The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  Within five days of Alexander's death, the former Persian queen mother had starved herself to death, lamenting (men said) the loss of Alexander: only eight years before, he had been her son's sworn enemy. Amongst Macedonians, there was a complication. Alexander had sent their respected general Craterus back to Macedonia with 10,000 elderly Macedonian veterans whom he had dismissed. Crat­erus was strongly conservative and was no friend to 'inclusion'. Alex­ander had ordered him to 'take care of the freedom of the Greeks', a reminder of how that old ideal had now been diluted.' He was also to replace the elderly Antipater who had been commander in Greece in Alexander's absence.

  What orders from Alexander might Craterus invent or claim for himself? There was no precedent or system in Macedonian society for dealing with such a crisis. The early death of a childless king had left a vacuum, and somehow the gaps must be filled in. Titles of honour could be quickly invented to placate the senior figures, 'guardian' or 'overseer' or 'chiliarch' (in the sense of 'deputy'). At Babylon, Per-diccas also claimed to have found Alexander's 'Last Plans'. He pre­sented them to the troops, surely intending them to be cancelled: it is quite likely that he and his aides, including the artful Greek secretary Eumenes, had invented them in an evening of frantic improvisation. They were made to include fantastic building projects; one was a temple at Troy, another, a vast mound as 'big as a pyramid' in Philip's honour in Macedon. Plans for Western conquest were added, stretching on through Carthage and beyond. The aim, surely, was that the troops should listen respectfully but reject them. The likes of Craterus could not then appeal to different 'plans' and claim that they were empowered by them. But would the troops be sure to reject even this much? So another vast plan was included: 'transfers of population' between Europe and Asia, so as to bring them into harmony by 'intermarriage and assimilation'.4 From a king who had stood up for inclusion, this plan was just credible: the Macedonians, 'Asia-sceptics', dreaded it, and rejected the 'plans', as intended.

  Roxane's baby, born in September, was a boy (Alexander IV). Meanwhile, Perdiccas took the lead in Asia with Antipater, now in his seventies, a 'rotten thread' in Macedonia.5 Within twenty-two years, Alexander's kingdom would have fragmented among quite other generals: his lifelong friend Ptolemy, in Egypt; his infantry com­mander Seleucus, in Asia; his bodyguard, Lysimachus, in Thrace and north-west Asia; Antipater's impetuous son, Cassander, in Macedon (as Alexander's companion at Babylon, Cassander was alleged, even, to have helped to have him 'poisoned'). For a while, other major competitors led troops and played for high stakes: the big, burly Antigonus, one-eyed, with a booming voice, the veteran who had commanded in western Asia throughout Alexander's march east; his flamboyant son, Demetrius, 'brave as a hero and beautiful as a god, of such majesty that strangers followed him merely to gaze';6 the artful Eumenes, no Macedonian himself, but a literate Odysseus of a Greek who had been Alexander's secretary. Until 281 bc wars were waged incessantly between the major participants and their followers.

  The first of the long-term winners to show his hand was Ptolemy. He had known Alexander well since childhood; he had even been appointed as his food-taster (obviously a highly responsible job, in a world of poisons). At Babylon, he received rich Egypt as his governorship, but he entrenched himself there by conquests in the West (in Libya) and then by invading Cyprus. His weakest frontier lay in the East, causing him to invade Syria repeatedly in a pattern of 'Syrian wars' which would preoccupy his successors for a hundred years and more. Ptolemy was to found the dynasty, the Ptolemies, which ruled Egypt for three hundred years. One of his most artful moves was to seize Alexander's dead body when Perdiccas sent it home from Babylon on a magnificently decorated funeral carriage. One story is that Ptolemy cheated his pursuers by substituting a sham corpse: they must have chased him, and so perhaps some such trick is historical.

  At first, Ptolemy kept Alexander's body in the old Egyptian capital at Memphis. Later, it was moved down the Nile to Alexandria where a subsequent king, Ptolemy IV, built a magnificent mausoleum, the Sema, for Alexander and the other dead Ptolemies. Rumours that Alexander's tomb has been found continue to attract publicity, but they would have to involve the rediscovery of a huge dynastic monu­ment under the built-up centre of Alexandria. As for his body, it continued to be displayed there to visitors, including the first Roman emperor Augustus, who laid flowers (in 30 bc) on the coffin's glass lid. It was said, perhaps rhetorically, to be still on display in c. ad 3 80, but there is no specific reference to a visit to it after one in ad 215. The tomb and the corpse were almost certainly destroyed in one or other great city-riot in Alexandria.

  For seventeen years, the competing 'successors' avoided the title of king, but then Alexander's little son died (in 310) and his own tantaliz­ing sister Cleopatra died too (in 308 bc). Antigonus was the only successor with that royal necessity, a promising son, Demetrius: after a fine victory by the young man, he first took the title of king, knowing that now he had a worthy heir. His rivals then followed suit, including Ptolemy in Egypt, though the scribes in Egypt waited until 305 to describe him as Pharaoh-king too. Ptolemy had to fight hard to sur­vive, first against Perdiccas, then against Antigonus and his son. Since 311, he too had posed as a champion of the 'freedom of the Greeks': most of all the successors, he needed Greeks for his armies and his new Egypt. His plea for freedom, however, was not a committed plea for democracy.

  In Greece, meanwhile, many of the Greeks had anticipated him. On news of Alexander's death, they had risen in revolt, summoning Greeks to 'freedom' from the Macedonian 'barbarians' in a way which reversed the spin of Alexander's own invasion of Asia. Despite some valiant successes, they were crippled by defeats at sea, leading to the Athenians' capitulation. In 322 bc, after more than a hundred and eighty years, the Athenians' democracy was ended by a conqueror, Antipater. Political rights were confined to those Athenians who had moderate property or more; the lowest classes were to be exported to the wilds of Thrace.

  Only the changing power-struggles of the Successors allowed Athenian democrats to restore their system, briefly in 318, more last­ingly in 307. 'Freedom' would remain a much-publicized slogan for Greeks, but it was now a slogan for the competing Macedonian generals to offer. As under Philip and Alexander, it depended on concessions from a powerful overlord. Such concessions continued to be made, however, either to destabilize a rival general or else to secure Greece (and thereby, Macedon) and attract Greek settlers and recruits out into the new dynasties in Asia. There was, then, room for manoeuvre for the Greek city-states, but not for full liberty: since 338 bc, under Philip, the Athenians no longer controlled the vital sea-route for their grain-imports from the Black Sea.

  In Asia, the wars had two unusual patterns: an absence of local nationalism and a general respect for continuing kingship and legality, even when the 'kings' were a half-wit and a child. Remarkably, none of the people in Asia rose in rebellion during the fights for the suc­cession. Asian recruits even continued to serve copiously in the Mace­donians' own competing armies. Meanwhile, the two 'compromise kings', Philip III and Alexander IV, continued to be recognized in public inscriptions in the Greek cities, in Babylonia and in Egypt; the various royal treasuries continued to be guarded punctiliously and made available only to those with royal letters; a royal coinage and a royal calendar (numbering the years by their reigns) continued to prevail, at least until Philip the half-wit was killed in autumn 317 bc and then young Alexander IV (with Roxane) in 310 bc.

  Why were there no national revolts? At first, Alexander had re­appointed those Iranian governors who surrendered to him. In his absence in India, some of them then revolted, but other Iranians helped to capture and surrender them. There was no national solidarity, and the Macedonians had the monopoly of trained military force. Perceptions of the conquest also varied according to class. Fot many of their subjects, the Macedonians' victory had meant very little change. Tribute continued to be demanded; local collectors still gathered it. Even when land was given to new
beneficiaries, it still had to be worked by the same local workers. Why, then, revolt for more of the same, under a new or old name? Alexander's conquests in India were lost after twenty years, but not because of local nationalism: his emerging general, Seleucus, exchanged them with Chandragupta, a newly emerged Indian military leader from the south, and then for the massive price of 500 war-elephants. His conquests in Bactria survived in Graeco-Macedonian hands for more than a hundred and fifty years. In Babylonia, so densely populated, Seleucus himself could profit from good memories of the previous governorship which he had held since the 320s: in 312 bc he reinstated himself with a core force of only a few hundred horsemen after a bold gallop back from Syria. All over Asia, non-Greek subjects acquiesced in Macedonian rule or preferred to profit by joining their new masters.

  Not only were these masters hardened soldiers: they were prepared to fight massively against each other. From King Philip's reforms onwards, the Macedonians refute so many of the popular stereotypes about soldiers and the human condition. They fought loyally although they had no votes, no 'republican' freedom to inspire them. In the chaos after Alexander's death, they did start to express approval for one or other leader in their military assemblies, and so consultation of them became a customary necessity. They did not, however, gain any democratic liberty, or even seek it. Nor did they want to retire from the army; Alexander's best Macedonians in India were often over sixty, but they fought on for another ten years, still terrorizing their opponents. After his death they were prepared to fight fellow Macedonians, especially if attacking younger Macedonians from the 'new intake' who had never served the great Alexander. In the absence of a true hereditary king as general, these veterans served whoever could pay them and protect the goods and baggage (including women) which represented their personal riches on the move. At first, endorse­ment by the two compromise kings did help the competing generals to win them over, but then the kings were killed off and in the end Alexander's successors were just military men, no more. They were a generation of 'lucky condottieri',8 whereas Philip and Alexander had been truly dynastic kings of the Macedonian people.

  Alexander's own memory and style, therefore, did matter to his would-be heirs. Naturally, they continued the style of his army and tactics, including his one innovation in Greek warfare, use of the elephant. So far as there was an 'arms race', it was only to create ever bigger versions of the same machines as Alexander's, the ships or siege-engines: in 306 young Demetrius could even mobilize fabulous siege-towers, 120 feet high, against the walls of Rhodes (the city survived the siege, nonetheless). By 318 war-elephants, even, were being used against city-walls in Arcadia in Greece: an Indian expert taught the Greek defenders how to conceal spiked planks in the ground before their walls so that the soft undersides of the elephants' feet became impaled. In Syria, Ptolemy then repeated the trick in a pitched battle six years later.

  For seven years the prominent career of the non-Macedonian Eumenes showed what an aspiring leader needed to represent in the wake of Alexander. Although he was also a secretary, Eumenes was a wily general; though a Greek, he was not above being drunk (like a good Macedonian) for a night in his army-camp. How ever could such a non-Macedonian lead hardened Macedonian troops? Eumenes had problems with their dialect, but he did know how to make a point to them, by telling them a simple fable about a lion, the sort of story last recorded in our history books in the archaic world of the speeches in Herodotus' 'enquiries'. Lacking Macedonian roots, it was crucial that Eumenes did have letters of royal Macedonian approval from the compromise kings. These letters allowed him to claim money: they even made the famous veteran 'Silver Shields' follow him, because he was validated as the kings' man. When some of the big names from Alexander's past joined him, he artfully persuaded these uneasy 'equals' to agree to meet in a tent containing the dead Alexander's throne. His sceptre was placed on it; they all revered Alexander as a god and when they took counsel, they felt as if a 'god was leading them on'. Six years after Alexander's death, they could still unite in his unseen presence.

  Eumenes' tactics were only a part of a wider imitation of the famous king. Alexander's great multi-racial banquets were imitated in Persia; his Successors were said to imitate his voice or even the way he held his head. The least powerful of them, Lysimachus, was the one who eventually issued the most idealized portrait of a god-like young Alex­ander on his silver coins. Like Alexander, himself a passionate hunter, the Successors paraded their hunting prowess, claiming to be true 'lion kings': Perdiccas was even said to have taken a lioness's cubs from her den bare-handed. Like Alexander, the Successors received local cults from hopeful or grateful Greek cities, without actually demanding their own worship as gods. As Seleucus' power in Asia grew, he claimed to have been acknowledged by a great Greek oracle as the begotten son of a god, like Alexander: the god was Apollo, the oracle the shrine at Didyma near Miletus. His Iranian queen, Apama, was encouraged to be a benefactress of the site which thus gained its enormous temple, the biggest and finest surviving monument of the early Hellenistic world.9

  By 302 bc there were five competing kings, but a year later they were reduced to four when Seleucus defeated the elderly Antigonus and killed him. India had by now been given away, but the rest of Alexander's territories stayed under Greek rule. In 2.81 bc, after more years of struggle, the four kings became three when Seleucus, an Alexander-survivor, killed off Lysimachus, one of Alexander's body­guards, at an old site of Persian military settlement, 'Cyrus' Plain', in western Asia. From 281 bc until the clashes with Rome, Alexander's Greek world remained split into the resulting three kingdoms: the Seleucid kings in Asia (without India), the Ptolemies in Egypt and the Antigonids in Macedon, bound by garrisons and treaties to the city-states and 'leagues' in Greece. On a long view, the split was not so very new. The previous empire, the Persians', had had recurrent problems in retaining Egypt. They had a loose hold on India and had never conquered Greece. The Successors' three-way split, then, was already visible in the early years of the fourth century bc.

  During the years of the dynasts' rivalry, one social group did gain greater prominence: royal and well-born women. Alexander's sister Cleopatra was soon widowed, a prize for the aspiring Successors; until 316, his mother Olympias was still at large in her home kingdom; his niece Adea (Philip's granddaughter), when she was aged only sixteen, proved to have a spirit and public audacity worthy of her military mother. But there were other great women, too, outside the royal house. Antipater's daughter Phila won a good name for charitable actions and sound sense, although she had to endure a marriage to the younger playboy Demetrius. One of the least promising of Alexander's arranged Oriental marriages had been the union of Darius' Persian niece, Amestris, with the staunch Macedonian 'Asia-sceptic' Craterus. He died soon afterwards, having ignored her, but she then married the dynast of a Greek city on the Black Sea and ended, by origin a royal Persian, as the ruler of the city-state.

  The honours, not unfittingly, went to Olympias. Brought back to Macedon in 317, she protected her son's half-Bactrian child, Roxane's boy, and attacked the vigorous young Adea who was by now the wife of the half-witted Philip III. In autumn 317 Olympias offered a truly theatrical choice of death to Adea (a dagger, a noose or poison), but within a year she herself had to surrender to her enemies after the most fearful siege in the coastal town of Pydna. It took the relatives of her previous victims to murder her: no less than two hundred soldiers, sent for the purpose, had refused the task 'out of respect for her royal rank'. Her death was worthy of Greek tragedy's over­powering Queen Clytemnestra. But even this tragic drama was ex­celled on Cyprus by the awesome Axiothea, the queen of Paphos. In Paphos' palace, in 312 bc, she made each one of her daughters kill herself before finally taking her own life, rather than fall into the hands of Ptolemy's agents.

  In Greece during these years, we hear of prominent courtesans, heirs to the top 'mistresses' of Alexander's own court. None was more famous than the mature Lamia, whose doings wit
h Athens' liberating prince Demetrius remained a topic of witty scandal and comic theatre. In Athens, some of the courtesans are said to have been hearers of the affable philospher Epicurus; we even know of portraits of two distinguished Greek poetesses, Myrto and Anyte. But these women were of minimal public impact compared with the feminine rivals who were active inside the Successors' own palaces.

  When praising the Ptolemies, the poet Theocritus cited the quality of being a 'good lover' (erotikos).w It was different to being a good husband. In almost every Successor family, the kings not only fell repeatedly in love; they actually married a second woman, or more, and fathered more sets of children. Marriage to Cleopatra, his seventh wife, had been the cause of King Philip's murder back in 336, but even so, Alexander left three Iranian wives at his death: Roxane, the new 'queen mother', was said to have been very quick to poison one of the other two brides. In the Successors' families, 'second-wife syndrome' then became rampant, as if no lessons had been learned from the Macedonian past. Ptolemy married one of Antipater's daugh­ters, but then fell in love with one of her Macedonian attendants and married her too: this younger wife's sons became the more favoured sons in Ptolemy's priorities, causing a serious dynastic quarrel with the older children. Lysimachus repeated the same mistake and killed his eldest son by one wife after foolishly marrying another. This family chaos undermined his rule and helped to bring Seleucus against him. Cassander did no better, and Seleucus only escaped trouble by sharing his kingdom with his son in his lifetime and conceding one of his wives to him: the boy, it was said, was lovesick for her. One-eyed Antigonus was the only steady man in marriage, but his son Demetrius made up for him by his two marriages and his prodigal liaisons with star Greek courtesans. A hunting prince, he never killed a lion, but he did make love to a famous prostitute called 'Lioness' (the name of a sexual position, too).