Alexander the Great's Legacy

The Decline of Macedonian Europe in the Wake of the Wars of the Successors

Mike Roberts

• Editorial: Pen and Sword Military
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526788535
• Categoría: Geschichte
• Categoría: Militär- & Seefahrtsgeschichte

Why was it that 2400 years ago the people who had recently conquered the world were unable to stop barbarian Galatians from looting the tombs of their revered royal line? Why was it that the Macedonian state virtually created by Philip II and taken to the heights of epochal triumph by his son Alexander the great had, hardly two generations after his death, became a weaker entity than it had been when the young conqueror had crossed the Hellespont? This was a period during which Cassander and Lysimachus had seemed about to construct durable Europe based polities and had seen the likes of Demetrius Poliorcetes and Pyrrhus of Epirus battling and besieging across Macedonia, Thrace and Greece. The story that unfolds here explores how both the unique character and the particular legacy left when Alexander died at Babylon in 323, at the romantically youthful age of 32, ensured that his homeland failed to gain the kind of imperial dividend that accrued to others of the world’s great Empires. For Macedon there was not the thousand years of glory that was the extraordinary destiny of the Romans, nor even the two hundred years of Persian primacy, only 50 or so years of strife and trauma ending in a Galatian deluge that threatened the sacred site at Delphi and had remarkable parallels to the earlier Persian invasions of the Greek world that Alexander had claimed to avenge.

Chapter One

An Old, Old Man

Sometime in the 600s impecunious, land-hungry and adventurous people from Miletus and Clazomenae, both Greek cities on the Aegean shore of Asia, sailed north along the coast to reach the head of the Gulf of Melas (today the Gulf of Saros) and there on the margins of Europe they planted the town of Cardia. Mixing with folk from the local Dolonci1 the place thrived, getting a population boost from Athens late in the next century when Miltiades of Marathon fame was a big man in the region and the town became an important post on the grain route that fed the maw of the Athenian people in the days of that city’s pomp, as indicated by the ears of corn shown on the city’s money. A hard-won but fragile autonomy for this most important city of the Thracian Chersonese terminated in alliance with Philip II of Macedon by 346, if not earlier, such that the orator Demosthenes in the Peace of Philocrates specifically designated the people of Cardia as enemies of Athens.

In the 350s a man was born there from whom we derive so much of what is known of the period of Alexander’s successors. Hieronymus the historian and his kinsman Eumenes grew up in the privileged milieu of a cultivated urban upper class with close Macedonian ties. Eumenes’ father, also called Hieronymus,2 was recorded as a guest friend of King Philip himself. The future historian would have been in his late teens or early 20s when he accompanied Eumenes, possibly an uncle and a senior functionary in the chancellery that accompanied Alexander’s army in the conquest of the Persian Empire. Belonging to one of the great families of the city, these two were bitter rivals of Hecataeus who became the local tyrant; indeed, it may well have been for their own safety that they removed themselves so far from home where a malignant nemesis was eager to encompass their demise. Certainly in the year after Alexander’s death when for his own purposes a general called Leonnatus was trying to get both Eumenes and Hecataeus to support his bid for power as husband of Alexander’s sister Cleopatra, it became clear that Eumenes was afraid if he co-operated in this foray into Europe, Antipater, still in power at that time, might have him killed to gratify the Cardian strongman.

The significance of this man who would wear out so many years – one suggestion is that he lived to 1043 – is first properly noticed in 320 when he headed a diplomatic mission from Eumenes to Antipater, although before that he would have already been a senior member of that capable man’s administrative staff when he was ordered by Perdiccas to take over troublesome Cappadocia, a region where these well-connected Greeks born in a city so close to Anatolia would have been worth their weight in gold. In 318 when Eumenes, notorious and outlawed for having defeated Craterus near the Hellespont in a battle where that Macedonian military exemplar died, a figure of almost kingly stature who wrapped himself in a purple cloak when he received Greek envoys after the victory at Crannon ended the Lamian War,4 was tracked down by Antigonus the One-Eyed to a fortress in Cappadocia called Nora at the foot of the Taurus Mountains. This contemporary of Philip had been in charge of Phrygia in Alexander’s time, but had taken charge of the Asian army Antipater left behind on returning to Macedonia at the end of his one foray east of the Hellespont. There, besieged in his eyrie, Eumenes tried to intrigue his way out by directing Hieronymus to win terms from the man entrenched tenaciously below his walls. The scheming during these exchanges is opaque, but Hieronymus and Eumenes showed cunning in the context of a world just ruptured by the news of Antipater’s death, apparently first accepting an alliance with Antigonus to earn their release from Nora, but then reneging and gaining from Antipater’s successor Polyperchon access to enough of the treasure kept at Cyinda in Cilicia that it was possible to fund an army spearheaded by those formidable old veterans of all Alexander’s battles, the Silver Shields. These were men that Eumenes would lead with such subtly and intelligence that Antigonus would only just get the better of him in two years of hard campaigning over a vast Eastern amphitheatre.

The winter of 316/315 saw Hieronymus penned up with other prisoners following his leader and compatriot being sold by the Silver Shields to his death as the price of their women and baggage. However, if the victor of the Iranian war felt that Eumenes was too dangerous to live, this was not at all the case with his talented protégé. Transferring to the victor’s party from the defeated one was anyway a norm in these successor wars and the Cardian already knew Antigonus from the Nora transactions. The administrator-historian was soon established at the heart of Antigonid headquarters, on familiar terms with both Antigonus and his son the future Demetrius Poliorcetes (the besieger of cities). At the time this highbrow joined the entourage of the one-eyed dynast he had been campaigning deep in upper Asia for two years and when starting out on the road to Mesopotamia and the upper satrapies Antigonus had been but one of a number of significant power-players in the splintered world that had emerged in the half-decade since Alexander’s death. However, when in 315 he returned to the west, his position was exponentially different: now he was the dominant power, the richest by far of the Diadochi with the strongest army in Europe, Africa or Asia. He had even resuscitated those old dazzling Persian arrangements that meant exploiting the resources of an Asian realm of vast distances and hugely varied terrain would be so much easier: ‘He himself established at intervals throughout all that part of Asia of which he was master a system of fire-signals and dispatch-carriers, by means of which he expected to have quick service in all his business.’5

The product of success was inevitably envy and fear. Antigonus was worrying everybody now after his removal of local potentates like Pithon, Seleucus and Peucestas, the latter two who had been enjoying control of the wealthy old provinces of Babylonia and Persia. The size of his fortune was alarming: he had already taken 10,000 talents from the Cyinda treasury and had an annual income of more than that. Such military might, founded on the combined Macedonian veterans, minus the Silver Shields sent off in small units on what was intended to be fatal duty on the Indian frontier, of both his own and Eumenes’ armies and the best mercenaries his ample money could buy, was bound to raise anxiety among his peers. Ptolemy of Egypt became the architect of a joint reaction instigated by the arrival of the exiled Seleucus, so it was his envoys that covered the hundreds of miles on roads well maintained since the Persians had been in charge that it took to reach Antigonus in upper Syria. What they had on offer was extraordinary: the confederates’ demands laid before the old warrior and his council if accepted would have chopped great chunks of real estate out of the empire he had won so there was little real chance of accommodation. Yet refusal meant war and, after accepting the gage thrown down at his feet, we hear of Ptolemaeus, a nephew of Antigonus, being sent to raise the siege of Amisus, to clear Cassander’s men out of Cappadocia and occupy the Hellespont to prevent him interfering in Anatolia again. Hieronymus would have known this man well: they had met as far back as the siege of Nora when Antigonus had dispatched him as a hostage to Eumenes, but still Ptolemaeus’ efforts were largely peripheral; it was Antigonus’ maritime offensive against the Lagids of Egypt that was at the centre of the great man’s exertions. The generation of naval muscle with which to control the Aegean and its islands was crucial in dominating the routes east and west from Phoenicia to Greece as far as Carthage and Spain and north-south where control from Rhodes to Paros would cut communications between his enemies in Europe and Africa. As part of this strategy, the Peloponnese, Attica and Euboea were also crucial in monitoring the whole East Mediterranean, as were the Cypriot powers who Antigonus was soon assiduously wooing.

This involvement in Europe was a process, not an event, and had emerged as a serious prong of Antigonus’ strategy by 314. He might have sponsored Cassander before when he needed a counterweight to Polyperchon, having his own hands full in dealing with Eumenes, but that time was past and it hardly needed the ruler of Macedon to have made demands for compensation in Cappadocia and Lycia as part of the list of requirements forwarded by Ptolemy to make him an enemy, but from that moment onwards he certainly was one, meaning that there would be another dimension to the next successor war. Once returned to the coast of Syria, the Antigonid chancery, where Hieronymus cheerfully sat, would have collated the reports on the situation in the Macedonian homeland and what had been for almost a generation her Greek adjuncts. Not that the hard-hand hegemony impressed by Philip and reinforced by Antipater had been uncontested: there were always factions, often fuelled by savage class hatred, eager to oust the garrisons or apparatchiks that had long been keeping them subservient. The Lamian War had almost looked like it might introduce a new dawn of autonomy, and if these reveries had been stillborn, in more recent years the bloody divisions between their Macedonian masters had offered the opportunity of finding freedom between the cracks. If Cassander’s success in establishing himself in Pella suggested a return to the bad old days of his father’s time, there were still sparks glowing and perhaps the more prescient of Hellenic observers realized that exploitation of dynastic fault lines might engage the power of those to the east who possessed the fuel to start a mighty fire of freedom.

It was the history written by the minister Hieronymus of Cardia who had long ago left his birthplace on the Thracian Chersonese and freighted via Diodorus of Sicily that highlights the impact of a newly-conquered Asian world rebounding west across the Aegean against the homeland of its conquerors. Down to modern times Diodorus has suffered, being considered an entirely unoriginal copyist despite him having no inclination to try to hide his character as a compiler. Yet at least the quality of Hieronymus as a source, concerned as he was to discover the practical motives of leaders and qualities of subordinates with less emphasis on the impact of sacrilege or piety, makes him invaluable, whether from the geographic itinerary compiled in the last year of Alexander’s life with information from his chancery or from the Diadochi period with military details never reproduced in Diodorus’ pages when he was not available. Nonetheless, as Pausanias suggests: ‘If Philistus was justified in suppressing the most wicked deeds of Dionysius, because he expected his return to Syracuse, surely Hieronymus may be fully forgiven for writing to please Antigonus.’6 Such an association with power ensured that he could not help but show a certain bias.

The details of the European contest would have been personally familiar to the man who would chronicle it, listening to the intelligence reports in Antigonus’ headquarters and relaying what his proxies in Europe had achieved. He must inevitably be partial, making grand and tragic his sponsors’ reputation by suggesting that he alone really had the ambition to reunify and rule the whole of Alexander’s Empire, the most deserving for trying for the supreme prize, for contemplating world conquest. Such a verdict fails to register that if Ptolemy and Cassander may have had largely more local ambitions, certainly Seleucus shared the aspiration and was but a short step from achieving most of it when he fell foul of a despicable fatality. Yet despite this preference, Hieronymus had the considerable advantage of being contemporary with events and as such was able to verify the narratives heard from eyewitnesses and directly understand the personalities of those involved. Following a historical tradition well over 150 years old, his analysis remained to be not just tapped but sometimes virtually plagiarized by not a few of those whose works are still left to us and, like Polybius, the historian of Rome’s climb to greatness, with first-hand knowledge of the world he was describing and intimate contact with major figures, he also probably had just as elevated an understanding of his own significance in what he understood as an age of giants. We know much more about him than many ancient historians. We may hear of Thucydides in command of a naval squadron near Amphipolis and his subsequent exile or Polybius as a world traveller and sycophant and tutor in the houses of the Scipio Aemiliani, but Hieronymus remained significant through to his demise, dying sound in mind and body at over 100 years of age.

Since Antipater had straddled the Balkan world, the family programme continued by his son had been to keep a grip on the Greek cities in their purview, either by the presence of a military garrison or the rule of congenial oligarchies generally guaranteed by the restriction of the citizen franchise to men of very considerable means. This enfeebling of democratic factions was for years the norm in mainland Greece, only entrenched after the debacle of the Lamian revolt had dampened recalcitrant spirits in blood. Yet these Macedonian rulers were not the only kids on the block: of those already on the spot when the successor conflict flared again there was Alexander, the able son of Polyperchon who had been reported as active on his father’s behalf in Attica in 318 in his high days when he was, as the guardian of Alexander’s heirs designated by Antipater, besieging Megalopolis. The family pairing may have fallen in the world since Cassander had taken Macedonia from their ally Olympias, but the industry they had showed in the Peloponnese since 317 had paid local dividends so Alexander still controlled strong posts in the peninsula while his father remained active, offering another focus of opposition while enjoying Aetolian hospitality, while almost inevitably the Spartans refused obeisance to any foreign master despite her days of real greatness being long past.

Cassander’s response to these political wrinkles in the realm he had so recently won was typical of this busy man. Since eliminating Olympias at Pydna and securing Pella in 315 he had married Thessaloniki, daughter of Philip II, to graft his line to that of the Argeads and, claiming that prerogative of kingship most outstandingly exercised by Alexander, he founded Cassandreia on the site of old Potidaea in the Chalcidice. As the year was winding down he even found the time and inclination to deal with the problem to the south where only Alexander seemed possessed of a force that could stand against him. The new ruler of Macedon, ‘after assembling an adequate force, set out from Macedonia’, crossed Thessaly before being held up at Thermopylae by the Aetolians, taking up a position at this choke point as they had done so often in the past. It took real fighting but he dug them out in the end and with the road cleared the Macedonians reached Boeotia. There he re-established the city of Thebes in the rich Teneric Plain before his progress took the army through the Cithaeron Mountains across the Megarid and over the Gerania hills before discovering that Alexander’s men were well-positioned blocking the isthmus. Temporarily stymied, Cassander showed at his best: backtracking to Megara, he set the local shipwrights to work building not only boats to transport his men but special barges to take the elephants he had with him. It must have been a splendid sight to see the huge beasts trumpeting in concern as their conveyances set sail with the sun shining off the armour of the warriors following their wake in the flotilla, crossing the Saronic Gulf to arrive on the coast of the Argolid at Epidaurus, there disembarking at this ancient port famous for its healing centre at the sanctuary of Asclepius, offspring of Apollo.

They pushed on to the city of Argos. There the municipal leaders were pressured to ‘abandon its alliance with Alexander and to join him’, and after this promising start he progressed right across the peninsula through Arcadia and into the region of Messene. Cassander managed to enter the town and take control, but it was beyond him to capture the stronghold on Mount Ithome. So it was a precarious presence left behind when he retraced his route back to the Argolid where he was able to negotiate the submission of Hermione, a place on the southern coast near the island of Hydra. Despite this enemy parading around his domain, Alexander felt he did not have the numbers to react, instead keeping safe behind the walls of the fortress Acrocorinth rising rugged and precipitous from the coastal plain. So the fighting season terminated with the main army returning to Macedonia while leaving ‘at the end of the Isthmus towards Gerania two thousand soldiers commanded by Molyccus’ to try to bottle up Alexander in the peninsula and deny him any opportunity to join his Aetolian allies in interfering in Attica or Boeotia. This force was not incredibly numerous but still sufficient to be able to hold these defensible hills against almost anybody coming against them. The ruler of Macedon might now have felt he had good reason to feel he had solved the problem of the sprig of old Polyperchon who had not been up to contesting the open field with him, particularly as the father looked an even more spent force hiding out in Aetolia with an old Epirot ally.7 Surely he expected that with Olympias gone and Macedon secure he would inevitably inherit the old ascendency in mainland Greece? Yet it was not going to be that easy; things would soon hang in the balance as Hieronymus’ master took a hand.

This intervention was spearheaded by a very significant official named Aristodemus of Miletus who, although he suffered from bad notices8 as an archetypal sycophant, was one of Antigonus’ most dependable agents and closer to his master than many of his weightiest military men. He had been first with the news of Antipater’s death in 319 and was years later on hand to profit, if slightly belatedly, as the foremost to report the extraordinary victory of Demetrius at Cypriot Salamis in 306, but now in 314 he was offered the opportunity to flex his military and diplomatic muscles in an independent mission. He was sent to the Peloponnese with 1,000 talents to make friends with Polyperchon and his son and buy a bespoke army with which to ferment a war against Cassander. We know that when he reached Sparta he greased palms and got permission to recruit 8,000 soldiers, most probably at the great mercenary mart of Cape Taenarum at the tip of the modern Mani peninsula. Once established as a local player, Aristodemus approached the family firm then dominating the region. Polyperchon and son were not fantasists. They knew that compared with the big political beasts they were but hyenas who could only feed between the tracks of the great dynasts, so when the newcomer offered the senior man the post of Antigonid commander in the Peloponnese, he bit his hand off. This marriage of convenience was consummated as Polyperchon, prepared to gamble with his son’s life to gain the advantages on offer, shipped him over to visit the great ruler of Asia in his headquarters at Old Tyre.

While Hieronymus’ master played on a world stage, the Greek audience always remained significant and he took the opportunity of the young man’s arrival to advertise his good intentions to this constituency. At an assembly of Macedonian soldiers and civilians this master of propaganda launched a tirade against Cassander as the murderer of Olympias and spinning his reported mistreatment of Alexander’s wife Roxana as indicating ambitions for the Macedonian throne. More than that, he had founded a city named for himself near where Olynthus, ancient enemy of Macedonia, had stood before re-establishing Thebes, a place the great Alexander, despite a glorious past hardly less shining than that of Athens, regarded as a nest of traitors who had famously Medized in 480 and twice revolted against Macedonian rule. Indeed he razed it to the ground, leaving it a gutted ruin with the dogs howling, echoing the anguish of their exiled masters who fled from among toppled statues, charred corpses and incinerated houses carrying any valuables that could be saved. The terrifying fate that hung over the band of refugees who survived along the road from the broken city was reinforced by the knowledge that Alexander had announced a specific diktat that Thebes should never be rebuilt. The assembly trumpeted that Cassander must undo these misdeeds and put himself under Antigonus’ orders as the proper guardian of the legitimate dynastic line or face destruction. It was also on this occasion that the decree of Greek autonomy was promulgated, posting a clear opposition to Cassander’s line that contended the only way to deal with the Greek cities was by the establishing of garrisons, sympathetic oligarchs and tyrants. What this Greek freedom really meant to these Macedonian grandees is moot. Whatever he may have promised for Antigonus, it was surely more about weakening Cassander than any ideology, and his rival understood it as realpolitik. The reality was all about context. Alexander himself, while largely suppressing autonomy on the mainland during the invasion of Achaemenid Anatolia, had not scrupled about mobilizing local Greek support by sponsoring the democratic factions in the Aegean cities where the Persians had previously favoured oligarchs and tyrants.

This fishing in the muddy waters of the Peloponnese by Antigonid strategists was not the only sign of tentacles approaching Macedonian Europe. The old man’s nephew Ptolemaeus was progressing through Cappadocia, throwing out Cassander’s lieutenants before his army pr...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Content
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 An Old, Old Man
• Chapter 2 Forging the Fetters
• Chapter 3 Cassander and Lysimachus
• Chapter 4 Demetrius Rex
• Chapter 5 Now an Old Man Moves
• Chapter 6 A Passing Thunderbolt
• Chapter 7 A Gallic Fury
• Chapter 8 An Improbable Hero
• Chapter 9 The Last of an Eagle
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Platessection