Great Battles of the Hellenistic World

Joseph Pietrykowski

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848847101
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

An exploration of 17 critical military conflicts of the Hellenistic period in Western civilization. For almost two centuries, the Macedonian phalanx, created by Philip II and refined by his son, Alexander the Great, dominated the battlefields of the ancient world from the sweltering riverbanks of India to the wooded hills of Italy. As the preferred weapon of some of antiquity's greatest commanders, this powerful military system took center stage in many of the largest and most decisive conflicts of ancient times. In Great Battles of the Hellenistic World, Joseph Pietrykowski explores the struggles that shook the ancient world and shaped history. From the structure and composition of the opposing armies, to the strategy of their campaigns, to the leadership decisions and tactics that decided the engagements, Great Battles of the Hellenistic World examines seventeen landmark conflicts from Chaironeia to Pydna over the course of 170 years of bloody warfare. "The writing is quite lively and interesting.... Of value to war-gamers because he sets the stage well and there is a lot of tactical detail.... An enjoyable book to read." — Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Contents

	Acknowledgements
	Preface
	Key to Maps
	Introduction
Part I: Philip and Alexander
	Chapter 1: Chaironeia
	Chapter 2: Granikos
	Chapter 3: Issos
	Chapter 4: Gaugamela
	Chapter 5: Hydapses River
Part II: Successors
	Chapter 6: Paraitakene
	Chapter 7: Gabiene
	Chapter 8: Gaza
	Chapter 9: Ipsos
Part III: Pyrrhos of Epeiros
	Chapter 10: Heraklea
	Chapter 11: Asculum
	Chapter 12: Beneventum
Part IV: Later Battles
	Chapter 13: Sellasia
	Chapter 14: Raphia
Part V: The Roman Conquest
	Chapter 15: Kynoskephalai
	Chapter 16: Magnesia
	Chapter 17: Pydna
	Chapter 18: Conclusion
	Notes
	Bibliography
	Index

Acknowledgments

To begin with I would like to thank Larry Jones, a world-class teacher whose passion for history and desire to share his learning with others helped shape my life. With a second-hand copy of Thucydides he revealed to me the world of ancient history. For that I am eternally grateful.

I would also like to thank Dr Don Carrell for his support, encouragement and for enduring countless lengthy discussions which led me down the path I am on today.

To the queen of ILL, Beth Grimes, for whose astounding ability to locate the most obscure volumes, no less than for her continued enthusiasm and friendship, I owe a debt of gratitude that can never be fully repaid.

I would like to thank Paul Bardunias for his immensely useful criticism of portions of this work as well as his spirited discussions of ancient warfare in general.

Many thanks are due to Beejay Elles for his skilled map-making and patient guidance in the mysteries of graphics software.

For taking a chance on a first time author, and gently guiding me through the rigorous process of making a book, I am extremely grateful to my editor, Philip Sidnell, and to everyone at Pen & Sword Books.

I would also like to thank Elizabeth James for her skilful copy-editing and insightful critiques.

My deepest thanks to my family, who have encouraged and supported me every step of the way. I would especially like to thank my parents, Marlene and Patrick Pietrykowski, without whose love, encouragement and diligent proofreading this volume would not have been possible. I must also thank my brother Adam Pietrykowski for patiently reading and listening to my interpretations of events long past.

Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful wife Sarah for dealing with all the long hours, rambling monologues, midnight epiphanies and midweek dejection. I owe you more than words can express.

Preface

This project was originally conceived as a simple study of the Macedonian art of war beginning with its creator Philip II, then continuing on to the spectacular conquests of his son Alexander the Great, and concluding with the long, bloody squabbles of the Successor states and their struggle against the rising power of Rome. In detailing the complex evolution of the Macedonian system from its Balkan origins, however, I found myself growing increasingly preoccupied with the army’s tactics and performance in battle. Unwilling to abandon my original goal, I eventually hammered out a compromise by shifting the focus slightly to chart the rise, reign and fall of the Macedonian phalanx as a dominant force on the battlefield by examining its role in many of the largest and most significant engagements of the era. By focusing on a number of far-flung encounters (geographically and chronologically), it is possible to observe the development of the forces, strategies and tactics employed by Hellenistic generals, while tracing the successes and failures of their military machine when facing new and powerful foes.

In attempting to bring these struggles to life for the enjoyment of the interested newcomer to history as well as the grizzled academic, I have focused on the average reader, avoiding much of the perplexing terminology that so often drives prospective students away from the study of the past. In addition to this, I have reconstructed and presented the various battles as realistically as possible. Understanding the sights, sounds and emotions of the ancient battlefield is an often-ignored prerequisite to understanding the temperament of the armies, the decisions of the commanders and the overall course of the action.

Purposefully limiting this work to include only the battles leading to the formation of the Macedonian empire of Alexander and those of his successors who struggled to carve out or preserve kingdoms of their own, this volume may justly be said to exclude substantial parts of the Hellenistic world. The decision to ignore the great Punic Wars and much of the early empire-building of Rome stems directly from my goal to trace the progress of the Macedonian phalanx over the course of its battlefield primacy. It was only with great consideration and careful thought that each of the battles which appear in the following pages was selected. Others, such as Megalopolis, Krannon, the Hellespont, Corupedion, the ‘elephant victory,’ Apollonia, Panion, Kallinikos and Corinth were no less ‘great’ in their own right, but were nevertheless excluded for reasons of faulty or incomplete sources and the subsequent impossibility of substantial and detailed reconstruction.

On a stylistic note, I preferred wherever possible to adhere as closely as possible to a strict transliteration of Greek names for ease of pronunciation.

Key to Maps

The following symbols are used on the maps used throughout this book.

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Introduction

The Hellenistic World: A Landscape of War

The Hellenistic age was conceived as it was destined to perish, in the death-struggle of a people beset by enemies and worn down by generations of bloody strife. From beginning to end it was a time of unscrupulous opportunism, ceaseless conflict and jarringly pervasive change. Ironically, these same characteristics typify the man most directly responsible for bringing into being this chaotic period of history. Philip II, father of Alexander the Great and, more importantly, creator of the famed Macedonian phalanx, was above all a man whose genius was for victory by any means. Be it through force, diplomacy, bribery, intimidation or trickery, Philip pacified the ferocious Balkan tribes of the northeast and dominated the squabbling Greek city-states of the south to form the greatest empire Europe had yet known. Masterfully wielding his fearsome army and no-less fearsome reputation, Philip found Macedonia a nation of shepherds and farmers and left it a nation of warriors. His success, however, did not come without a cost.

Unfortunately for the ancient world, Philip’s methods inaugurated a dark period of total war that only intensified during the reign of his son Alexander. Warfare in this new age aimed not simply at defeating a foe, but at utterly annihilating his forces, thereby rendering him incapable of ever again raising the banner of resistance. Into this mould of Philip’s making Alexander fitted perfectly. Though he lacked some of his father’s diplomatic tact and strategic cunning, Alexander was both a consummate battlefield tactician as well as a relentlessly brutal adversary renowned for pursuing a broken foe dozens or even hundreds of miles. When these traits were combined with a boundless store of ambition and facilitated by one of the greatest killing machines of all time, the result was an era of death and destruction that fundamentally changed the ancient world.

For a brief, heady decade the astounding reign of Alexander was marked by an uninterrupted series of successes that brought ever more distant lands under his sway while his power and prestige skyrocketed to dizzying heights. As his star reached the pinnacle of its brilliant climb, however, its light failed, plunging the world below into a deep, vast darkness from which lesser men were powerless to raise it. After so dazzling and bloody a career as Alexander’s, no individual would ever again shine so bright. With such drastic changes now unleashed on the world in the wake of Alexander’s conquests, however, the floodgates of Ares, first wrenched open by Philip in his country’s darkest hour, proved impossible to again close.

In the chaos that followed Alexander’s sudden death, the shards of his great empire sufficed only to whet the appetites of his power-hungry lieutenants. It is with their short-sighted struggles for dominance that the majority of the military history of the Hellenistic age is occupied. With the weapon Philip had forged now at the command of dozens of opposing warlords, generals and kings, Alexander’s vast domains splintered into a nightmarish expansion of the bloody internecine fighting of old Greece. Massive armies clashed at the whim of larger-than-life tyrants while empires rose and fell on the strength of an afternoon’s manoeuvring. For 170 years the terrible Macedonian phalanx rumbled across the battlefields of the eastern Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and beyond, leaving hundreds of thousands of enemies slain and countless burnt and pillaged cities in its wake. It was only with the coming of Rome and the establishment of a Mediterranean-wide hegemony that a semblance of peace again returned to the Greek world.

All the dates on the following pages are BC unless stated otherwise.

Part I
Philip and Alexander

Beginnings: Macedonia in Crisis

The Hellenistic period was an age defined by the incessant warfare that engulfed it, from its spectacular birth in the fires of fourth century Greece to its slow death under the relentless pressure of Roman imperialism. Militarily it began with the inconceivable: the astounding rise of Macedon from its place as a tiny, battered kingdom in northern Greece to the greatest power in Europe. This unexpected reversal of course was achieved through the visionary reorganization of the Macedonian army by Philip II, a man without whom the Macedonian state would have never survived the second quarter of the fourth century; a time when the fortunes of the crumbling nation were at their bleakest.

Surrounded by enemies and rent by internal discord, early Macedon was a harsh land of underdeveloped countryside, few cities and little moveable wealth. Cursed with a tradition of bloody and disruptive succession crises, a chronically weak army and a tantalizing abundance of natural resources, Macedon was a tempting prize for political domination, economic exploitation and military conquest. It should come as no surprise then to learn that much of the early history of Macedon is filled with its kings staving off invasions and shoring up their reigns by any number of brutally effective methods. Still, problems persisted for the beleaguered kingdom, not least of which was the avarice of a host of jealous and formidable neighbours.

For years Macedonia had been the target of destructive and demoralizing raids by the fierce semi-Hellenized tribes lining its borders. As these harassing attacks chipped away at Macedon’s morale and manpower, her kings suffered ever-worsening humiliation at the hands of the arrogant Greek city-states to the south. Time and again Macedon felt the oppressive tramp of foreign troops on her soil and more than once knew the shame of a pretender raised to the national throne on the strength of Greek spears. When the turbulent politics of the time did not dictate its use as the pawn of greater nations, Macedon was often ignored entirely by the fractious city-states.

Isolated from the Greek world because of the somewhat different cultural heritage at work in the mountainous north, many southern Greeks looked down their noses at the Macedonians who they considered at best uncouth and at worst irredeemably barbaric. A vastly different political environment distanced Macedon from the world of the city-states as well, with power concentrated in the hands of a king and his council of nobles. This ruling class, based as they were in the more ‘civilized’ southern and coastal regions known as Lower Macedonia, enjoyed only limited control over the tribal lands of the interior and the more loosely organized north, known as Upper Macedonia. Though the kings of Macedon ruled by the consent of the nobles, they nonetheless exercised autocratic power, making decisions that could, at times, lead the nation to the very brink of disaster.

Just such a lapse in judgement nearly erased Macedon from the map before the chaotic fourth century had even reached its bloody midpoint. On his accession to the Macedonian throne in 359 BC, Philip was faced with a country on the verge of collapse due to a monumental blunder on the part of his predecessor. Just months before, in the summer of 360, the Illyrians, a ferocious Balkan tribe well-established as one of Macedonia’s oldest and most powerful foes, launched a devastating invasion of the weakened kingdom from the northwest. Bursting through the flimsy border defences, the Illyrians ravaged Upper Macedonia, burning and pillaging everything in their path. When Perdikkas III, king of Macedon and Philip’s el...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Full Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents