — furnish evidence for the relations between the Mace- donian dynasty and the powerful Egyptian priesthood.
A further source of information properly included under archaeology consists of surviving objects — works of art, mosaics or sculpture, or
46 The volumes of the Sy//oge are gradually appearing. S NG Copenhagen (The Royal Collection of Coins and Medals, Danish National Museum (42 fasc.; Copenhagen, 1942~69)) offers the most complete coverage to date. See Bibliography B(d) and F(k); for additions to the literature see A Survey of Numismatic Research, published periodically by the International Numismatic Commission.
4” See Plates vol., pls. 17, 26, 27, 30-1 (Ai Khanum), 18 (Failaka), 66 (Pella).
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22 I SOURCES FOR THE PERIOD
everyday objects of trade and household use. The presence of these in a particular place cannot always be satisfactorily explained. Objects can move from where they were made for several reasons — in the course of commerce, but also as gifts or booty. They may also have been lost or indeed hidden away in time of danger, like coins and treasure. Their interpretation therefore presents the historian with problems. But they can sometimes provide evidence about trade routes to supplement what is known from finds of coins and from other sources. Unfortunately, though it is occasionally possible to determine an object’s provenance with certainty — certain types of pottery, for instance, and stamped jars originally containing oil and wine — this is not always so, and the origin of many artefacts made of metal, ivory or glass can only be guessed at. Such articles throw light on economic trends, on the standard of living, on taste in art and on many cultural assumptions. Finally, it is only by a combination of methods supplementing the findings of archaeology with the use of every other sort of evidence that progress can be made towards the solution of outstanding historical problems; and many must await the discovery of new source material.
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CHAPTER 2
THE SUCCESSION TO ALEXANDER
EDOUARD WILL
I FROM THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS (323-321)
At the time of Alexander’s death in June 323, the actual military conquest of the East was to all intents and purposes complete. It had come to an end — despite the king’s wishes — on that day in 326 when his troops had refused to follow him further across the plains of the Indus. But the organization of this immense empire was still only roughly sketched out and ideally the Conqueror should have lived a good many more years to enable this colossal and disparate body, held together only by the will and genius of the king, to acquire some homogeneity and some hope of permanence. This very year in which Alexander died would in all likelihood have proved decisive from the point of view of his political work. On the one hand, his choice of Babylon as capital (though this choice is not certain) was probably the prelude to a definitive organization of the central administration, a very necessary task, since everything so far had been more or less improvised. On the other hand, certain recent incidents (the proskynesis affair, the mutiny at Opis, and so on) must necessarily have led the king to a more precise and at the same time more restricted definition of his powers, of the relations between Macedonians and Persians, and the like. In short, the great epic adventure was over, and the task of reflection was beginning. It demanded prudence and imagination, tact and boldness. No one can say whether Alexander would have been equal to this task (some have doubted it), and his death leaves all the questions open.
The very fact that from the crossing of the Hellespont to the descent into the plains of the Indus everything had depended on the person and the will of the Conqueror meant that on his death the first problem to arise was that of the succession.! Alexander had no legitimate son. It is true that the rules of succession in Macedonia had never been very strictly defined: if power in Macedonia had been passed down for many generations within the family of the Argeadae, it had nevertheless
1 Glotz ef al.: 1945: (A 18) (to which readers are referred for the chapter as a whole); Merkelbach 1954, 123ff., 243ff.: (B 24); Vitucci 1963: (c 72); Schachermeyr 1970: (c 58); Errington 1970: (c 22); Bosworth 1971: (c 6).
23
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 25
always been, and still was, necessary to reckon with the assembly of free Macedonians (or, according to a recent hypothesis, of the Macedonian nobility alone), which could impose or ratify successions departing from the normal patrilineal system. The most notable example of these ‘irregularities’ (which were irregularities only for those who cannot conceive of monarchical succession in any other terms than those of male primogeniture strictly interpreted) was still present in all minds: it was that of Alexander’s own father, Philip II, who was certainly not the son of his predecessor but had, without great difficulty, acquired the power which should ‘normally’ have fallen to one of his nephews. The absence of a legitimate son of Alexander did not, therefore, pose an insurmountable legal problem as long as the royal family was not extinct —and not even then. Alexander had a half-brother, Arrhidaeus, a bastard of Philip IJ, who could have made an acceptable successor, in law at least, for in fact he was incapable of taking on the tasks left by Alexander, being an epileptic and retarded. Despite the unpromising prospects raised by the possibility of a recognition of Arrhidaeus, the memory of Philip II and of Alexander left so strong an impression on those who survived them (an impression stronger, no doubt, than the simple feeling of loyalty to the dynasty) that no one dared or even thought to raise the dynastic question. Moreover, another circumstance prevented its being raised immediately: Roxane, the widow of Alexander, was pregnant, and so might, within a few months, give her deceased husband a male heir. Between the two possibilities opinions were divided. Perdiccas, who, after Hephaestion’s death had held the position of chiliarch to Alexander (the title is a Greek translation of a Persian term meaning ‘commander of the thousand’ and indicating ‘first after the king’), and the members of the royal council indicated their preference for the possible direct heir: a long minority was no doubt not without attractions for the ambitious among them, not least Perdiccas. Roxane, however, was not Macedonian and her son would be half-Iranian, and this prospect was repugnant to the Macedonian peasants who made up the phalanx. These infantrymen, the majority of whom were mainly interested in returning to their homeland and re-establishing contact with the national traditions which Alexander had gradually abandoned, met spontaneously in a tumultuous assembly and, spurred on by Perdiccas’ opponents, proclaimed Arrhidaeus king. To avoid a battle between the cavalry, who supported Perdiccas, and the phalangites, a bargain was negotiated: if the child was a boy (as proved to be the case; he was called Alexander [IV]), he would share power with Arrhidaeus,? who was given the distinguished (and, for the infantrymen, politically
? Granier 1931, 58-65: (D 23); Briant 1973, 24off., 279ff.: (c 8); Errington 1978: (pD 17).
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26 2 THE SUCCESSION TO ALEXANDER
significant) name of Philip (III). This compromise, based on a collegiate kingship shared between an idiot and a minor, was clearly no more than an interim solution. But the interim before what? No one yet knew, or at least no one would yet say.3
Even before the child was born, however, the empire he was to inherit had to be governed, and Alexander’s companions divided among themselves the duties and the great regional governorships which, in the conquered countries, the Conqueror had allowed to retain their structure and their title of satrapies.
In Europe the aged Antipater, whom Alexander had left behind him on his departure for Asia, retained his previous functions as strategos, which made him the all-powerful representative of the monarchy. In practice regent of Macedon, Antipater in addition exercised the Macedonian protectorate over all the regions of Europe which, in one way or another, had been more or less closely tied to the kingdom (Thessaly, Thrace, Epirus, parts of Illyria, etc.) and especially over European Greece, which Philip II had organized within the Corinthian League. Antipater was devoted to the ideas of his contemporary, Philip II; he was the embodiment of loyalty to the dynasty (if not to Alexander himself, of whose development he is known to have disapproved), of prudence, of wisdom, but also of unrelenting energy: without Antipater and the vigilant watch he kept in Europe Alexander’s adventure would have been impossible. He was to continue this work until his death, now unfortunately close.
In Asia too provision had to be made for a central authority. Perdiccas seemed marked out for this by his duties as chiliarch. He therefore retained this office (and took the title going with it, which Alexander had not yet conferred upon him) and was thus invested with a power to which all the satraps were theoretically subordinate.
The kings (or at least Philip III, who was as yet sole king) were, however, kings both of Macedon and of Asia, and, since one already was and the other would be for a long time incapable of exercising their kingship in either of these two countries, it was necessary for a person of some standing to undertake, not indeed the exercise of power over the whole empire, but the representation of the sovereigns. This person was Craterus, the most respected member of Alexander’s entourage, whose high authority must have been, in the eyes of some, above all a means of curbing the thrusting ambition of Perdiccas. Craterus was named prostates of the kings. This office, that of a proxy rather than of a guardian in the strict sense, seems to have been intended to give him supreme control of the army and the finances of the empire, more
3 Arr. Diad. fr. 1.1; Dexipp. fr. 1.1; Diod. xvimt.2; Just. x11t.2—4.4; Plut. Eas 3.1; Curt. x.19-315 App. Syr. 52.
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 27
particularly in Asia. In 323, however, Craterus was not in Babylon; he was en route for Europe (where he was secretly intended to replace Antipater) at the head of the returning veterans, and was later to play a part in events there. But his career was destined to be even briefer than that of Antipater, and in fact he was never able to exercise his powers. Until 321 (the date of the deaths of both Craterus and Perdiccas) the kings were to remain with Perdiccas, who thus assumed in practice the duties which had been conferred, perhaps more in theory than in reality, on Craterus.4
Craterus, Antipater and Perdiccas thus formed a sort of triumvirate controlling Alexander’s legacy. This triumvirate was totally theoretical, since at the time these decisions were taken Craterus and Antipater could not be consulted, and it was to be shattered by events before long.
There was also a matter of more importance than the division of the supreme powers, and this was the division of the satrapies, for it is this which contains the seed of the dismemberment of the empire. A passage of Pausanias (1.6.2) asserts that the most active initiator of this division was Ptolemy the son of Lagus;5 if this report is accurate, it probably implies that Ptolemy had an idea at the back of his mind, and we shall probably not be wrong in supposing that it was at his request, or as a result of his intrigues, that Egypt was allocated to him. During his stay in Egypt Alexander had not made the country a satrapy, but tradition asserts that in 323 the title of satrap was used in Egypt by the Greek Cleomenes of Naucratis, one of those appointed by Alexander to manage the finances of Egypt: whether Cleomenes was named satrap by Alexander at an unknown date or whether he had usurped the position, he was now made subordinate to Ptolemy.®
In Asia Minor satrapies were given to or confirmed in the possession of two figures destined to become famous later: Antigonus Mon- ophthalmus (‘the One-Eyed’), who was installed in western Anatolia (Greater Phrygia, Lycia, Pamphylia),’ and Eumenes of Cardia,’ who was sent to Cappadocia and Paphlagonia. The case of this last is somewhat unusual. Eumenes, who was a Greek and Alexander’s archivist (and so one of those closest to him and most familiar with his intentions), was unpopular with the senior Macedonian captains, and it may even have seemed desirable to some to remove him from the centre of affairs. From this point of view, Cappadocia represented the gift of a poisoned chalice,
* Arr. Diad. fr. 1.3; Dexipp. fr. 1.3-4; Just. x111.4.5; Diod. xvimi.2.4 and 3.2 is confused and incorrect.
5 Seibert 1969, 27ff.: (F 143).
® Seibert 1969, Goff.: (F 145); Vogt 1971: (C 73); Seibert 1972: (F 147). ? Wehrli 1969, 32-3: (c 75); Briant 1973, 125ff.: (c 8).
8 Briant 1972: (c 7}.
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28 2 THE SUCCESSION TO ALEXANDER
since this difficult country had not been conquered by Alexander and was administered by a Persian satrap, Ariarathes: in sending this civil servant to take Ariarathes’ satrapy from him, there must have been those who expected him to fail. Perhaps, however, this was not the attitude of Perdiccas if there was already an understanding between the chiliarch and the Greek, which is not certain: it might suit Perdiccas to put a reliable man in areas which allowed him to keep an eye on communi- cations between Mesopotamia and Europe.
At the junction of Macedonia and Asia Minor, Thrace was entrusted to Lysimachus.® This is also a special case, because Thrace was not a satrapy but a European territory which Philip II had annexed to his realms and which was now detached to form a separate province. It is true that, as a country under threat, Thrace required an energetic soldier to devote himself exclusively to its defence, but to give it to Lysimachus was also to take it away from Antipater.
Ptolemy, Antigonus, Eumenes, Lysimachus: the list (along with the supreme ‘triumvirate’) embraces the names of those who were to be the protagonists in the confused struggle which was about to be engaged. The other satrapies, in Asia Minor and Syria, in Mesopotamia and in Iran, were entrusted to figures summoned to a less illustrious future: we shall meet some of them in passing; for the moment they may be ignored.
All these men — with the exception of Eumenes and one or two other Greeks — are Macedonians. The death of Alexander meant the removal of almost all Persians, whom the Conqueror had admitted in large numbers to his entourage and placed in administrative posts. In other words, the sort of Macedonian—Iranian condominium over Asia which Alexander had begun to create — not without fierce resistance from the Macedonians — was immediately replaced by the power of the conquerors alone. This, at least, was a tendency which appeared in the summer of 323, and it would be wrong to identify it summarily as the principle which was to govern the whole of the Hellenistic period. Yet nowhere is there any sign, except perhaps in the case of Peucestas in Persis, that the reality of power was ever subsequently shared with Orientals. And the rapid break-up of the Iranian marriages forced by Alexander on his Macedonian companions (only Seleucus kept his Iranian wife) is a further sign that these men did not intend to have descendants of mixed race. The Macedonians, who had criticized Alexander for not keeping all the fruits of their conquests for them, seem henceforth to have been firmly resolved to be the sole masters.
Conflicts were to break out immediately among these new masters of
® Saitta 1955, 62ff.: (C 57). 10 Arr. Diad. fr. 1.5—8; Dexipp. fr. 1.2-7; Diod. xvim1.3; Just. x11.4, 9-23; Plut. Eva. 3.2.
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 29
the empire, the ‘Diadochi’ (‘Heirs’). Nevertheless it is important to note that these conflicts, if they were obviously first conflicts of personal ambition, were also, in this first period, something else and something more: conflicts between the unitary idea, the legacy of Alexander’s thinking, and particularist tendencies. Furthermore, these two aspects of the struggles of the Diadochi are inextricably intertwined, inasmuch as the unitary idea simply covers larger ambitions, more on the scale of Alexander’s, than do the particularist tendencies. The period we are about to consider is, in short, that which sees the elimination of the unitary in favour of the particularist tendency. Indeed, the latter had already won final victory, despite a last revival of the will to reunite the empire, as early as 301.
To the best of our knowledge, the announcement of Alexander’s death aroused no disturbance among the nations of Asia. This inertia is remarkable but, though its interpretation is a delicate matter, it would no doubt be wrong to see it as no more than a general indifference. In the vast stretches of Mesopotamia and Syria the indigenous inhabitants were accustomed to a subjection often stretching back over centuries, and the death of a new conqueror was nothing to cause an upsurge of ‘nationalism’. It would no doubt be desirable to draw distinctions — what did Tyre think? what was the atmosphere in Babylon? — but the documents available do not enable us to answer such questions. However, if the inertia of the westernmost regions of the Asian empire was largely the result of apathy, this interpretation would probably be false for Iran. We have of course no more documents in this case than in the other, but if we consider, first, that the Iranians were the former masters of Asia, second, that Alexander had given them a privileged position, and finally, and to anticipate, that Iran was soon to be the main area of anti-Macedonian agitation, we may be inclined to think that the inertia of Iran in 323 was in large measure a waiting game.
While the Asians made no move, the general tranquillity of the empire was on the other hand disturbed, at both extremities, by Greeks.
It was in the far East that the first rising, that of the Greeks of Bactria, took place. This is our first encounter with this country and these people, whose subsequent role is by no means negligible. Who were these Greeks established in eastern Iran, on the northern slopes of the Hindu-Kush? We are told that they were soldiers settled by Alexander in military colonies designed to protect this particularly vulnerable border region of his empire who, weary of their stay in this remote spot, had been demanding repatriation since 325. There must indeed have been such semi-penal colonies, and no doubt their inhabitants chose this moment to revolt or, more accurately, at the news of Alexander’s death they renewed a mutiny which had broken out two years before. But
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certain facts make one hesitate. The satrap of Media, Peitho,. who was given the task of suppressing the revolt, would willingly have shown clemency to the rebels (against the orders of Perdiccas) in the hope of making them a base for his personal power, but his Macedonians, contrary to his plans, massacred the Greeks in large numbers. And yet, some eighty years later, a vigorous Greek state was to spring up in this area; heavy Greek immigration in the intervening period is so unlikely that it has been suggested that there may have been a well-established Greek population on these edges of the known world before Alexander’s arrival. The only support for the hypothesis is a phrase in Herodotus (v1.9), which indicates that Bactria was a place of deportation in the Achaemenid period. There is a problem here, insoluble in the present state of the sources.!? But the fact remains that there were large numbers of Greeks in Bactria, that they revolted in 325 and then again in 323, that they survived despite their defeat and the accompanying massacres, and that once calm was restored the satrap appointed to Bactria was a Greek (the Cypriote Stasanor) and not a Macedonian.
At the other end of the empire there occurred an event more serious, more moving and, not least, one better known, the rising of the old states of European Greece.!# While it is certain that it was the news of Alexander’s death which provoked the explosion, it is nonetheless also true that a complex discontent was brewing in Greece. Significantly, that not very intelligent compiler Diodorus Siculus assigns two different causes to the conflict in two different passages of his work.!5 In one place he emphasizes the agitation of the mercenaries in the huge man-market of Cape Taenarum, many of whom were on their way back from Asia and had chosen as leader the general Leosthenes, an Athenian condottiere of whom it is not certain whether he had served Alexander or Darius, but whose hostility to the Macedonians was by this time open. In his other reference Diodorus places the stress on the discontent provoked in Aetolia and Athens by the decree of Alexander ordering the Greeks to recall their exiles, a measure which in particular forced the Athenians to abandon their cleruchy on Samos.'® Alexander’s death brought all these discontents together. The heart of the anti- Macedonian resistance was once more Athens, in Athens the democratic party (the propertied classes would have preferred peace) and within that party Hyperides, the former comrade-in-arms of Demosthenes
M Bengtson 1964, 1.177ff.: (a 6).
12 Narain 1957, 1ff.: (E 196); Cozzoli 1958: (c 14).
13 Diod. xviit.7 presents the rising of 323 as a continuation of that of 325 (xvII.g9).
M4 Ferguson 1911, 11~28: (D 89); Lepore 1955: (C 45); Treves 1958: (C 70); Braccesi 1970: (B 6).
18 Diod. xvit.3.1-3; XVHI.8.
18 Habicht 1957, 15 4ff.: (B 81); 1970, 253: (1 29); 1972 (Nos. 4~5): (B 84); 1975: (C 34); Barron 1962: (c 4).
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 31
who, however, had just secured Demosthenes’ conviction in the obscure affair of Harpalus.!?7 Leosthenes placed at his country’s disposal the essentially unpolitical force of his mercenaries, for whom the remains of Harpalus’ treasure provided wages. A treaty of alliance was concluded with the rising power of Greece, Aetolia; the Thessalians acceded to it a little later, with some others.
Well led by Leosthenes, the last military celebrity of Athens, and organized in a confederation of autonomous cities and nations which replaced the Macedonians’ Corinthian League, the allies won easy successes over Antipater, who lacked troops and was forced to take refuge in Lamia (hence the name of the war). Large numbers of waverers now hastened to support what looked like success. In the Peloponnese, where he had taken refuge after his conviction, Demosthenes, at first hostile to a rising which he judged premature, was soon all action, securing an alliance here and neutrality there. Forgetting the recent past, Athens opened her gates to him and gave him a triumphal welcome — to what was to be his final failure. At the very point when a united Greece seemed to be pulling itself together to break the yoke of masters weakened by the fragmentation of their forces, the tide was already turning. It is true that free Greece had a run of bad luck. Perhaps even before Demosthenes reached Athens, Leosthenes, the only man capable of organizing the common effort, had fallen in battle and his successor had been obliged to raise the siege of Lamia to go and head off the army approaching under the command of Leonnatus, the satrap of Hellespon- tine Phrygia, who had been summoned by Antipater along with Craterus. Antipater’s appeals, while certainly justified by the military situation, were also part of a political strategy. Antipater had offered the hand of one of his daughters to Leonnatus at the same time as he asked for his help; no doubt he wanted to obtain the allegiance of this ambitious young man (with his ties to the royal family), on whom Perdiccas had recently relied. Leonnatus, however, had moved only after receiving another matrimonial proposition, more interesting from his point of view but contrary to Antipater’s interests: it had come from the old queen Olympias, who had suggested that he should marry Alexander’s own sister Cleopatra (whom Olympias was a little later to offer to Perdiccas himself). It was thus probably with designs on the crown that Leonnatus landed in Thessaly.18 As for Craterus, he must
17 Harpalus, who had managed Alexander’s finances, had in company with some others turned traitor to the king in 324 and, with the help of his treasure, had tried to carve himself principality in Cilicia before arriving in Athens with the object of provoking her, and in her wake Greece, to revolt. Divided but cautious, the Athenians had refused to listen to him and Harpalus had gone off again, though not before he had distributed much money among the leading circles in the city — a circumstance which had induced the settlement of several political accounts, and notably the
condemnation of Demosthenes for misappropriation of public funds. 18 Briant 1973, 162ff.: (c 8).
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have received Antipater’s appeal about the time that the news reached him of his appointment as royal prostates. No doubt uncertain of the course to adopt, he waited in Cilicia until the day he learned that Perdiccas was marching on Asia Minor (spring 322). Preferring to place his veterans, who in any case had to return to Macedon, at the service of Antipater rather than to have to face Perdiccas, he now set out for Europe; this choice was to have serious political consequences. In the meantime the situation had developed in Greece. In his encounter with the Greek army, Leonnatus had been defeated and killed, but his army had nevertheless linked up with Antipater. Even now all was not lost for the Greeks. Athens had made a final, considerable, naval effort — but her fleet was defeated off Amorgos.!9 In the forces committed on the two sides, the battle of Amorgos seems comparable only with that of Salamis. Salamis had laid the foundation of Athenian naval power, which now sank for ever in the waters of Amorgos. The classical history of Athens is, as it were, enclosed by these two battles fought for Greek freedom, battles with such different outcomes.
Antipater, meanwhile, had been joined by Craterus: together they marched on Greece and forced the reluctant allies to accept battle at Crannon in Thessaly; the fighting was unspectacular, but emphasized the already advanced decay of the league. Antipater and Craterus, following the practice of Philip after the battle of Chaeronea, skilfully refused to treat with their enemies as a group and so provoked a succession of defections among the last allies of Athens and of the Aetolians. Isolated, Athens had to negotiate in the autumn of 322. Some clauses of the treaty she was forced to sign were no more than the normal price of defeat: payment of a heavy indemnity, the loss of Oropus on the Boeotian frontier, the installation of a Macedonian garrison in the Piraeus. The obligation imposed on the defeated to surrender the leaders of the revolt could also count as a legitimate demand of the victors; Hyperides and Demosthenes, already in flight, were pursued. Hyperides was captured on Aegina and executed. Demosthenes committed suicide at Calauria as he was captured. But the most serious blow for Athens was the measures, disdained sixteen years previously by Philip, against the democracy, which was abolished, perhaps less by a dictatorial decision of Antipater than by the support he gave to the régime’s opponents.”° Once again, but this time more permanently, Athens experienced the oligarchy of defeat, led by the virtuous octogenarian general Phocion and by the corrupt politician who had made his career (out of conviction too, it seems) in the service of the enemy, Demades, an oligarchy protected by the spears of the occupier. Even though a number of
19 Hauben 1975, 43ff.: (c 37). 2 Gehrke 1976, 87ff.: (c 29).
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 33
upheavals were still to come, for Athens it was the end of her history as an independent city — and it is this that justifies us in having dwelt at some length on these events in Greece in the years 3 23—322, which are in fact fairly unimportant when viewed in relation to the destiny of the work of Philip and Alexander.?!
Nevertheless it is important to note that the outcome of the Lamian War meant for European Greece as a whole a worsening of its juridical situation. For the Corinthian League of Philip and Alexander the rebels had substituted their own confederation, and the collapse of this created a void which Antipater and Craterus took good care not to fill: the cities were henceforth subject to Macedon directly and in isolation.” If it is true that the Corinthian League had been no more than a fiction designed to mask the Macedonian protectorate in Greece under the cloak of a collective alliance, the new situation had at least the merit of clarity: the Greek cities, without being theoretically deprived of their autonomy, without being legally annexed to Macedon, were tightly bound to her. From this point of view the case of Athens is exemplary.
Greece, then, was pacified by the end of 322 — except for Aetolia. Antipater and Craterus organized a large expedition against this mountainous and difficult region, but it was cut short as the two Macedonians were abruptly summoned east by the news from Asia. The sudden switch was of immense importance, because this unexpected chance offered to the Aetolians is very probably the reason for the important role the Aetolian confederation was soon playing in world affairs. Contrasts have been drawn between the collapse of the ‘old’ Aegean city, whose revival of patriotism had not restored its ancient military virtues, and the rise of the ‘young’ mountain people of the west which, in a short time, was to reveal remarkable reserves of political and military energy — but the fact remains nevertheless that the difference in their fates at the end of the struggle they jointly led in 323-322 was in large measure due to the intervention of an unexpected outside factor, the sudden inability of the Macedonians to devote themselves to crushing the Aetolians.
Let us therefore return, with Antipater and Craterus, to Asia, where dangers and complications were already beginning to multiply. While, as we have seen, no ‘nationalist’? movement threatened Alexander’s work in Asia on the morrow of his death, the rivalries of his former colleagues did.
There can be no doubt about Perdiccas’ personal ambitions, but it is difficult to define them exactly, particularly as they probably grew
21 Hyper. Epitaph.; Diod. xvitt.g-18, 2425.5; Art. Diad. fr. 1.9 and 1.12~15; fr. 17; frs. 22-3;
Just. xuit.s; Pluc. Phoc. 23-8; Dem. 27f.; ps.-Phut. X orat.; Dem. 38ff.; Hyper. 11-12.; Paus. 1.25.5. 2 Bengtson 1964, 1.52—-G; 129-32: (A 6).
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rapidly in the few remaining months of his life. One fact, however, is clear from his short career: Perdiccas showed a strong desire to complete the work of conquest and to maintain (certainly for his profit) the integrity of the empire against the separatist tendencies of the powerful Macedonian satraps.
Completing the work of conquest was a task which had to be performed, somewhat paradoxically, in the region first reached by Alexander, Anatolia. We have seen that, in the allocation of satrapies, the task of occupying Cappadocia and Paphlagonia had been entrusted, perhaps not without hesitation, to Eumenes of Cardia, who was to be assisted by the satraps of the neighbouring regions, Antigonus Monophthalmus (Greater Phrygia) and Leonnatus (Hellespontine Phrygia). Whether from personal ambition or from reluctance to submit to the authority of a Greek, Antigonus for his part had refrained from action and Leonnatus, who had gone to help Antipater, had been killed. With Eumenes isolated, Perdiccas had gone himself to support him in 322 and had installed him in his Cappadocian province. The success of the enterprise, which served further to round off the empire only a year after Alexander’s death, increased the prestige and power of Perdiccas, and his ambition, and still more the impatience felt by some Macedonian satraps at having to accept his authority. This authority had, moreover, recently become more onerous: once Craterus had joined Antipater in Macedonia Perdiccas had not hesitated to claim for himself the title conferred a few weeks earlier on Craterus of prostates of the kings.?3 Here was the seed of the first conflict. Perdiccas’ main opponent was Antigonus, whom the chiliarch criticized sharply for his hostility to Eumenes. As the official, but hardly legitimate, ruler of Macedonian Asia, Perdiccas thus found himself more or less isolated in the face of suspicious and hostile subordinates. Only Eumenes was genuinely attached to him.
Matrimonial questions also arose to complicate Perdiccas’ situation still further. Antipater had three daughters and had opened negotiations about marriage with Perdiccas, Craterus and Ptolemy: in the case of the first two, to make them his sons-in-law was clearly, to Antipater’s mind, a way of cementing the ‘collegiate leadership’ which the events of 3 23 had placed in control of the empire. Perdiccas had therefore become engaged to Nicaea, Craterus agreed to marry Phila and Ptolemy accepted the hand of Eurydice. Antipater, however, had a redoubtable enemy in the person of the aged Olympias,*4 the mother of Alexander, and Olympias, from her native Epirus, where she lived in exile, devised a plan to play Perdiccas against Antipater: she offered the chiliarch the
2 Bengtson 1964, 1.95ff.: (A 6), but cf. Goukowsky 1978, 197: (A 19). 2% Hammond 1967, 558ff.: (D 26).
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 35
hand of her daughter Cleopatra, the sister of Alexander the Great and widow of Alexander the Molossian. Perdiccas was thus trapped between the promise he had given to Antipater, whose daughter was even then about to arrive at his headquarters, and the tempting visions conjured up by a marriage which would make him the posthumous son-in-law of Philip II, the posthumous brother-in-law of Alexander the Great and the uncle of the young Alexander IV. Had not Philip II come to power as the uncle of the legitimate heir? Perdiccas’ attitude seems to have been equivocal. He did not break off the engagement with Nicaea, but neither did he refuse the hand of Cleopatra who, in turn, set out for Asia, which she reached at the same time as Nicaea. Perdiccas, who thought he could still reach agreement with Antipater, married Nicaea. But when, having summoned Antigonus to appear and explain himself, he saw him join Antipater in Europe, Perdiccas realized that all hopes of an accommod- ation were gone. He repudiated Nicaea and married Cleopatra. This personal affront came as an addition to the reasons Antipater must already have had to mistrust Perdiccas, who could from this point be openly accused of aspiring to the throne — as was probably true.”
This is the first time, but not the last, that we find the female factor intervening in Hellenistic affairs. To stress, as some scholars have, that this is something utterly contrary to Greek traditions, according to which women played no part in political life (in the classical period at least), is of little interest: the political and diplomatic traditions of the classical city are no longer relevant here. The new world is one of personal and — already — dynastic politics.
A coalition, the first in a period which was to see so many, now united against Perdiccas all those disturbed by his ambitions:26 Antipater and Craterus, aroused by Antigonus; Lysimachus who, though immobilized by the long drawn-out war he was forced to wage against the barbarians in his Thracian province, controlled land communications between Macedonia and Asia; and, last, Ptolemy. In other words, Perdiccas, like all those who were to succeed him in the possession of these Asiatic territories, was threatened with a war on two fronts. No doubt judging his moral position rather weak in relation to Antipater and Craterus, more authentic defenders of dynastic legitimacy who also could command the military resources of the motherland, Perdiccas decided to make his first target Ptolemy, an apparently less formidable, though not negligible, opponent and one with whom he had a personal quarrel for his action in diverting Alexander’s remains to Egypt when Perdiccas had intended, perhaps against the last wishes of the deceased (the tradition is
% Diod. xviit.16.1-3; 22-35 25.3ff.; Arc. Diad. frs. 1.11; 213 26; Just. x111.6.1-7; Plut. Ewa. 3-4;
App. Mit. 8. 26 Diod. xviii.25.4; Just. x111.6.9.
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uncertain), to deposit them solemnly in the dynastic vault at Aegae in Macedonia*’ — probably with the intention of seizing power in Europe on the same occasion.
Ptolemy had not as yet played any notable part in these emerging conflicts. Prudent and skilful, he had solidly established his power in Egypt. He had also succeeded in making himself master of Cyrenaica by intervening in the political and social conflicts which divided the Greek cities of the country (322~321). With great skill he had avoided annexing the country to his Egyptian satrapy, but had left the Cyreneans a theoretical independence, granting them a constitution in which he made a place for himself as s¢rategos for life, so creating what was in effect a personal union between Egypt and Cyrenaica.*® Ptolemy had also very early established diplomatic relations with several petty Cypriot kings.” The subsequent period was soon to show that, from the beginning of his residence in Egypt, Ptolemy had been laying the foundations of his future policy, one of determined independence. By choosing him as a son-in-law alongside Perdiccas and Craterus, Antipater had no doubt shown that it was from the direction of Egypt that he expected the first attempt at secession. In addition, Ptolemy also enjoyed considerable financial resources, in the shape of the treasure of his predecessor Cleomenes of Naucratis, whose assassination he engineered at the precise moment of his break with Perdiccas. He suspected the Greek of being in secret communication with the chiliarch, and it is likely that, by making himself Perdiccas’ agent in Egypt, Cleomenes in fact hoped to be restored one day to his previous position as satrap.
At the beginning of 321, therefore, having failed to get the army to condemn Ptolemy, Perdiccas decided to march first against his southern enemy,°° leaving the government and defence of Asia Minor to Eumenes. But the expedition ran into both natural and artificial obstacles which denied it access to the valley of the Nile and forced it to mark time in the neighbourhood of Memphis. The result was a conspiracy at Perdiccas’ headquarters, and he was assassinated.3! This murder ended the campaign. On the following day the conspirators invited Ptolemy, who had immediately joined them, to assume the functions of Perdiccas and the guardianship of the kings. Ptolemy
27 The tradition is confused: Arr. Uuad. frs. 1. 25; 24.1; Paus. 1.6.3; Diod. xvrti.26—8. Cf, Seibert 1969, r1off.: (F 145); Errington 1976, 141ff.: (a 14).
28 Diod. xvit.19—-21; Arr. Déad. fr. 1.16-19; Just. x1n.6.20; Marm. Par. B11. Epigraphical text of the ‘Cyrene charter’: SEG 1x.1 (1938) no. 1; Glotz et a/. 1945, 281 and n. 88: (A 18); Machu 1951: (c 47); Bengtson 1967, 111.15 8ff.: (A 6); Pagliaro 1956, 101 fio(c 5 5); Fraser 1958, 1 20ff.: (B75); Volkmann 1959, 1609ff.: (Cc 74); Seibert 1969, 91ff.: (F 145); Laronde 1972: (C 43).
29 Arr. Diad. fr. 24. §6 (‘the Reitzenstein fragment’); Moser 1914, 12ff.: (F 139); Hill 1940, 15 6ff.: (p 144); Seibert 1969, 113~14: (F 145).
% Diod. xviit.25.6; 29.1-3; Just. xm1.6.10-17. 31 Diod. xvutt.33-6; Arr. Diad. fr. 1. 28-9; Just. x111.6.18-19; 8.1-2 and 10; Plut. Ewa. 5—7.
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DEATH OF ALEXANDER TO TRIPARADISUS 37
refused. Wisdom and prudence, certainly, made him wish to keep to the strictly Egyptian policy which he had begun to practise with success, and also a desire to lull suspicions by adopting an attitude of genuine modesty. But perhaps this refusal was prompted by another consider- ation as well, namely that Ptolemy, determined as he was to assert his independence — though without dramatic gestures — was not anxious to make himself the instrument for maintaining the unity of the empire, which he probably judged impossible and above all did not want.*?
While Perdiccas thus disappeared from the scene, his adversaries had lately failed in their attempt to subdue Eumenes in Asia Minor.® Craterus had even perished there in a major battle the site of which is unknown. These circumstances, which brought about the passing in the space of a few days of the only two surviving colleagues of Alexander with sufficient stature and authority to pull together the whole of his inheritance, allowed Eumenes to take possession of a large part of Anatolia.#4
A little later, though still in 321, or according to some in 320, the opponents of Perdiccas and Eumenes met at Triparadisus in northern Syria® to examine the new situation. The simultaneous disappearance of Perdiccas and Craterus, that is, of two of the members of that fragile triumvirate which had taken over or, more accurately, had been supposed to take over the direction of affairs, but had fallen apart in barely a year, clearly made necessary a reorganization of what was already no more than the shadow of an empire.?6 Since Ptolemy had declined the offer of the regency of the whole, the normal course was for this to be offered to Antipater, who certainly had more than one claim to it and who took on the functions of epimeletes of the kings. Nevertheless this concentration of supreme power did little to improve the situation. At the point events had reached, it is doubtful whether anyone could have stopped the rapid process of the disintegration of the empire, but no choice was better suited than that of Antipater to hasten the process still further. This is not to question either the personal capacities of Philip’s old collaborator or his devotion to the dynasty; Antipater had given ample proof of both. No, what made this choice ominous for the future was the fact that, while the seat of unrest and intrigue was in the conquered countries of the East, the theoretical centre of power was being once more transferred to Europe, where Antipater intended to take the kings — or the king, if it is true that Philip Arrhidaeus was sole
32 On Ptolemy’s coinage and the chronological difficulties of this period, see Will 1979, 1.39-40: (a 67).
3% Diod. xviti.29.4-32; Just. xm1.8.3-9; Plut. Ewa. 5—7; PSI xt1.1284 (Arrian?).
#4 Errington 1970: (C 22).
3% Schlumberger 1969: (C 60).
38 Diod. xviit.37-9; Arr. Diad. fr. 1.30-8; 42-4; App. Syr. 53; Just. xiv.t.t.
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king after Triparadisus.3’ Having always lived and served in Europe and having followed Eastern affairs merely from a distance and without sympathy, Antipater, who, moreover, was a very old man, would inevitably tend to let events take their course at a moment when there was no longer any sign of unitary feeling on the spot in Asia to resist the pressures of separatism. In Alexander’s lifetime Macedon, deprived of the royal presence, had ended by looking in fact like an appendage of the new empire. The return of the kings (under-age kings, too) to Macedon certainly did not reverse this situation, but further accentuated the break between the metropolis and the conquered lands. The unity of the empire was, no doubt, being maintained in theory, but the possible and predictable disappearance of the last of the Argeads would suffice to make this theoretical unity in turn vanish. In essence the appointment of Antipater as regent over the whole empire amounted more or less to returning Macedon to its situation before Alexander, that of a strictly European state. From this moment the profound weakness of Alexander’s unfinished work becomes apparent, a weakness which consisted essentially in the fact that old Macedon and the newly conquered countries were bound by nothing more than a personal union. Alexander’s empire was not a state, but an artificial aggregate of at least three states, Macedon, Egypt and ‘Asia’. Once Alexander had died without leaving an effective successor, the disintegration of this fragile structure was inevitable. We have seen that, even before Triparadisus, Ptolemy had more or less brought about the secession of Egypt. Macedon was currently tending to return to its traditional role as a Balkan kingdom. But, much more important, the arrangements made at Triparadisus contained in germ the dismemberment of the ‘kingdom of Asia’ itself.
The redistribution of Asian satrapies which was now carried out had the effect (apart from other measures of minor importance) of giving key roles to the two most ambitious and talented figures (apart from Eumenes) surviving from Alexander’s staff, Seleucus and Antigonus. Seleucus, one of Perdiccas’ murderers, who as yet had had no experience of territorial administration, was given Babylonia — a satrapy which might suggest certain ambitions to a governor with the makings of a politician:39 had not Alexander, as in Egypt and as the first Achaemenids had done before him in Babylon, assumed the old native kingship? Had he not also intended to give Babylon a place of prominence (like that of Alexandria) within his empire, if not to make it his capital? As for Antigonus Monophthalmus, whose old satrapies were restored, he was
3? Goukowsky 1978, 198: (4 19). 38 Errington 1976, 158-9: (A 14). 39 Funck 1974, 505ff.: (c 27).
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ANTIGONUS MONOPHTHALMUS 39
charged with waging the war against Eumenes of Cardia, whom the assembly had condemned to death immediately the fate of Craterus was known. For this purpose Antipater, in the name of the kings, had named Antigonus ‘s¢rategos of the royal forces’, a title which put at his disposal the military resources of the empire. In addition, Antipater had thought of entrusting Monophthalmus with the guardianship of the kings, but, rapidly made suspicious by the all too evident ambitions of the gentleman, the regent had decided, on the eve of his return to Europe, to take the kings with him, as was mentioned earlier. At this point he had conferred on Antigonus the office of ‘ strategos of Asia’, which gave the holder of this title more or less unlimited authority over Asian affairs and placed him, in relation to Antipater, in practically the same position as he, as strategos of Europe, had occupied in relation to Alexander” — but Antigonus did not have the loyalty or the disinterestedness of Antipater.
Antigonus charged in the name of the kings with waging the campaign against Eumenes, the last close partner in Alexander’s thought — here was a fine reversal of the situation. The break between Perdiccas and Monophthalmus had been brought about by the obstacles which the latter had placed in the way of the completion of Eumenes’ work in Cappadocia, and it was then Antigonus who had put himself at odds with the wishes of the central authority, represented by Perdiccas. Now, with Perdiccas defeated and dead, legitimacy and loyalty changed sides and it was Eumenes, the victim of his loyalty to Perdiccas, who appeared as a separatist and was placed under the imperial ban. In reality, despite the sanction given to this condemnation by Antipater, there was practically no more Argead legitimacy in Asia (further confirmation of the Macedonian withdrawal to Europe): Asia was now no more than the lists where rival ambitions were to clash.
If until the death of Perdiccas there could still be some hesitation about the fate of Alexander’s empire, this uncertainty was now removed. Triparadisus, two years after the Conqueror’s death, marks the passing of his work and his thought.
Il. THE PERIOD OF ANTIGONUS MONOPHTHALMUS (321-301)
The death of Perdiccas enabled a new, strong personality to make an appearance, Antigonus Monophthalmus, who for a period, from pure ambition and without any real concern for the Argead dynasty, was in turn to embody the unitary ideal. One would like to know more about the physiognomy of this great adventurer who almost succeeded where Perdiccas had failed from the start. Despite the lack of detail in the texts
4 Bengtson 1964, 1.96ff.: (A 6).
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relating to him, he is nonetheless one of the Diadochi best understood through his actions, which recall on the one hand the tireless energy of Alexander and on the other the political realism and cunning of Philip II. We shall therefore let his actions speak.
(a) From Triparadisus to the death of Eumenes (321-316)
We saw earlier that Antipater and the other Diadochi had given Antigonus the task of continuing the struggle against Eumenes of Cardia,4! whose victory over Craterus had given him possession of a large part of Asia Minor. Antigonus not only took up the task with vigour; in addition, wishing to round off the territories which constituted his province proper, he did not hesitate to look for any pretext to intervene against his colleagues in the other satrapies of Asia Minor. The result was that very quickly, and in defiance of the arrangements made at Triparadisus, he was in more or less sole control of vast areas of Anatolia.4? Eumenes had been driven back towards the east and forced to take refuge with a handful of men in the little Cappadocian fortress of Nora, where he was duly besieged.** But, at the moment when Antigonus might suppose that he had his opponent by the throat, one of the reversals of fortune in which this period is so abundant forced him to come to terms. The cause of this reversal was the death of Antipater.
The effect of the old regent’s death was to introduce a period of acute complications for Alexander’s inheritance and to open up new vistas for the ambitions of Monophthalmus. The first question thus raised was who would inherit the position of epimeletes of the two kings, Philip I] and Alexander IV. Antipater’s son Cassander felt that the position was his by right.“4 Antipater, however, had taken a different view and, judging that his son was too young to control the turbulent Macedonian satraps (particularly Antigonus, with whom Cassander had quarrelled as early as 321), he had appointed as his successor one of his companions of the older generation, the man he had left in charge of European affairs on his departure for Asia two years before, Polyperchon.* This old officer of Philip was more notable for his military talents than for his political and diplomatic ability. Feeling himself slighted, Cassander quickly broke with Polyperchon and crossed into Asia, where he formed a
On Eumenes: Vezin 1907: (c 71); Westlake 1954: (c 76); Briant 1972~3: (c 7).
42 Bengtson 1974, 1.106ff.: (a 6).
43 Diod. xviit.4o-2; 44-7; Arr. Diad. fr. 1. 39-41; Just. x1v.1—2.4; Plut. Ewa. 8.3-11.
4 Fortina 1965: (c 26); Goukowsky 1978, 94ff.: (A 19).
Diod. xv111.48.4~49.3; 545 Pluc. Phoc. 31.1; T. Lenschau, ‘Polyperchon (1)’, PW xx1.2 (1952) cols. 1797-1806.
2»
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coalition against the new regent which included Lysimachus and Antigonus, who were shortly afterwards joined by Ptolemy.
It is at this point that one realizes to what extent all accepted ideas are upset from this moment on. Antipater himself, beyond doubt the most loyal representative of the tradition, had acted ambivalently. If the fact of not having passed on his position to his son could be seen as a wise gesture (though in fact Cassander was to show himself infinitely superior to Polyperchon), above all in the sense that it avoided giving any basis for accusations of dynastic ambitions, on the other hand it is certain that, legally, Antipater had no right to appoint his successor and that by making Polyperchon epimeletes of the kings and so regent of the empire, he had acted autocratically.4¢ The illegality of the procedure was not what shocked the new masters of the empire, however, but the fact that the succession to Antipater aroused secret ambitions in some of them. Lysimachus, Macedon’s immediate neighbour, would certainly not have disdained the idea of one day restoring for his advantage the union of Macedon and Thrace, nor Antigonus above all that of ruling on both shores of the Aegean. The Macedonian mirage seems to have exercised such a powerful influence on Monophthalmus that he imprudently released Eumenes, in spite of having him at his mercy, and promised to give him back his satrapy and even more if he supported the venture. Eumenes, whose situation was desperate, hastened to accept; both, of course, were insincere.
As for Ptolemy, his participation in the struggle against Polyperchon had different motives. The death of Antipater gave him the opportunity to throw off the apparent modesty he had displayed so ostentatiously immediately after the death of Perdiccas. As soon as the news of the regent’s death reached him, trampling underfoot the promises of Triparadisus as Antigonus had done before him, he invaded the satrapy of Syria-Phoenicia.*’ This action is most important for an understanding of the ideas and policies of Ptolemy and shows (though some modern writers have denied this) the extent to which he had rapidly absorbed the political and strategic traditions of the land of Egypt in which he had established himself as ruler: while no more than a satrap, a high official theoretically subordinate to a central power, admittedly a distant and shadowy one, he fell upon this traditional land of conquest of the great independent Pharaohs. No doubt by acting in this way he was applying what he had learnt from the threat Perdiccas had used against him two years earlier: throughout time Palestine and Coele-Syria had formed Egypt’s defensive glacis on her Asian side, and provided her not only with more convenient and closer naval bases than those of Cyprus
48 Bengtson 1964, t. Goff.: (A 6). 47 Diod. xviit.q3; App. Syr. 52 (confused and inaccurate).
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(which Ptolemy did not yet control) but also with a continental base for eventual operations against northern Syria, Mesopotamia or Asia Minor. But the point to be emphasized above all in this study of the disintegration of Alexander’s empire is that by annexing these regions Ptolemy was showing clearly, on the morrow of Perdiccas’ failed offensive, that he was determined never again to be dislodged from the valley of the Nile. Nothing shows more clearly that Ptolemy was easily the first of the Diadochi to reveal in his actions a fully worked out policy —one probably worked out even before this year of 319: the fact that this first conquest of Syria-Palestine was, as we shall see, no more than ephemeral makes no difference.#8 So — to return to the coalition against Polyperchon — the Syrian venture was a challenge to the order which Polyperchon symbolized and as it could be foreseen that the new regent would find it difficult to keep his position it was important for Ptolemy to be on the side of his opponents.
Against so many enemies Polyperchon had few resources. But, to counter Cassander, who was already establishing a hold in Greece, he had the idea of playing the Greek card by offering the Greeks the prospect of an improvement in the unenviable lot which had been theirs since the Lamian War. In the name of Philip Arrhidaeus Polyperchon addressed a solemn proclamation to the Greek cities in which, in essence, he drew a veil over the unfortunate events of the Lamian War and announced that royal benevolence was granting a return to the situation existing in the reigns of Philip II and Alexander: this meant mainly the restoration of the constitutions which preceded the oligar- chies imposed by Antipater and maintained by his son, and the return of the exiles. Special favours were granted to certain cities, such as a promise to Athens of the return of Samos, though the return of Oropus was refused. It has often been held that this charter granted by Polyperchon was equivalent to a restoration of the Corinthian League;*® in fact, it has to be recognized that, in the text of the declaration which has come down to us,* with the possible exception of a vague reference to the achievements of Philip and Alexander in Greece and a passing mention of the ‘ peace’ on which the League of 338 was based, there is no reference to the legal status or the institutions of the League, which we know, moreover, to have been little more than a shadow at the end of Alexander’s reign. Rather than a restoration of the legal position of 338, this was a restoration of the actual position of 323. From a different angle, Polyperchon’s proclamation has often been compared with Antigonus’ famous appeal to the liberty of the Greeks, which we shall
48 Moser 1914, 23ff.: (F 139); Volkmann 1959, 1611ff.: (C 74); Seibert 1969, 133ff.: (F 145). 4 Larsen 1925~6: (A 31). ® Diod. xvuit.56.
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soon come to, but this comparison is inaccurate, although the aim pursued in turn by Polyperchon and by Antigonus (to win the support of the Greek cities and to detach them from Cassander) was the same. If Polyperchon had proclaimed the liberty of the cities, he would have recognized de facto the justice of their revolt in 323; in fact his proclamation was an amnesty, which reminded the Greeks of their fault only to pardon it. Polyperchon’s action is thus completely original, without antecedent and without sequel.*!
And also without much effect. If Polyperchon expected an explosion of enthusiasm and gratitude from the Greeks, he was mistaken. His policy had no more than mixed success. At Athens, in particular, a small expedition was necessary to restore the democracy despite the presence in Piraeus of a garrison of Cassander. Even then, the democracy survived no longer than the time necessary for a bloody settling of accounts (which cost Phocion his life), because the democrats were soon forced by Polyperchon’s failures to come to terms with Cassander’s troops and with the oligarchs who had taken refuge with them. One of the latter, Demetrius of Phalerum, succeeded in organizing the transition with skill and moderation. At the beginning of 317 Athens concluded a treaty with Cassander the text of which, preserved by Diodorus (xviil.74.3), is characteristic of the new era: the Athenians are to keep their city, their territory, their revenues, their boats ‘and everything else’ ~ but in friendship and alliance with Cassander, who also reserves the right to occupy Munychia ‘ until the end of the war against the kings’. A property-based franchise, but quite broadly based, was substituted for the democracy: in other words, Cassander imposed on Athens the system of his choice, one which kept power in the hands of that propertied class which already had a long history of sympathy with Macedon. But better — or worse — was to come: ‘as epimeletes of the city an Athenian citizen of Cassander’s choice would be installed’, and Diodorus concludes, with what must be involuntary irony, ‘Demetrius of Phalerum was elected’, the term used implying a formal election by the citizens, presumably by this new restricted citizen body. Athens was to live for a decade under this régime of controlled autonomy. Demetrius of Phalerum, a worthy representative of that Peripatetic intelligentsia which asked nothing better than to turn from the theory of politics to its practice, gave his country, in its mood of self-absorption in a sort of philosophical utopia, a period of excellent internal administ- ration with a touch of ‘ moral order’, in accordance with the more or less genuinely Solonian ideal which has inspired conservative circles since the beginning of the century. It was an ideal which, as we shall see, was
51 Heuss 1938, 142ff.: (c 41).
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never shared by the majority, but as long as Cassander was in charge the majority had no choice but to get used to it.52
Seeing Athens escape from his grasp seriously reduced Polyperchon’s chances of solidly establishing his influence over Greece. Nor was it long before his power began to*collapse even in Macedon. After the destruction of his fleet by that of Antigonus in the Straits and Cassander’s rapid recovery in Greece,®3 Polyperchon fell back on the Peloponnese, where his ‘liberal’ policy had had a slightly better response than in central Greece.*4
This was the beginning of the bloody drama in which the Argead dynasty, already reduced to a shadowy existence, was finally to disappear. Polyperchon had taken with him the little Alexander IV, but Eurydice, the extremely clear-headed wife of the retarded Philip IIT, had sided with Cassander and so the two kings were in opposite camps. The ambitious and scheming Eurydice had Cassander proclaimed regent (spring 317),°> clearly with the intention of seizing the royal power herself, which could only be at the expense of the infant Alexander. Polyperchon, for his part, ever since the death of Antipater and in order to give some prestige to his power, had had the idea of recalling from Epirus the aged Olympias, whom Antipater had spared no effort to keep at a distance from Macedon. Olympias had hesitated long, but at the news of Eurydice’s schemes she hastened towards Macedon at the head of an Epirote army and some troops of Polyperchon, and her grandson Alexander IV was brought to her. Olympias succeeded in taking possession of the persons of Eurydice and Philip HI Arrhidaeus, whom she immediately had killed (autumn 317), thereby unwisely satisfying old resentments (Philip ITI was a bastard of Philip II); one of Cassander’s brothers met the same fate, together with a hundred or so Macedonian nobles. Cassander himself returned in haste from the Peloponnese, where he had been campaigning against Polyperchon’s supporters, and succeeded in having Olympias handed over to him. Her crime had ranged all Macedon against her, the assembly of the army condemned her to death and she was executed in her turn.5® Thus at the beginning of 316 the infant Alexander IV was left sole king — but he was little more than a hostage in the hands of the new master of Macedon, Cassander, who lost no time in attempting to assert the legitimacy of his own power by organizing a solemn royal funeral for Philip III and Eurydice and
582 Ferguson 1911, 30ff.: (D 89); Cloché 1923-4: (C 10); Lenschau 1941, 45 8ff.: (c 44); Bayer 1942: (c 5); Colombini 1965: (c 13); Mossé 1969, 155ff.: (A 43); Gehrke 1976, 105ff.: (c 29).
53 Engel 1973: (c 21).
5 Diod. xvitt.5 5-57-13 64-75; Polyaenus, Sfrat. 1v.6.8. On Demetrius of Phalerum: Diog. Laert. v.75-85; Suda, s.v. 55 Just. xIv.5.1-3.
56 Granier 1931, 87ff.: (D 23); Errington 1978, 118-19: (D 17).
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marrying a half-sister of Alexander the Great, that is, attaching himself personally to the dynasty: this marriage opened up possibilities for him whose realization was highly likely (though not necessarily) to be at the expense of the little king, now his nephew.*?
While these conflicts were taking place in Europe a more important contest was being fought in Asia. We have seen*® that Eumenes had accepted Antigonus’ self-seeking proposals merely to get himself out of a tight corner; in fact, far from allying himself with Monophthalmus against Polyperchon, he had immediately resumed his own activities, following the ideas of Perdiccas and, probably, of Alexander himself. This made it natural for Polyperchon now to get in touch with Eumenes and, since he still regarded himself as regent, to offer him in the name of the kings the position of strategos of Asia which Antipater had formerly conferred on Antigonus. There were thus, for a few months, two rival regents in Europe and two rival s/rafegoi in Asia — though, admittedly, Polyperchon and Eumenes were recognized by almost no one but each other. But Eumenes had bad luck with his allies: the failure of Polyperchon and his confinement to the Peloponnese left Eumenes practically isolated, as the death of Perdiccas had isolated him. He nevertheless pursued a quite astonishing military adventure in which he revealed talents rare in men who have made their careers at a desk, an adventure which had already taken him, by 318, from Asia Minor to Phoenicia, where he had seized some of Ptolemy’s recent conquests, and was now taking him into Iran. Detail is of little importance here in view of the ultimate failure of these campaigns: hunted by Antigonus, Eumenes was finally surrendered by his troops, tried, condemned and executed (316).59 These events took place against a background of revolts and rivalries among Iranian satraps — a state of anarchy to which Antigonus, the new sole master of the ‘upper satrapies’, attempted to put a temporary stop.
Eumenes had doubtless been the last faithful follower of Alexander’s ideas, and the cult of Alexander (or at least of Alexander’s royal insignia) had helped him to rekindle the failing enthusiasm of his troops. For Eumenes, this fidelity to Alexander’s ideas probably did not mean unconditional loyalty to the Argead dynasty. In his attitude to the dynasty he had always manoeuvred, and if in the end he posed as the defender of Alexander’s empire and the champion of dynastic legi- timacy, he also had no other way of retaining any sort of position for himself: his personal ambitions were perhaps less pure than they seemed
57 Diod. xv1i1.49.43 §7-2; §8-2-4; 65.1; XIX.11; 35-6; 49-52.5; Just. xIv.5.8-6. 58 See above, p. 41.
59 Diod. xviil.5 7.363; 73.2ff.; XIX.12-34; 37-44.2.
© Diod. x1x.44.4-5; 46-8; Bengtson 1964, 1.180ff.: (a 6).
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46 2 THE SUCCESSION TO ALEXANDER
and than modern historians have sometimes thought. With the departure of Eumenes, it was the turn of Antigonus to take up the unitary cause — but on his own account this time and without any real consideration for the last survivor of the Argead line. This was enough for the constellation to shift once more: the Diadochi (with the exception of Polyperchon, as we shall see) were now united against the aged Monophthalmus.
(b) The first phase of the struggle against Antigonus (316-311)
Antigonus’ victory over Eumenes had given him control of almost all the regions between Asia Minor and Iran inclusive, an outcome which the negotiators of Triparadisus had not foreseen. In these countries Antigonus appointed governors chosen from among his loyal sup- porters. Then, in a surprise attack on Babylonia,®! he forced Seleucus to abandon his province (apparently spring 315). Seleucus fled for safety to Ptolemy; his stubborn desire to win back his satrapy made him one of the lynchpins of the coalition against the new conqueror.®
As Antigonus advanced deeper into northern Syria he was met by an embassy from Lysimachus, Ptolemy and Cassander carrying an ulti- matum in the following terms:§? Monophthalmus was immediately to return Babylonia to Seleucus, abandon the whole of Syria to Ptolemy, return Hellespontine Phrygia to Lysimachus (who had never possessed itand would thereby have become master of the Straits), and, lastly, cede Cappadocia and Lycia to Cassander (this last point has provoked many discussions,™ but there is no reason to doubt that Cassander may have had Asian ambitions).® In addition he was invited to share Eumenes’ treasure with the other Diadochi. The legal justification for these demands was that the war against Eumenes, with which Antigonus had been entrusted at Triparadisus, had been a joint venture and that, consequently, the spoils of the former archivist should be shared among all; further, Antigonus had no right to deprive of their territories satraps who had not supported Eumenes. In reality this ultimatum was a poor disguise for ambitions which clashed with those of the man to whom it was addressed and it is understandable that Antigonus should have rejected it and accepted war. Accordingly, he methodically occupied all the settlements of southern Syria, except Tyre, where the Ptolemaic garrison offered effective resistance; then, with tireless activity, he seized
8 Diod. x1x.55.6; Bengtson 1964, I.111ff.: (A 6).
8 Hauben 1975, 83ff.: (c 37).
8 Diod. x1x.57.1; 85.3; Just. xv.1.2; App. Syr. 53.
Was it Lycia or Cilicia — or Lydia? To Cassander or Asander? Cf. Tarn 1927, 484, n. 1: (c 68); Aucello 1957: (c 3); Fortina 1965, 5 4ff.: (c 26); Wehrli 1969, 44ff.: (c 75); W6rrle 1977, 48: (B 178); Wil 1979, 1.55-G: (A 67). 6 Braunert 1967, 13ff.: (H 25).
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all of Asia Minor he did not already control, from Bithynia to Caria.® At the same time he formed an alliance with his former adversary Polyperchon, whom he appointed sfrategos of the Peloponnese, a rapprochement which the breach between Antigonus and Cassander made natural.®
In 315, at Tyre, where he had gone to take charge of operations, Antigonus, not content to extend his success in practical terms, also gave his claims a political and legal formulation. A manifesto® announced to the world that the assembly of his army had tried and condemned Cassander for various misdeeds, the most important of which were the murder of Olympias (who, as we know, had herself been condemned by Cassander’s army for the murder of Philip III) and the detention of Alexander IV and his mother Roxane; further, that the same assembly had proclaimed Antigonus epimeletes of the king (a regency which he would thus be able to add to his command of Asia); and finally, that if Cassander refused to submit he would be treated as an enemy. This was the beginning of the battle to the death between Antigonus and Cassander: it was to last thirteen years.
The manifesto which announced Antigonus’ new claims and the condemnation of Cassander contained a final article, which boldly proclaimed that the Greek cities were to be free, autonomous and ungarrisoned.” This exercise in ‘psychological warfare’, as it would be called today, was directed mainly against Cassander, who held central Greece, and was intended to detach from him and to draw into Monophthalmus’ camp the cities which had fallen into the power of the master of Macedon: the move was clear, and quite fair.
Ptolemy, however, learning of this document, immediately published another in the same terms, ‘wishing the Greeks to know that he had no less concern than Antigonus for their autonomy’, says Diodorus. Coming from Ptolemy, who also controlled Greek cities, this action might well seem a sham; on the other hand, it also contained an ambiguity, since Ptolemy was an ally of Cassander and the latter, to all appearances, would be the first victim of its proclamations. This total disregard on Ptolemy’s part for the interests of his ally can be explained only if we accept that he saw further than the present moment. In the growing conflict between Antigonus and Cassander, the victor, whoever he was, would be master of Macedonia and a candidate for the regency of Alexander’s inheritance, and thus for authority over Egypt as
6 Diod. x1x.58ff. 87 Diod. xIx.6o.1.
® Or only in 314: Errington 1977: (C 24).
® Diod. x1x.61.1~3; Just. xv.1.3; Manni 1951, 99ff.: (c 48).
® Heuss 1938, 146-52: (c 41); Cloché 1948, 108-12: (c 11); Simpson 1959, 380ff-: (c 65); Wehrli 1969, 105ff.: (c 75).
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over the other satrapies. The victor, whoever he was, would therefore be Prolemy’s enemy. And having realized (from Antigonus’ actions) that the freedom of the Greek cities would be the best obstacle to place in the path of the master of Macedon, Ptolemy was already taking his place among the ‘disinterested’ defenders of those liberties.
It goes without saying that in itself the freedom of the Greek cities was of little interest to either Antigonus or Ptolemy. It was a propaganda theme which makes its appearance in this period and recurs year in year out until the intervention of the Romans, who use it in their turn. Nevertheless it must be stressed here at the outset that the only reason why this theme could play sucha role and be so often repeated was that it corresponded to an important political problem which was to remain a live issue throughout the Hellenistic period. That problem was the position which the Greek cities could and should occupy within the new territorial and monarchical states which were taking shape in the period we have now reached. In other words, it was the problem of the adaptation of the most widespread ancient Greek political formula to a new political form.
In the circumstances of 315 Ptolemy did nothing to translate his completely theoretical proclamation into fact. This was not the case with Antigonus, who made clever play with the freedom of the cities. When there were signs of unrest in the Aegean islands, and Delos and Imbros rejected the control.of an Athens in thrall to Cassander, Antigonus encouraged and gave his support to the establishment of a body which was to have some importance, the &oinon of the Nesiotes (the Confederation of the Cycladic Islanders). These circumstances and this date (315-14) are preferable to the date 308 and Ptolemaic patronage, which have sometimes been proposed for the foundation of this confederation.”! At the same time Antigonus sent agents, money and troops to Greece in an effort to raise the country against Cassander:” his own nephew Polemaeus was among those in charge of the operation.”
Antigonus’ establishment of his patronage over the islands and the occupation of a few places in Greece were not, however, enough to give Antigonus victory. Fundamentally Monophthalmus was in the same position as Perdiccas in 321 and facing the same strategic problem, being forced to fight on two fronts, whereas Cassander had simply replaced his father on the north-western front. But the situation was made more complicated than in the time of Perdiccas and Antipater by the presence
1 Durrbach 1907: (c 19); Guggenmos 1929, 12ff.: (C 32); Laidlaw 1933, 95ff.: (D 145); Wehrli 1969, 113ff.: (C 75); Merker 1970, 141 n. 2: (C 50); Hauben 1975, 28ff., 36ff., ro1ff.: (C 37).
7% Newell 1923: (B 246); Simpson 1955: (c 64); Geagan 1968: (B 80); Bakhuizen 1970, 112f.: (B 182); Hauben 1975, 93ff.:(c 37). Thechronology of this period is difficult to establish with certainty and views differ: Hauben 1973: (c 35) (criticizing Bakhuizen 1970, iGoff.: (B 182)); Errington 1977: (c 24). 73 Diod. x1x.61.3-4; 62.1-2; 62.9; 68.3—-4.
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of Polyperchon in the Peloponnese: the rapprochement of Antigonus and Polyperchon was, as we have seen, in the order of things.
No doubt with Perdiccas’ unfortunate experience in mind, Anti- gonus chose to press the main northern offensive himself to give Lysimachus a fright in Thrace and go on to attack Cassander in Macedon itself, while his generals undermined his power in Greece.”4 The attack on Egypt would then be simple, and in the meantime Antigonus’ young son Demetrius (the future Poliorcetes) was given the task of looking after Syria-Palestine. The precaution was clearly necessary for it was easy to see that among Antigonus’ enemies Ptolemy had a particular aim, namely to recover control of the satrapy of Syria-Phoenicia which he had conquered for the first time in 319 but which Eumenes and then Antigonus had stolen from him.
While Antigonus was making his preparations and trying in vain, by diplomacy and by arms, to force the barrier which Lysimachus’ possessions constituted to his plans for an offensive against Macedon, Ptolemy, as was his habit, acted without haste. He strengthened his influence in Cyprus (though Antigonus put up fierce opposition here), on the southern coasts of Asia Minor (Caria), and tried without much success to occupy ports in Ionia.75 It now seems doubtful whether he formed an alliance with Rhodes as early as 315, as had been thought.”6 However, he hesitated to attack the formidable Monophthalmus directly; and a revolt in Cyrene”? and another in Cyprus’ also tied his hands until the end of 313. It was not until 312 that, at the insistence of Seleucus, who was impatient to recover Babylonia, he took the decision to attack Demetrius.”? Demetrius was overwhelmed at Gaza,® and this defeat, which allowed Seleucus to strike into Mesopotamia, forced Antigonus to abandon his northern projects in order to head off Ptolemy — who lost no time in getting back to Egypt.
Seleucus, however, proved so enterprising in Mesopotamia,®! and showed signs of doing the same in Iran, that Antigonus preferred to seek terms.
As a result peace was agreed in conditions which have been much discussed by modern writers and are still not totally clear.8* The previous years had already seen attempts at negotiation:®? rather than a homogeneous coalition, Antigonus faced two groups of opponents
74 On European affairs, the details of which have been ignored here, cf. Diod. x1x.63—64.4; 66~-68.1; 74; 75-6-8; 77-8; 87-9.
% Diod. xix.68-9; 75; 79-6-80.2. 76 Hauben 1977: (C 39).
7 Will 1979, 1.60: (A 67). 78 Diod. x1x.79. 1-4. Diod. x1x.80—-6; 93; Just. xv.1.6-9; Plut. Den. 5-6.
% Seibert 1969, 164ff.: (F 145).
81 Diod. x1x.90-2; Plut. Deny. 7.2-3. On the problem of the date of the foundation of Seleuceia- on-the-Tigris (311, 306, 3002), bibliography in Will 1979, 1.601: (a 67).
8 Simpson 1954: (c 63); Wehrli 1969, 52ff.: (c 75). 83 Diod. x1x.64.8; 75.6.
3
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(Ptolemy and Seleucus on the one hand and Cassander and Lysimachus on the other), and it was in his interest to separate the two groups by making a separate peace with one or the other. As early as 314 a conference had taken place between Antigonus and Ptolemy, then, at the beginning of 312, another between Antigonus and Cassander. They got nowhere; Antigonus’ demands (which can only be guessed at) were probably excessive. After Gaza Antigonus reopened negotiations with Cassander and Lysimachus and, no doubt more modest this time, succeeded in reaching agreement. Ptolemy, finding little pleasure in the prospect of a concentration of Antigonid forces in the south, made haste to join the peace, and a joint treaty was sworn in 311. The articles (if not the actual text) have been preserved:® Cassander remained strategos of Europe until Alexander IV attained his majority, which amounts to saying that he was to remain epimeletes of the young king, the very point on which Antigonus had challenged him in 315. Lysimachus remained master of Thrace and Ptolemy of Egypt; Antigonus received power over ‘all Asia’. These clauses, far removed from the claims announced by Antigonus in 315, were essentially, taken literally, a ratification of the status quo. Taken literally, since in fact Antigonus was no longer master of ‘all Asia’, and this raises the question of the fate of Seleucus. Seleucus does not figure in the treaty (and nor does Polyperchon), which evidently means that the peace of 311 did not include him. Cassander and Lysimachus, the first to negotiate, probably ignored him. In the case of Ptolemy, who had been the host and protector of Seleucus for years, the matter is more surprising at first sight, but comprehensible on reflection: when Ptolemy acceded to the peace Seleucus was already conquering the “upper satrapies’ and no longer needed protection. Ptolemy thus did not betray him by coming to terms with Antigonus. Cassander and Lysimachus may have been showing a certain indifference to Seleucus by abandoning ‘all Asia’ to Monophthalmus; for Ptolemy this clause can have been no more than form, both because he was following Seleucus’ progress with sympathy and because secretly he had not abandoned his ambitions in Syria. Whatever the truth, Antigonus and Seleucus remained at war, and that war was to last until 309/8.
Besides these territorial arrangements, two clauses in the treaty of 311 deserve particular attention. The treaty was still, officially, an arrange- ment for the management of Alexander’s legacy, and not a division of that legacy. The legitimacy of the little Alexander IV was still maintained — but this was certainly no more than a fiction, and a fiction not destined to survive the peace of 311. The clause which assigned the ‘generalship of Europe’ to Cassander stipulated, as we have seen, that
8 Diod. xtXx.105.
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this arrangement was to last until the king should come of age. It is likely that none of the parties seriously envisaged this event taking place — but it was a matter of winning time. Nevertheless this clause was the death sentence of Alexander the Great’s son since Cassander, having no desire to see the appointed day arrive, lost no time in bringing matters to a head and by 310 had presented his colleagues with a fait accompli by arranging the assassination of Alexander IV and his mother, who had been entrusted to his care.85 We may imagine that this elimination of the direct Argead line by the efforts of the son of the dynasty’s most loyal servant was received with a secret satisfaction by the former lieutenants of the victim’s father:8° henceforth no legal obstacle stood in the path of their ambition; henceforth all were equal and no argument could be used to challenge the rights of the strongest. There remained, it is true, a sister and a bastard of Alexander the Great, but it would not be long before they were eliminated in their turn.
Finally, a last clause of the treaty of 311 reaffirmed the right of the Greek cities to autonomy. Under its generously Platonic appearance, this clause was perhaps the most insidious of this whole diplomatic instrument. All the parties had established their control over Greek cities — in Greece (Cassander), in Thrace (Lysimachus),®? in Asia Minor and the islands (Antigonus), in Cyrenaica8® and Cyprus (Ptolemy) — and it is clear that none of them intended to let his cities return to independence, which allowed each to find, whenever he might wish, a casus belli to use against the others. Antigonus, however, whom it is impossible not to see as the inspiration behind this clause (as his proclamation of 315 suggests), made a great show of translating it into the realm of fact. He sent a letter to the cities under his authority (preserved only in an inscription from Scepsis in the Troad)® in which he announced the welcome return of peace and explained the motives for his policy with self-righteous emphasis on his concern for the cities (but omitted his son’s defeat at Gaza). Most important, as well as confirming the text of the treaty given by Diodorus, the letter adds a detail of which we would otherwise be ignorant: the cities were invited to join together to defend their freedom and autonomy and to bind themselves to this by an oath as ‘those in power’ had done. It looks (though it is not certain) as if this is evidence of the establishment of, or of an attempt to establish, a federation of autonomous Greek cities within the emerging ‘dynastic’ states and guaranteed by them. On the other hand it is odd that this addition to the clause about the freedom of the cities should be preserved
8 On Cassander’s motives see Bendinelli 1965: (B 3) and Goukowsky 1978, 109ff.: (A 19). 88 Though Alexander IV was recognized in Egypt until 305/4 (Atzler 1972: (B 280)).
87 Will 1979, 1.65: (A 67). 88 Will 1960, 369ff.: (c 77).
8 OGIS 5=RC 1. Cf. Heuss 1938, 153ff.: (C 41); Simpson 1959; (C 65).
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only in Antigonus’ letter, and we may wonder whether this was not a measure taken purely for internal use in Asia Minor and the islands (already organized in a federation, as we have seen) by Antigonus alone in his anxiety to play his role of defender of Greek liberties, if not to the end,® at least as far as possible. Be that as it may, it is obvious that Monophthalmus would not have tolerated any attempt by the cities to use their solemnly proclaimed freedom against him, but his skill consisted precisely in showing himself sufficiently liberal for the cities to identify their interests with his. This document is important for an understanding of Antigonus: it shows that this rude warrior of almost uncontrollable ambition was also a subtle politician — one thinks of Philip II.
A final remark on the treaty of 311. It shows clearly that from this point, despite the fiction of Argead kingship, which continued to exist for a further year, there were in fact five states in the place of Alexander’s empire. But there was probably still one man, Antigonus, who aspired to merge these five states once more into one. It required the removal of Antigonus to prevent the fragmentation of the empire from ever again being seriously challenged and to allow the real history of the Hellenistic states to begin: this was to take another ten years.
(c) The second phase of the struggle against Antigonus (311-301)
The period from the peace of 311 to the fall of Antigonus is complex in the extreme because the advances and retreats of the five fragments of Alexander’s empire took place in theatres stretching from the Adriatic to the Indus. Let us try to introduce some order, geographical as well as chronological, into all this. The best course, to get a clear view, is to place ourselves in Antigonus’ position, all the more since it is his activities which give everything else what coherence it has. The peace of 311, while at root a defeat for Antigonus, made his territories the key to Alexander’s legacy, the centre from which new attempts at expansion came and against which attempts at resistance were directed. Even if some episodes independent of this central seat of the politics of the period prove to have a certain importance, they will here be kept in the background for clarity of exposition.
We have seen that Seleucus did not join in the peace of 311. Having regained control of Babylonia as early as 312 and apparently without too much difficulty, he established himself here in genuine independence (this was to be the starting date for the ‘Seleucid era’),®! even if he did
® On Antigonus’ policy towards the cities see the documents and related bibliography in Will
1979, 1-64-5: (A 67). 91 Sachs and Wiseman 1954, 205: (E 49); Aymard 1955, 105: (& 2). There is a summary of the problem in Will 1979, 1.67: (A 67).
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not at this stage adopt the local royal title (contrary to what has often been thought). From Babylonia he had set out on the conquest of the ‘upper satrapies’ (the term generally used for the Iranian satrapies) which Antigonus had held since his victory over Eumenes in 316. It seems, moreover, that the memory of Eumenes was not completely dead in these remote regions, and that Seleucus found ways of using it against Antigonus. For Antigonus, consequently, the most urgent task was to take advantage of the precarious calm ensured by peace in the West to try co rid himself of the energetic Seleucus. In this he failed completely. The details are far from being known exactly, but it is certain that after being defeated by Seleucus in an important battle of which neither the location nor the date (though it must have been 309/8) has been preserved, he had to abandon Iran. A treaty was probably concluded between the two opponents because from 308 we find Seleucus involved even further east in a contest with the Mauryan ruler of India, Chandragupta, which implies that by then he was no longer embroiled with Antigonus. And, conversely, from this same date of 308 we find Antigonus involved in Western affairs, which implies that he had ended his struggle with Seleucus.%
That the peace of 311 was only a truce hardly needs saying — at least as regards Antigonus and Ptolemy. Certainly, while Cassander and Lysimachus might feel satisfied at having their claims confirmed, in the former case on Macedon and its dependencies, in the latter on Thrace, it is quite clear that Antigonus’ ambitions included the conquest of Macedon (which inevitably ranged the others against him) and that Ptolemy had not given up his interest in the satrapy of Syria-Phoenicia, even if there is doubt about whether he aspired to absolute supremacy.%4 For both control of the sea was a condition of success. Both also possessed solid advantages in the eastern Mediterranean. Ptolemy was established in Cyprus,®® where, in 310, he appointed as strategos and governor his own brother Menelaus.* Moreover, it was probably at this point that Ptolemy made an alliance with a Greek state which now began to play a major part in Mediterranean affairs, one of the last truly independent and sovereign cities of the old Hellenic world, Rhodes. The date of this alliance is not known. It is not definitely attested until 306,% but then in terms which suggest that it had been in existence for some time, though it is impossible that it should go back to the proclamation of Greek liberties in 315.98 Ptolemy thus held, directly or by alliance, the
% So Bikerman 1938, 12 n.5: (E 6); 1944, 74ff.: (E 7); Funck 1974: (c 27).
8 Diod. x1x.go-2; Plut. Dem. 18.2; App. Syr. 54 (274~-5)3 55 (278).
4 So Seibert 1969, 176ff.: (F 145). Contra, O. Miller 1973, 62: (c 51).
85 Cf. most recently Gesche 1974: (C 30); Bagnall 1976, 39ff.: (F 204). There is a summary of the problem in Will 1979, 1.72: (A 67).
% Diod. xx.21. 97 Diod. xx.46.6. % Hauben 1977: (C 39).
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two main island bases bordering on Antigonus’ territory. It was also since 315 that Antigonus had been protector of the Confederation of the Nesiotes and as a result was in possession of the ‘bridge’ which separated his territory from European Greece and Macedon. In addition, he controlled the Phoenician ports, and, despite his solemn guarantee of Greek freedom, the ports of Asia Minor were in practice his. This whole area of the islands and the littoral, divided in this way between Ptolemy and Antigonus, could not but be an area of conflicts. The clause of the treaty of 311 dealing with the freedom of the cities was there to provide pretexts: as early as 310 Ptolemy accused Antigonus (at the time detained in the East by his struggle with Seleucus) of encroaching on that freedom by installing garrisons in certain cities and himself took possession of a number of places,®* notably the island of Cos, where he placed his headquarters, which proves that his interest at this time was directed towards the Aegean.! It is reasonable to suppose that this sudden shift in the situation in the Mediterranean was one factor which made Antigonus decide to draw the conclusion from his Iranian failures and make terms with Seleucus.
Nevertheless the outbreak of the struggle between Ptolemy and Antigonus was to be delayed, as the result of a change in the situation in European Greece. Hitherto Cassander had been seriously embarrassed in Greece by the presence of his old rival Polyperchon in the Peloponnese. In 309 or 308, however, when Polyperchon had managed to send an advance force as far as the borders of Macedon with the intention of there proclaiming king a bastard (real or supposed) of Alexander the Great by the name of Heracles, Cassander judged it more expedient to be reconciled with Polyperchon, to whom he abandoned the Peloponnese and gave the title strategos,!°! the young Heracles being sacrificed in the process.1°? Whatever chance the least weak of the Greek cities had had hitherto of playing off Cassander against Polyperchon and vice versa, they now lost; against the newly reconciled pair the Greeks needed outside support. Antigonus, the certified defender of Greek liberties, was indeed maintaining in Greece the troops which had formerly gone there to support Polyperchon, but his representative in Europe, his nephew Polemaeus,!® had just betrayed him and offered his services to Cassander as a prelude to opening discussions with Ptolemy, who summoned him to Cos. Polemaeus must have given Ptolemy precious details of the situation in Europe. It is difficult to imagine a
% All the documents are of uncertain date. Miletus: RC 14; Seibert 1971, 159ff.: (F 146); H. Miller 1976, 74ff.: (B 112); Wrrle 1977, 55ff.: (B 178); lasos: Pugliese Carratelli 1967-8, 437ff.: (B 122); J. and L. Robert, Bull. épig. 1971, no. 620. Lycia: Worrle 1977, 43ff.: (B 178).
100 Diod. xx.19.3ff.: 27; Plut. Dem. 7.3. 101 Bengtson 1964, 1.136ff.: (A 6).
102 Diod. xx.20; 28; Just. xv.2.3-5. 103 Bakhuizen 1970, 112ff.: (B 182).
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more confused situation — but, to compound the confusion, Ptolemy had Polemaeus murdered and came to an agreement with Demetrius, who was then the representative in Asia Minor of his father Antigonus. The reasons which may have made Antigonus seek a rapprochement with Ptolemy in this way are easy to understand: he could not tolerate a situation in which Ptolemy intervened in Greece on his own but he was powerless to prevent him — so the ‘liberation’ of Greece would bea joint operation. As for Ptolemy, he no doubt exacted a price for this agreement in the recognition of the places he had just seized on the coasts of Asia Minor.
In fact these considerations are not sutticient to explain this reversal of alliances from Ptolemy’s point of view: for him to have been prepared to be reconciled with his most natural and immediate enemies and quarrel with Cassander, other factors must have been involved, and these are perhaps to be found in the fact that it was at this moment that Ptolemy’s representative in Cyrenaica, Ophellas, deciding in his turn to play his own game, embarked on a campaign against Carthage in concert with Agathocles of Syracuse and began to recruit troops in Greece and particularly in Athens, in other words, in the area under Cassander’s influence. Ptolemy, no doubt informed by Polemaeus, may have feared that Cassander would give indirect support to Ophellas’ ambitions in Cyrenaica and the eventual formation of an African state on Egypt’s western flank.10
A large Egyptian expedition therefore landed in the Peloponnese in 308.106 Ptolemy seems to have had the intention of forming a federation of Greek cities (a revival of Philip II’s League of Corinth?), but his appeal, accompanied by appeals for money and provisions, met little success. He did not insist, made his peace with Cassander (who no doubt supplied all the balm his feelings required) and withdrew his army, though not without leaving garrisons in a number of places (Corinth, Sicyon, Megara and others), a tactless act on the part of a ‘liberator’ of Greece.107
Antigonus sent his son Demetrius to Athens.!°° The moment was opportune since Cassander was occupied with a campaign towards Epirus. Demetrius was welcomed as a divine liberator by the en- thusiastic Athenians (307),!® and Demetrius of Phalerum, Cassander’s
104 Suda, s.v. Demetrios (cf. SUVA. 111.433).
105 Will 1964: (C 78) (but contra, Bakhuizen 1970, 126; (B 182); Laronde 1971: (C 42)).
106 Diod. xx.37.1-2; Suda, loc. cit.
107 Moser 1914, 37ff.: (F 139); Kolbe 1916, 5 30ff.: (F 134); Fritze 1917, 20ff.: (F 131); Bengtson 1964, 1.142ff.: (a 6).
108 Diod. xx.45—46.5; Plut. Dem. 8-14; Suda, loc. cit., Ferguson 1911, 95ff.: (D 89).
109 Taeger 1957, 1.264ff.: (1 78); Cerfaux and Tondriau 1957, 173f.:(1 18);.Habicht 1970, 44ff., 255: (1 29).
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protégé, went into exile.!!° The oligarchy supported by Cassander gave way to a restored democracy! — but one under Antigonid patronage. The blow was all the harder for Cassander in that his expedition to Epirus, the occasion for Demetrius’ venture, ended in failure.
The friendship between Antigonus and Ptolemy was no longer-lived. As early as 306 conflict broke out between them in the area of their most vital interests. Antigonus plucked his son from the delights of Athenian life and put him in charge of a large offensive against Cyprus.1!? Plutarch, in his Life of Demetrius (15), notes that the prize of victory was to be, not Cyprus nor even Syria, but general supremacy: at least that was Monophthalmus’ intention. Ptolemy suffered the most shattering defeat of his career:18 Cyprus passed into the hands of the Antigonids and stayed there for more than ten years. Antigonus, anxious to exploit his success, immediately organized a double expedition, by land and sea, against Egypt. Success, which he anticipated, was meant to cover his rear during his subsequent operations against Cassander.144 The operation was a total failure. Ptolemy was saved.15
Accordingly Antigonus turned back towards the Aegean. Between his now long-established protectorate over the Confederation of the Nesiotes and newly conquered Cyprus there was now only one obstacle left which prevented his complete control of the sea — Rhodes."!6 The Rhodians, who had had to give in to some of Monophthalmus’ demands between 315 and 311, had nevertheless refused to take part in either the Cyprus or the subsequent Egyptian campaign: their interests placed them clearly in the Ptolemaic camp, even without a formal alliance. Now, showing that the freedom of the Greeks was of concern to him only insofar as it did not conflict with his ambitions, Antigonus ordered his son to take Rhodes. It was a famous siege,!!” in which the poliorcetic resources employed by Demetrius won him the name with which he has gone into history, Poliorcetes, ‘taker of cities’. Yet he failed to take Rhodes, which Ptolemy kept supplied with food. After a year’s siege (305-304), he had to seek terms. The Antigonids recognized the liberty of the Rhodians (a proof that the root of the problem of the freedom of the cities in this period is not so much a legal doctrine as a balance of forces), and they in turn agreed to form an alliance on the express condition that it would never be invoked against Ptolemy. The Rhodian episode is important. The preservation of the island’s freedom is the source of the prosperity it enjoyed for more than a century and of the
No Bayer 1942, 93ff.: (Cc 5). lL. C. Smith 1962: (c 67).
M2 Diod. xx.47-52; Just. xv.2.6—9; Plut. Dem. 15-16; App. Syr. 54.
113 Seibert 1969, 190ff.: (F 145); Hauben 1975, 107ff.: (C 37); 1975-6: (C 38). 114 Hauben 1975/6: (c 38). US Diod. xx.73-6; Plut. Dem. 19.1-2. 16 Hauben 1977, 330ff.: (C 39).
7 Diod. xx.81—-8; 91-100.4; Plut. Dem. 21-2.
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important role it played during this period. Nor were the Rhodians in any doubt about the scope of their success: it was to commemorate the raising of the siege that they erected at the entrance to their harbour, in honour of Helios, the high god of the island, the famous Colossus which the ancients counted among the seven wonders of the world. As for Ptolemy, the success of the Rhodians compensated him somewhat for the loss of Cyprus.
Since the murder of Alexander’s son in 310 and the extinction of the Argead dynasty none of the Diadochi had dared to usurp the Macedonian royal title. Antigonus was the first to take this step and to have himself granted by acclamation the title of basi/eus, which he shared with his son. The occasion was Demetrius’ triumph in Cyprus in 306. Antigonus’ act has a very clear significance: by proclaiming himself basileus he was claiming to be the successor of the last real king, the Conqueror; by associating his son with himself he was indicating his intention of founding a dynasty; and by the very act of assuming Alexander’s title and diadem, he was laying claim to Alexander’s legacy. In other words, he was declaring ambitions hitherto left implicit.1!8
But the two kings’ lack of military success in their expedition against Egypt induced Ptolemy in his turn to assume the royal title (305/4).1!9 It is important to make it very clear that in Ptolemy’s case this act has nothing like the same significance as in the case of Antigonus. As basileus, we have just said, Antigonus claimed to inherit the whole of Alexander’s legacy — Egypt naturally included. Ptolemy, on the other hand, had no such claims: in also taking the royal title, his main intention was probably to challenge Antigonus’ status in the area he, Ptolemy, had reserved for himself — he was proclaiming his sovereignty over Egypt. The proclamation was addressed to the Macedonians; for the native Egyptians the title basz/eus had no significance. In Egyptian eyes, the only dignity Ptolemy could assume was the traditional Pharaonic kingship, which Alexander had certainly assumed. That Ptolemy had behaved as a Pharaoh from the beginning (just as, we are told, Seleucus behaved as a king with the barbarians) is a plain fact, even though it has recently come to light that he maintained the fiction of Alexander IV’s reign as Pharaoh after the young king’s murder. Whether, at some moment or other of his career, he had himself crowned Pharaoh at Memphis is, on the other hand, doubtful — but it matters little for our purposes. The assumption of the royal title of Macedon in 305 was not an act of domestic policy; it was an act of foreign policy: against Antigonid pretentions to universal kingship Ptolemy was asserting his particular, limited sovereignty — though a sovereignty which he too claimed to derive from Alexander’s.
NS Ritter 1965, 8qff.: (1 62); O. Miller 1973: (c 51). 8 Volkmann 1959, 1621-2: (c 74); Samuel 1962, 4ff.: (F 399); O. Miller 1973, 93ff.: (c 51).
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In the months that followed Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus in turn proclaimed themselves basileis. It is possible that Cassander, as the author of the extinction of the legitimate line, made himself king in the same spirit as Antigonus (though the evidence is that he, and he alone, used the title basi/eus Makedonon),!*° but Lysimachus and Seleucus!2! were clearly imitating Ptolemy; in other words, they were challenging Antigonus’ claims to sovereignty over what we may from now on call their states — but in no sense themselves, individually, claiming sovereignty over the whole.!”2
The moment is important; this is the birth of the Hellenistic monarchies, if not in fact (since something similar had existed in practice since Triparadisus), at least in law. Just as first Perdiccas’ unitary ambitions, and now those of Antigonus, had contributed heavily to accelerating the territorial fragmentation of Alexander’s empire, so Antigonus’ claims to Alexander’s royal power provoked, in reaction, the fragmentation of that power — even though Antigonus in all probability had no such intention, since he never seems to have admitted the kingship of his rivals.128
It was now to be left to force to settle the question of the new order: would legitimacy in future derive from the pleasure of Antigonus or from that of his opponents?
Despite the two successive failures suffered by the Antigonids at the gates of Egypt and at Rhodes, it looked for many years as though the rival monarchies — certainly those of Cassander and Lysimachus — would be no more than ephemeral, because the prospects at this point for Monophthalmus and his son in Greece and the Aegean looked at first very favourable.
As early as 307 Cassander had set out once more on an assault on Greece, and quite quickly succeeded in confining Ptolemy’s garrisons to Corinth and Sicyon. This offensive had the further effect of inducing the Antigonids to raise the siege of Rhodes in 304. As early as 303, however, Demetrius Poliorcetes had begun to eliminate completely the influence of both Cassander and Ptolemy from the region of the isthmus.
It was at this point, in the spring of 302, that there occurred one of the most interesting episodes in the Greek policy of the Antigonids, the setting up of a federation solidly grouped around Antigonus and his son. This venture, despite its lack of any real future, seems to have been more serious than those of Polyperchon and Ptolemy, and above all we know
120 SIG 332; Goukowsky 1978, 201: (A 19).
121 See above, p. 52 n. 91.
122 So Cohen 1974: (C 12).
123 Diod. xx.33.2-4; Just. xv.2.10ff.; Plut. Dew. 17-18; App. Syr. 54.
124 Diod. xx.100.5-7; 102-3; Plut. Dem. 23-7; Moser 1914, 58ff.: (F 139). For Demetrius’ coinage, bibliography in Will 1979, 1.78: (a 67).
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more about it, thanks mainly to epigraphic evidence:!* inscriptions give us glimpses of the federal institutions and even enable us to build up a picture of Demetrius Poliorcetes’ principal agent in the carrying out of this task, Adeimantus of Lampsacus.!?6 This league, which, like that of 338/7, seems to have been based at Corinth, is generally interpreted by modern writers!®? (after Plutarch) as a restoration of the league of Philip II, though some have denied this. What we know of the federal institutions does seem to justify the comparison, but the difference in circumstances explains why doubts could be expressed. In 338 the foundation of the League of Corinth had been the conclusion of Philip’s Greek policy, the end of a long enterprise which had started from Macedon; its essential purpose had been to organize a ‘common peace’ in Greece, and the alliance for other purposes was merely secondary. In 302, however, the situation was practically the reverse. While it is certain that, in Poliorcetes’ mind, the new League of Corinth was, like the old, to be a means for controlling Greece (an Antigonid garrison was installed in Corinth, and was to remain there for sixty years), nevertheless it was also, and above all, to be one starting point among others for the seizure of Macedon from Cassander. The league of 302 was, therefore, for a time a weapon of war against the ruler of Macedon and from this point of view the ‘symmachy’ became the primary objective, with the ‘common peace’ as no more than a distant goal. If the Antigonid offensive against Cassander had been crowned with success, then, but only then, the league of Corinth of 302 might have acquired a similarity with that founded by Philip, that is, it would have become exclusively an instrument for Macedonian domination of Greece, in the framework and under the cover of a firmly re-established ‘common peace’. If, of course, the league had lasted .. .
While Demetrius was organizing Greece in this way, his father was pressing ahead with his preparations in Asia: Macedon was to be caught in a vice. Cassander, feeling that the days of his power were numbered, attempted to negotiate, but the aged Antigonus, seeing success at last within his grasp and with old age leaving him little time to lose, refused: his ultimatum gave new cohesion to the union of his opponents.126 Cassander first obtained the support of Lysimachus, who faced as greata threat as himself. Ptolemy’s was automatic, and finally Seleucus, who had been occupied for several years by affairs in India, now realized that an Antigonid victory in the West would once more compromise his situation and, at an uncertain date (between 305 and 303?)129 made peace
1% IG 1v*.1.68 (cf. SEG 1.75; 11.56; 111.319; x1.399). ISE 1.44: sv a 111.446.
128 Robert 1946, 15ff.: (C 56); Daux 1955: (c 15); ISE 1.9; 11.72.
127 Bengtson 1964, 1.154ff.: (a 6); Hampl 1938, 5 8ff., 11 3ff.: (a 20); Ferguson 1948: (c 25); Wehrli 1969, 122ff.: (C 75). 1% Diod. xx.106—13. 122 Hauben 1974: (c 36).
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with the Mauryan Chandragupta, surrendering to him territories in the Paropamisadae and in Arachosia and Gedrosia the extent of which has often been discussed, as have other enigmatic clauses of this treaty.19° The allies decided, ina risky gamble which, however, proved correct, to sacrifice the defence of Macedon to an offensive in Asia Minor, which forced Antigonus to recall his son from Europe. The combined operations of Cassander, Lysimachus and Seleucus (with Ptolemy on his own playing his very personal game by invading Coele-Syria) resulted in a complete reversal of the situation: in the summer of 301, at Ipsus in Phrygia, Lysimachus and Seleucus completely crushed the Antigonids, thanks particularly to the elephants supplied by Chandragupta.!8! The aged Monophthalmus himself was left on the battlefield.
After Ipsus, a division of the spoils of the Antigonids was necess- ary.182 Lysimachus took Asia Minor as far as the Taurus, with the exception of a few places in Lycia, Pamphylia or Pisidia, which seem to have come into the hands of Ptolemy!3 (where they were not already in his possession), with the exception also of Cilicia, which was given to one of Cassander’s brothers, Pleistarchus,'™ though this little state was to be short-lived. Cassander made no demands, but he evidently expected to have a free hand in Greece from now on, even though Demetrius Poliorcetes, who had escaped by a hair’s breadth from the disaster of Ipsus, retained strong positions. Seleucus laid claim to Syria, but he was unable to annex it completely because Ptolemy, who had refrained from appearing at Ipsus as arranged, had immediately set about methodically occupying the southern half, as far as the river Eleutherus.'%5 The conquerors of Antigonus, suspicious, ordered Ptolemy to surrender this territory to Seleucus, but he refused. Seleucus, invoking the old friendship between himself and Ptolemy, agreed provisionally to let the territory go, but not without making it clear that he was not renouncing his rights over Coele-Syria:156 this was the origin of what are called the Syrian wars; which were to involve the two kingdoms in lengthy hostilities. Reduced to the northern half of the country, which was to take the name of Seleucis, Seleucus, following the policy of colonization begun by Antigonus, founded especially the four towns of the ‘Syrian tetrapolis’ (Antioch-on-the-Orontes, Seleuceia-in- Pieria, Laodicea-on-Sea and Apamea) which were henceforth to be the heart of his kingdom.13?
189 Summary of the discussions and bibliography in Will 1979, 1.265—G: (4 67).
131 Elephants on Seleucus’ coins: Newell 1938, 38ff., 115ff., 121ff., 229ff.: (B 249).
132 Diod. xxi.1.5; Just. xv.4.21-2; Plut. Dem. 28~-30.1; 31.4.
133 Bibliography in J. Seibert Historia 19 (1970) 347€.
131 Robert 1945, 55ff.: (B 142); Schaefer 1951, 197ff.: (C 59).
18 Otto 1928, 37ff.: (E 46); Seyrig 1951, 208ff.: (E 173); Volkmann 1959, 1624: (c 74).
136 Bikerman 1947: {E 154).
137 Seyrig 1968: (E 174) and 1970: {E 53); Marinoni 1972: (E 39).
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In one sense, the disappearance of Antigonus Monophthalmus marks the end of an era. After him, even if the unitary idea still haunted the thoughts of his son (which remains uncertain), even if it passed through the mind of Seleucus as a fleeting desire on the eve of his death, from this point onwards there was to be no policy devoted seriously, stubbornly, like that of Antigonus, to reviving Alexander’s empire. Besides, that union of Asia and Europe had been made possible for a moment by exceptional circumstances (the euphoria caused by Philip’s successes, the Achaemenid collapse, Alexander’s personal prestige) and too many centrifugal forces stood in the way of its being reconstructed. Antigonus himself had learnt this since, for all his desire to bring territories in Asia and in Europe under his authority, as early as 307 the facts themselves had given the lie to this claim; from the day when the Antigonids’ activity had crossed the Aegean from Asia to Europe, father and son had been obliged to divide responsibilities, Antigonus keeping Asia for himself and delegating Demetrius to Europe, to recall him only in the hour of danger. Thus for the Antigonids Asia (an Asia already severely reduced by the fact of Seleucus) and Europe had in reality been no more than two territories artificially linked by a dynastic bond. In contrast, what Lysimachus was to achieve for a moment was to be different in scope and character from Antigonus’ dream. Antigonus’ death on the battlefield of Ipsus marks the final passing of the idea of an empire reviving that of Alexander, if not inherited from him. That is by no means to say that Alexander’s work was totally and finally ruined. Beneath the collapsing territorial unity another unity, deeper and more important for the future of the world, was coming into being, taking root and growing, and spreading too, if at the cost of its purity; this was the unity of civilization of the Hellenistic world. In this chapter (as in chapter 4) it is primarily the political aspects of that unity with which we shall be concerned, but these are not the least interesting aspects since, from many points of view, what was taking place in these years was the birth, even now obscure, of the ‘modern’ conception of territorial states with no claims to universality which seek to co-exist, as far as their interests allow, in a system of unstable equilibrium. This may be not at all what Alexander would have wished to leave to posterity but it is nonetheless his legacy, since without his work the experiment could never have started. And even then Antigonus Monophthalmus had to disappear from the scene in the debacle of Ipsus before the fragmen- tation of the world newly opened to Graeco-Macedonian civilization could be assured beyond all challenge.
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CHAPTER 3
MONARCHIES AND MONARCHIC IDEAS
F. W. WALBANK
I. THE NEW POLITICAL PATTERN
Within twenty years of Alexander’s death his empire had split into separate states, whose rulers had taken the title of king. In future most Greeks were to live under the shadow of monarchic régimes. Some lived in cities situated within the kingdoms, and even the inhabitants of mainland Greece and such islands as stayed independent were subjected to their pressure, while many from time to time were forced to endure their garrisons. The immediate presence of monarchy affected all aspects of life, including political theory and philosophical speculation. It was the exceptional city that could escape making some sort of accommod- ation with one or other of the new monarchies and political theory now had to start from the premise that kingship was the best form of state. This was an assumption not too difficult to accept in as much as it was far from novel. Throughout the fourth century a strong current of anti- democratic thought had advocated monarchy as the most stable régime and the one best able to defend the power and prosperity of the rich. According to Aristotle (Po/. vit (v).10.3, 1310boff.), kingship is the resource of the better classes against the people, whereas a tyrant is chosen from the people to be their protector against the notables. Such notions fell in with the new political developments which followed after Alexander; but they were not their cause, for the monarchic régimes had sprung naturally out of the break-up of Alexander’s empire, left without an effective heir.
To fifth-century Greeks monarchy was something remote. Except in the hated and supposedly corrupt form of tyranny it either belonged to the heroic age (and was therefore familiar in an idealised form from Homer and tragic performances) or it survived in backward and peripheral areas like Thrace, Macedonia, Epirus, Cyprus and Cyrene. At Sparta, and less obviously in some other cities, kingship had been incorporated as a sort of magistracy or even reduced to a ritual office within the structure of the city. In its absolute form monarchy seemed a form of government suited only to barbarians, slavish by nature, and the King par excellence was of course the King of Persia. In the fourth century the older cities, which hitherto had dominated Greece but were
62
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now weakened by protracted warfare and could not afford the more sophisticated fighting techniques and the high cost of hiring mercen- aries, gradually yielded place to new centres of power and, after Chaeronea, to Macedonia under Philip and Alexander. Alexander’s eastern expedition encouraged the military and autocratic aspects of his rule, and in this respect his successors, the Diadochi, followed in his footsteps. It is symptomatic of the military character of the new states that of the fourteen Seleucid kings from Seleucus I to Antiochus VII only two, Antiochus II and Seleucus IV, died at home.!
The new kings were forceful and ambitious men who relied on their armies and mostly ruled in lands where monarchy was traditional. There was really no feasible alternative. The nature of their rule, and one at least of its problems, are sketched in a passage quoted in the Suda:
It is neither descent nor legitimacy which gives monarchies to men but the ability to command an army and govern a state wisely, as was the case with Philip and Alexander’s Successors. For Alexander’s natural son got no help from his kinship with him owing to his weak character, whereas those who were in no way related became kings over virtually the whole inhabited world.?
The first Successors to take the royal title were Antigonus and Demetrius, after the latter defeated Ptolemy at Salamis in Cyprus in 306;3 they were followed by Ptolemy himself and Seleucus in 305/4 and, soon afterwards, by Cassander and Lysimachus.* Others — including Anatolian rulers not of Graeco-Macedonian origin — followed suit over the next decades, beginning with Zipoetes of Bithynia in 297 and Mithridates of Pontus in 296 (or 281).° What these claims to royalty really signified can only be surmised; but it seems more than likely that while Antigonus and Demetrius were staking a claim to the whole empire, their rivals were merely asserting their right to kingship within the areas they governed.®
Though they were in fact jointly successors to Alexander’s empire and their kingship in a sense followed on from his (and that of his ill-starred heirs), the Diadochi based their claims to kingship not on succession, but on their personal achievements. Each government had to work out its own particular relationship, on the one hand to the indigenous peoples who lived within its frontiers and were accustomed to monarchy, and on the other to the Greek cities which were not. But
1 Bikerman 1938, 13: (E 6); Seleucus 1V was assassinated. 2 Suda sv. Bacireta= Austin 37; cf. Adcock 1953, 170: (1 5); Bikerman 1938, 12: (E 6). 3 See above, ch. 2, pp. 57-8; cf. Préaux 1978, 1.184: (A 48).
4 Pluc. Dem. 18.1-3; Just. Epit. xv.3.10-12.
5 Memnon, FGrH 434F 12, 4-5; Diod. xx.111. For the dates when the other monarchies were established in Asia see Préaux 1978, 1.184 n. 2: (A 48).
® Cf. Aymard 1967, 94: (1 9).
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despite these variations there emerged a new political form, Hellenistic monarchy, characterized by enough common traits to justify treating it as one institution. Graeco-Macedonian in origin and scarcely influenced from the East, it is to be found not only in the successor states, but also in regions which had never formed part of Alexander’s empire at all, such as Epirus and the Syracuse of Hiero II; and, as we have just seen, its forms and structure were adopted by non-Greek and semi-Greek states in Asia Minor.
The new monarchies presented Greeks with an ideological problem. Wherever they lived, they had to adjust to a dominant royal power and to find an acceptable place for monarchy within their political philosophy without losing their self-respect and (as far as possible) without discarding their traditional commitment to freedom. Earlier on some cities had had to live under the Great King; but the new relationship was more intimate and more ambiguous. It called for and very soon elicited a new political theory, capable of reconciling Greeks to their situation under an autocratic government and at the same time holding up an ideal image of the king against which his actual treatment of the cities could be measured. Between theory and political reality there were obvious divergences, but also considerable interplay, as each to some extent modified the other. But since monarchy and monarchical theory do not altogether coincide in their origins, we shall look at the former first.
II. THE CHARACTER OF HELLENISTIC MONARCHY
First it is necessary to get one source of confusion out of the way. It has been widely argued that the Antigonid monarchy in Macedonia differed in important respects from monarchy in the other kingdoms. As a national institution rooted in the Macedonian people, it was subject (it is alleged) to constitutional limitations which did not apply to the other kings. The king of Macedon was primus inter pares, whereas the others enjoyed personal and absolute rule. This view rests on slender foundations, namely the residual powers of the assembled Mace- donians to appoint a new king by acclamation and to act as judges in cases of high treason. The arguments in favour of the Macedonians’ having possessed such powers are examined elsewhere in this volume’ and need not be repeated here. They furnish no support for thinking that during the period after Alexander Macedonia differed constitutionally from the other monarchies. There was certainly a closer relationship between the king of Macedon and his people than existed elsewhere; to
7 See below, ch. 7, pp. 225-7.
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THE CHARACTER OF HELLENISTIC MONARCHY 65
that extent it was a national monarchy. Moreover, there are five known inscriptions dating from Amyntas, the son of Perdiccas III in the fourth century, down to Philip V, in which the king describes himself as ‘king of the Macedonians’. That is a formula not available for use in any other kingdom. But there is nothing ‘official’ about the phrase, which implies neither that the Macedonians possessed constitutional rights nor yet that the king was exercising greater autocracy over them (both views have been propounded). The formula ‘king of the Macedonians’ is comparat- ively rare and is probably used when the king (or in Amyntas’ case someone else) wanted to make a special point.8 It is noteworthy, too, that more treatises On Kingship seem to have been written for the early Antigonids than, for example, for the Ptolemies. So perhaps they were more interested in the philosophic justification of kingship. But this conclusion is not certain and in any case would have no bearing on Macedonian rights.
We may then assume that like their fellow-kings the Antigonids represented the state.® Their position inside the kingdom differed from that of others only in nuances — there was for example no official dynastic cult in Macedonia. Nor is this similarity surprising. Directly or indirectly all the dynasties went back to Alexander; and two Antigonid kings — Demetrius I and Antigonus II — had, earlier in their careers, exercised what it is customary to call a personal monarchy. In addition, there was a gradual process of assimilation which in time led the various monarchies to resemble each other more and more and to adopt similar institutions and conventions affecting their interstate relations. Mace- donia was in no way exempt from this development. Nor does any ancient source imply that the Macedonian monarchy differed in any substantial regard from the others. It is therefore legitimate to examine the general character of Hellenistic kingship without drawing fine distinctions, except in minor respects, between ‘national’ and ‘ personal’ monarchies.
One such minor difference we have just examined: the use of the title “king of the Macedonians’. Elsewhere (with one exception)! Hellenistic kings were not described as rulers of a particular people or country, but
§ For this formula see 1G vit.305 5 (Lebadeia: Amyntas); SIG 332 (Cassandreia: Cassander); SIG 573 and 574 (Delos: Philip V), Lindos 11 inscr. 1 no. 2 (Lindus: Philip V). Against Aymard 1967, 1o0~22: (1 9), See Errington 1974, 23-9: (D 16).
® Aristotle, Po/. v.8.5.1310b, links the Macedonian monarchy with those of Sparta and Epirus, not as traditional monarchies rooted in the state (so Aymard 1967, 149 n. 5: (1.9)), but as monarchies that have won merit by settling or gaining territory; and when, in Po/. v.11.2.13134, he refers to monarchies with limited powers he mentions Sparta and the Molossians, but not Macedonia.
10 Ina letter to Cos (RC 25 =SIG 456) Ziaelas calls himself ‘king of the Bithynians’ and this has been taken as evidence of ‘national feeling’ in Bithynia. But it was epistolary convention
everywhere (including Macedonia) for a king to style himself simply (e.g.) ‘King Antigonus’, and the solecism here seems simply to be the product of an incompetent chancellery.
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simply, fout court, as kings. That is, of course, within the Greek context. To their indigenous subjects they had other titles. Cuneiform docu- ments describe Antiochus I as ‘ the powerful king, the king of the world, the king of Babylon, king of the lands’;! and the Ptolemies, as Pharaohs, were kings of ‘Upper and Lower Egypt’.!? But these native titles were irrelevant to the Graeco-Macedonian population, in whose eyes the claim to kingship was not dependent on the possession of a particular piece of territory. Once he had been so recognized, a king might (like Demetrius Poliorcetes) lose all his territory and still retain his title. On the other hand it was important to his status and his renown that he should control territory, in which he could exercise his kingship (and from which he could draw revenues and recruit troops); and claims to territory were never lightly relinquished. Conquest was the strongest title to land, as Polybius (xxvi11.1.6) records of Antiochus IV who, at the outset of the Sixth Syrian War, was determined to maintain his hold on Coele-Syria and Phoenicia, since he ‘regarded possession through warfare as the surest claim and the best’. Earlier Antiochus III had drifted into war with Rome through his determination to recover the Chersonese and the cities in Thrace which his ancestor Seleucus I had won by his victory over Lysimachus (Polyb. xvut.5 1.3—6).
‘Spear-won territory’ was important partly because it was concrete evidence of victory:13 and victory was one of the main attributes of royalty, for it was a demonstrable proof of merit and an un- controvertible claim on the loyalty of troops and subjects. Commenting on the triumphant eastern expedition of Antiochus HI, Polybius remarks (x1.34.15—16) that
ina word he put his kingdom in a position of safety, overawing all his subjects by his courage and his efforts. It was in fact this expedition which made him appear worthy of the throne, not only to the inhabitants of Asia, but to those of Europe likewise.
It was after this expedition that Antiochus assumed the epithet ‘the Great’. Merit thus recognized was a personal quality. Yet, somewhat illogically, it tended also to become attached to the king’s family and so served as a justification for dynastic succession. To ensure that one’s kingdom passed peacefully to one’s heir was, naturally, a prime objective of most kings. It was to facilitate an easy transition from one reign to the next that it became customary for a king to raise his eldest son to co-regency during his own lifetime. Early examples are the co-
1 Bikerman 1938, 6 n. 1: (E 6).
122 OGIS 90(= Austin 227), 1.46, rv re avw ydpav nai TH Kdtw; forthe Egyptian versions see E. A.
Wallis Budge, The Rosetta Stone in the British Museum (London, 1929); Plates vol., pl. 3. 13 Diod. xviit.43 of Prolemy who riy. . . Atyutrov woavei twa <Bacrreiav > Sopixrytov elxev.
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THE CHARACTER OF HELLENISTIC MONARCHY 67
rule of Antiochus I alongside Seleucus I and Demetrius I alongside Antigonus I; but it was practised in most monarchies, and when this occurred the younger king was frequently trained for the succession by being given an independent command. Concern for the consolidation of the dynasty may also have been behind the adoption of brother-—sister marriage at Alexandria — a custom which the Greeks found odd, though they soon learnt to tolerate it and to make flattering references to Zeus and Hera. The first such union was that of Ptolemy II with Arsinoe. In their case the marriage was probably engineered by Arsinoe’s strong- minded and ambitious character, but it will have continued as a regular custom of the Ptolemaic dynasty, perhaps partly because it had parallels in earlier native Egyptian practice, but also because of the merits of such a marriage in consolidating the royal family and avoiding the complications that could arise from inter-dynastic unions.’ An extreme example of such a marriage is the polygamous union of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes II with his sister Cleopatra II and her daughter (and his niece) Cleopatra III. Hellenistic kings were normally monogamous, though this often went with a succession of wives. Brother—sister marriages are primarily to be found in Alexandria, but there is one probable example in the Seleucid family, if indeed the wife of Antiochus, Antiochus III’s eldest son, was the latter’s daughter Laodice.@
Part of the necessary glamour of kingship was secured by the wearing of special clothing and symbols of royalty — though compared with eastern monarchies this remained on a fairly modest level. Kings adopted the Macedonian military uniform with boots, a flowing cloak and a broad-brimmed hat (or in war-time a helmet).!7 In addition they wore a diadem!® on the head (or over the helmet), consisting of a white or purple and white headband with two loose ends behind. Other outward signs of kingship were crowns, presented as an expression of gratitude by Greek cities (later these were commuted into sums of money), purple robes (though others besides the king could wear these), a sceptre and a ring with a seal-stone. The Seleucid seal bore an anchor, the sign of Apollo. The king’s appearance, often idealised, was rendered familiar to his subjects through sculptures and representations on the coinage.
M4 See Hopkins 1980, 303-54: (F 266); for another view see below, ch. 5, pp. 136-8.
15 Cf. Aymard 1953, 400-1: (1 8).
16 Mérkholm 1966, 49: (E 43). It has been suggested that this Laodice subsequently married her two other brothers, Seleucus IV and Antiochus IV; cf. Bikerman 1938, 25 n. 1: (£6). See against this somewhat unlikely succession of marriages, Aymard 1967, 243 n.1: (19).
7 Cf. Aymard 1953, 401: (1 8); Bikerman 1938, 32: (E 6); Préaux 1978, 1.210: (A 48).
8 Cf. Ritter, 1965: (1 62). On the diadem as a symbol of kingship cf. Polyb. xxx.2.4. For examples, see Plates vol., pls. 4a, 4c, qd; 11; 14; 22b; 56b; Gsb, 65c, 65d.
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III. THE MACHINERY OF MONARCHICAL GOVERNMENT
Though the first generation of kings was much occupied with warfare, they already had considerable experience in governing the provinces of Alexander’s empire and from the outset they had to apply themselves to civil administration in their own kingdoms. The survival of evidence on this subject is uneven, and though written sources preserve some details, most of our information depends on the chance survival of papyri and inscriptions. Consequently far more is known of Egypt than of anywhere else, because of the papyri found there. The general picture is of a bureaucracy which begins by being fairly rudimentary, but fills out and solidifies as time goes on. In the early days of the kingdoms competent and reliable men were put to tasks which needed doing without too much regard for the title of the post they nominally held,¥ but after a time a number of what might be termed ministerial posts became established, and these often bore the same or similar titles in the various kingdoms: for example, the secretary-of-state, head of the chancellery and responsible for official correspondence,2° the grand vizier or prime minister,”! and the chamberlain in charge of the court and bodyguards.?2
The court is a typical feature of the new kingdoms, and gradually it takes on an elaboration which recalls the monarchies of Persia and Pharaonic Egypt rather than anything Greek. Set up in the capital, around the royal palace, it contained slaves, eunuchs and a variety of servants with specialized functions ensuring its smooth running. There were bodyguards to watch over the king’s safety, and there were doctors to minister to his health. But, most important of all, the king was surrounded by his Friends (p4:/07), whem he appointed to a position close to his own person, where they enjoyed an intimate relationship profitable to both parties, and he often rewarded them with gifts of land which established them among the propertied class, whose support was vital to the security of his rule. These Friends were of the king’s own personal choosing and might come from anywhere in the Greek world. A king’s Friends would not necessarily be taken over by his successor. Since with the exception of Macedonia the new monarchies were the
19 See below, ch. 6, pp. 185-6.
2 Polyb. 1v.87.8. mi rod ypaypareiou (Antigonid), xv.27.7, 6 mpos Tois ypdypace TeTAypevos (Ptolemaic); xxx.25.16, émoroAaypddos (Seleucid); cf. Bikerman 1938, 197: (E 6); Walbank 1979, 111.453: (B 37), for inscriptional evidence.
21 Polyb. v.41.1, mpoeotw@s Tay SAwy mpaypatwy; cf. 1] Macc. x1.12, émt trav mpayparwy; ct. Bikerman 1938, 197 {E 6).
® Polyb.tv.87.5, 6 éi ris Bepameias reraypévos; cf. Bikerman 1938, 36: (6); Corradi 1929, 297-8: (A 11).
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THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT 69
personal creation of their founders and had no roots in the native population — for Alexander’s policy of racial fusion and collaboration with the Persians had soon been rejected by the Seleucids and had never been even contemplated in Egypt” — there was no indigenous nobility on whose help the king could draw. He had to build up his own governing class and he generally chose his helpers on the basis, not of birth or wealth, but solely of ability: to get on with him and to carry out whatever duties he assigned.”4
The earliest contemporary reference to Friends occurs in a letter from Lysimachus to the city of Priene dating to around 285, in which the king, the Friends and the army are said to have received greetings of goodwill from Prienean envoys. But Friends are to be found in all Hellenistic courts, where they form a council of state in daily session, advising the king on matters of policy — though it remains his prerogative to take the decision. Meetings of the royal council are often mentioned in literary sources, for example that of Ptolemy IV discussing what to do about Cleomenes of Sparta (Polyb. v.35.7—13), or that of Antiochus III, meeting on several occasions over the revolt of Molon (Polyb. v.41.6, 49.1, 51.3); and an interesting dossier of inscriptions dating to the years 163-156 from Pessinus in Galatia reveals the active role of one of the Friends of Attalus II in securing the reversal of a decision to go to war, after a discussion lasting several days.?6
The Friends were almost invariably Greeks or Macedonians; Egyp- tians, Syrians, Jews and Iranians were alike excluded.?” Many, but not all, were exiles from their own cities. They flocked to Alexandria, Antioch and later Pergamum from all parts of the Greek world, seeking wealth, status and an opportunity to exercise skili and power. Nor did they simply form the council round the king. They were also a reservoir of talent from which the king chose his military officers, his governors of provinces, his ministers of state, his high priests and his ambassadors. There was little or no specialization. Artists, writers, philosophers, doctors, scholars — all were possible recruits, but once they became the king’s Friends they might be drafted to any task. The Stoic philosopher Persaeus ended his life — Stoically — by suicide, when he failed to save the Acrocorinth, where Antigonus Gonatas had made him commandant;
23 Whereas Seleucus I had a Bactrian wife, the mother of Antiochus I, there were no later dynastic marriages with Iranians. Against the view that Ptolemy I first contemplated an Egyptianizing policy see below, ch. 5, pp. 126-7.
% On the Friends see Habicht 1958, 1-16: (#1 85); on the changing attitudes of Greeks in the independent cities towards them see Herman 1981: (1 32).
RC6; king, Friends and army are often mentioned together as three focal points of importance in a Hellenistic kingdom; cf. 1. Magnesia 86, Il.15.; OGIS 219 (=Austin 139), l.12ff.; Polyb. v.50.4-9; Habicht 1958, 4: (H 85). For a later reference to Lysimachus’ Friends in 292 see below, Pp. 70. 26 RC 61; cf. Virgilio 1981: (E 98).
2? Hannibal at Antiochus IEI’s court is a noteworthy exception.
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the doctor Apollophanes carried his point of view in Antiochus III’s war-council in 219; and the poet and scholar Hegesianax (who had, appropriately, written a Trojan history) served as Antiochus’ am- bassador to Rome.
The king and his Friends looked to each other for assistance. Their relationship was that of a partnership based ultimately on self-interest. Hellenistic kings, in the early days at any rate, could not normally draw upon the hereditary loyalty which an established monarchy can command; but nevertheless the institution of the Friends fostered a sense of mutual obligation and goodwill, so strong at times that when in 292 Lysimachus