Dividing the Spoils

by Waterfield, Robin

  In the greater scheme of things, cities were bound to have a reduced role, but this made little impact on civic pride. Most citizens still felt that their primary loyalty was toward the city of their birth, and were prepared to work to maintain or enhance its importance. And through their citizens cities even came to take on new roles. Precisely because there was now a greater scheme of things, there was more possibility of impartial interaction, so that cities began to send out respected men to act as judges, or even to arbitrate in disputes between neighboring cities. These were occasions for civic pride no less than, say, the successful staging of a major international festival. And such diplomatic links might lead in due course to more formal alliances, or even some form of confederacy, on the principle that union was strength. The Greek city was alive and well in the early Hellenistic period, and learning to adjust to new circumstances.

  The Triumph of Cassander

  THE LIKELIHOOD THAT Greece would become a theater of war rapidly became a certainty, as Cassander and Polyperchon vied for control of the mainland cities. Political lines became clearly drawn, the only relevant issue being whether any given city would throw in its lot with the legitimate regent or the pretender. By and large, the poorer members of the cities and their champions lined up behind Polyperchon, while the wealthier classes found their interests best served by Cassander. But whichever side was in the ascendant, we can imagine the stress and the bustle as cities tried to determine how close they would be to the front line of the impending war and made their preparations accordingly, and as rival political factions, encouraged by one or the other of the contenders for supremacy in Greece, tried to gain or confirm their power.

  THE OPENING CAMPAIGNS OF THE SECOND WAR OF THE SUCCESSORS

  In his proclamation, Polyperchon singled out Athens for favorable treatment: not only would the democratic exiles return, as everywhere, but the island of Samos would be restored to the city. It had been removed by Perdiccas just a few years earlier as a consequence of Alexander’s Exiles Decree. Somehow, Polyperchon’s promise of freedom for the Greeks did not include the Greeks of Samos, who were to be expelled once more from their farmland in favor of Athenian settlers. But the glittering jewel of Athens in his crown was worth a little inconsistency.

  The Athenian democrats contacted Polyperchon early in 318 and requested help in changing the regime that had been imposed by Antipater after the Lamian War. Polyperchon sent his son Alexander south. With an army encamped just outside the city walls, the leaders of the oligarchy were deposed and executed in May 318. Athens thus became a protectorate of the official regime in Macedon, and democracy was restored. Jubilation was muted, however, by the continued presence of Nicanor and the garrison in Piraeus, which could still make a considerable difference to Athenian fortunes. Before long Cassander himself arrived, with men and ships loaned to him by Antigonus, to make Piraeus the launch point for his attempt on Macedon.

  Polyperchon responded by coming south in force to join his son for the blockade of Piraeus, but they achieved very little, since they could not control the sea. The Athenians were also finding it hard to feed the army of twenty-five thousand that was encamped on their land. Polyperchon therefore left Alexander with enough men to dissuade Cassander from venturing out of Piraeus by land, and marched into the Peloponnese.

  Most of the Peloponnesian cities bloodily evicted the Antipatrid oligarchs on Polyperchon’s orders. The most important exception was Megalopolis in Arcadia, and Polyperchon put it under siege. The battle was protracted and closely fought, but in the end the defenders were successful. They even foiled a final push by Polyperchon’s elephants through the collapsed wall by laying spikes in the breach.1 In frustration, Polyperchon left Megalopolis under siege (which was eventually broken off months later without having achieved its objective) and withdrew back to Macedon. Polyperchon’s failures at Piraeus and Megalopolis, despite the size of his army, drastically slowed the rate at which the cities threw in their lot with him. It now seemed more sensible for them to wait and see who would win the war in Greece.

  With many of his troops tied up in the sieges of Piraeus and Megalopolis, Polyperchon turned his attention elsewhere. Still desperate for allies, he sent the naval expert Cleitus to relieve Arrhidaeus, under siege in Cius, and at the same time to guard against a possible crossing of the Hellespont by Antigonus, who was encamped not far from Byzantium. The expedition went well at first; Cleitus relieved Arrhidaeus and joined forces with him. And when Nicanor arrived from Piraeus with over a hundred ships to help Antigonus, Cleitus inflicted a severe defeat on him off Byzantium. But that very night Antigonus arranged an unexpected counterattack: while he set about Cleitus’s camp on land, Nicanor returned with the remnants of the fleet to disable the enemy ships as they lay beached or tried to escape. It was a complete victory. Arrhidaeus either died or surrendered. Cleitus’s flagship alone escaped, but when he landed in Thrace, he ran into a detachment of Lysimachus’s troops and was killed. It was a wretched end for the man who, after his earlier successes, had styled himself as Poseidon, the god of the sea, and had insisted on being treated as a god.2 Nicanor fared little better, since soon after returning to Piraeus he was killed on Cassander’s orders for being overambitious.

  The loss of the fleet meant not just that Polyperchon was now cut off from Eumenes, but also that there was little to stop Antigonus crossing the Bosporus and coming at Macedon that way. But the deal the two allies had made assigned all Europe to Cassander, and Antigonus was not yet ready to leave Asia Minor. It was all under his control now—his personal control or that of allies such as Asander in Caria—from the Hellespont to the Taurus Mountains, but there was the matter of Eumenes just beyond the Taurus. He left most of his forces to protect Asia Minor, entrusted the war in Greece to Cassander, and marched southeast after the renegade Eumenes.

  SEA BATTLE

  Naval warfare had not changed much since the Classical period. The methods were still the same: skillful maneuvering so that you were in a position to disable an enemy ship by ramming (with or without subsequent boarding by marines) or by breaking its oars and oarsmen. The main innovations or developments in the early Hellenistic period stemmed from the same love of gigantism that produced—to name just a few outstanding examples—enormous armies, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the temple of Apollo at Didyma. Ever-larger vessels were being built. Unlike the sleek triremes of the Classical era, larger ships could deploy artillery on their decks—joined together catamaran-style, they might even carry massive siege towers with which to assault a port from the sea—and they could also carry more men. So the two chief developments in the early Hellenistic period were a greater reliance on long-range offensive weaponry, and more direct action. Instead of maneuvering to take an enemy ship from the side, the primary objective of Hellenistic naval warfare became frontal ramming, followed by boarding.3

  The increased sizes of Hellenistic warships hugely increased the expense of navies. A fleet of a hundred warships of varying sizes, from triremes upward, might employ around thirty thousand men as crew and marines. A single, enormous ship built toward the end of the third century BCE by Ptolemy IV had a crew of almost 7,500 men, including three thousand marines. This vessel was largely for show, but already in our period Demetrius the Besieger was building some lesser, sea-worthy monsters.

  But even before the crews had embarked, ships were very expensive to produce. It was essential also to control the raw materials, or to have good trading relations with places that controlled them: wood for the hull, mast, and deck (preferably fir, cedar, or pine), for the keel (oak for warships), and for the oars (preferably fir); pitch for caulking and bitumen for coating the hull; hemp, esparto, or papyrus for the cordage; flax to make linen for the sailcloth. The cost of ships was such that enemy ships were extremely valuable booty for the enemy. Being made of wood, holed ships tended to founder rather than sink, and could then be captured and taken in tow.

  It was ess
ential also to have access to as many ports as possible, not just as dockyards but as havens. Ancient ships were very vulnerable to bad weather, did not ride comfortably at anchor in the open sea, and, given the sizes of their crews, needed to restock their provisions regularly. They also had a tendency to become waterlogged. This weakness of ancient warships—that they often needed to make land—made it desirable to control not just ports but whole stretches of coastline, as well as islands. Ships that were temporarily beached, away from the safety of a good harbor, were also vulnerable to attack from either land or sea, as Cleitus found to his cost.

  ATHENS AND EARLY HELLENISTIC CULTURE

  In Athens, constant military and diplomatic pressure from Cassander took its toll. Despairing of any effective action from Polyperchon, the Athenians decided to surrender and opened negotiations. After only a few months, in the summer of 317, the restored democracy fell again, this time in favor of dictatorship by a puppet ruler of Cassander’s choice. Cassander gave the job to the Aristotelian philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, highly regarded, but still aged under forty. Demetrius ruled Athens for the next ten years, with the backing of the Macedonian garrison, of course. Piraeus and Athens were reunited, and gave Cassander a secure base in southern Greece.

  Demetrius of Phalerum’s rule, though benign, sealed the end of Athens’s world-famous experiment in democracy. Although in later years from time to time the term was used for the constitution, the democratic organs of the state were actually dominated by a narrow group of wealthy families. This, as I have already remarked, is the pattern that came to exist within all the great cities of the Hellenistic world: power devolved upon those citizens who were wealthy enough to support the city both materially and through their channels of communication with distant kings.

  Cassander’s protection ushered in a decade of relative peace for Athens. No wars were fought on Athenian soil, though of course the city took a keen interest in events elsewhere. Theophrastus (Demetrius of Phalerum’s teacher) wrote his Characters, light-hearted vignettes of different kinds of people, around this time, and his sketch of a rumor-monger shows him spreading the alarming (and untrue) report that “Polyperchon and King Philip have won a battle and Cassander has been taken prisoner”4—a situation that would certainly have spelled trouble for Demetrius of Phalerum’s pro-Cassandrian Athens. But Athenians watched from the sidelines rather than being involved in the action, and this was a major change for a city that had been at the center of Greek affairs for almost two hundred years, until the Lamian War.

  The relative disempowerment of Athens in the Hellenistic period shows, above all, in the fact that it never again built monumental buildings out of its own resources, without the help of kings and wealthy individuals. It also shows in its literature and art, and most clearly in the comedy that was popular at the time. In the days when Athens had been a major power in the Aegean, comedy had blended farcical fantasy with satire, or even direct criticism, of contemporary figures, especially political figures and their policies. Aristophanes, the main comic playwright at the end of the fifth century, assumed that his job was to instruct his audiences as well as entertain them.5 By contrast, it is clear that Menander of Athens, the chief surviving representative of the kind of comic plays that were being shown at the end of the fourth century (conventionally called “New Comedy”), was concerned more or less entirely with entertainment. The rural setting of most of his comedies contrasts with the way Aristophanes set his plays in the heart of the city, where the political action was.

  Menander’s plays are delightful, but they are light, soap-operatic situation comedies. The protagonists are recognizable types, but not political types; they are, for instance, clever slaves, young women with illegitimate children, grumpy old men, braggart soldiers, and worthless young men-about-town, all depicted with great skill and psychological insight. The plots invariably center on a thwarted love affair, which comes out well for the young lovers in the end. Where Aristophanes was engaged in contemporary events, Menander (who was a friend of Demetrius of Phalerum) and his peers do no more than refer to them as a kind of backdrop. Women might be abducted by pirates, or sold into slavery, or captured in war, or have children by foreign soldiers. Men contemplate enlisting as mercenaries, or are assumed to have died abroad on service, or return with a “spear-won” concubine. Menander was writing at a time when thousands of lives were being lost on the battlefields of Asia and Europe, but, not surprisingly, he felt it was his job to distract his audience’s attention from such harsh realities, not to comment directly on them. He was writing escapist literature. He drew attention not to large-scale events but to the personal problems of individuals and their families. And so he kept step with the emphasis on the individual that we have already found to be a dominant feature of early Hellenistic culture.

  Escapism is apparent too in the new craze among rich town-dwellers for commissioning pastoral paintings to adorn their domestic quarters—the first manifestation of the long European tradition of landscape painting. None of these paintings has survived from the Hellenistic period, but they are known through later imitations, especially those preserved in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in southern Italy (though of course Roman artists were never merely imitative). Vitruvius, writing in Rome in the first century BCE, described typical scenes as “harbors, headlands, woods, hills, and the wanderings of Odysseus.”6 Such scenes were considered relaxing—which is to say that they took one’s mind off current affairs. The men who commissioned these paintings were increasingly cut off from the countryside, and so they idealized it. It is telling that the Greek word boukolikos, meaning “bucolic” or “pastoral,” also came to mean “soothing,” “ distracting.”

  Of course, it is somewhat facile to describe any works of art or literature just as “escapist.” They are works of art in their own right, and many of the productions of the Hellenistic era have stood the test of time well. The degree of skill and the quality of the attention paid to works of art make it clear that both the artists themselves and their patrons shared the concept of art for art’s sake. The fact that they may have served escapist purposes is important from a social-historical point of view, but it falls far short of any kind of assessment of their worth as artistic productions.

  These pastoral paintings quite often occupied panels that were displayed in a room in such a way that they could be read as a continuous narrative. Around the middle of the third century, poets such as Theocritus began to echo the trend by writing pastoral or bucolic vignettes. Not all of Theocritus’s Idylls are on pastoral themes, but all of them display the typical Hellenistic focus on everyday men and women rather than heroes. In Idyll I, the most famous of the pastoral idylls, a shepherd and a goatherd pipe and sing for each other, for entertainment and competition, and their exchanges are filled with details of country life: the music of the breeze in the pines, the playful sound of a waterfall, the flora and fauna, tasks such as milking, and lore such as that the meat of an unweaned kid tastes better. All the pastoral Idylls are imbued with escapism in the form of “the nostalgia, or hope, for simple virtues, uncomplicated living, plain home-grown food, basic country values.”7 Of course, country life never has been as ideal as this fantasy, produced for an urban elite by the court poet of Ptolemy II’s Alexandria. Theocritus instigated the pastoral dream that led, via Virgil, to Poussin’s Arcadia.

  The evidence for the kind of tragedies that were being written in Athens and elsewhere at the time is exiguous, but bears out these generalizations about escapism. As far as we can tell, they tended to emphasize technical and musical virtuosity over the depiction and problematization of ideal civic values, as their fifth-century predecessors had. The fifth-century masterpieces of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were commonly revived, but only as great works of literature; we watch a Shakespeare production in much the same way nowadays, missing the copious references to contemporary events.

  The new emphasis on the individual also informed sculptu
re and painting. While kings and commanders were still portrayed in propagandist ways that distinguished them as players of critical roles, a considerable gap opened up between this kind of public idealism and the increasingly large numbers of privately commissioned works of art, which aimed at the perfect execution of less weighty subjects, depicted as realistically as the writer or artist could manage. Coin portraits bridged the gap, with their subtle combinations of ideal and real.

  Earlier in the fourth century, sculptors and painters had already begun to strive for a closer imitation of nature than the classical ideal allowed. Lysippus of Sicyon had introduced a new proto-Mannerist canon for the human figure, with longer legs and smaller heads, and positioned so that more than just the front of the body was visible. On this basis, sculptors began to experiment with more sensuous poses of the human form. The full range of emotions could now be expressed on face and body together—a satyr turning to look at his tail, a dancer dancing free. Realism—or at least the appearance of realism, as Lysippus is said to have quipped8—was the name of the game. Just as Lysippus was Alexander’s court sculptor, so Apelles of Colophon (died ca. 295) was the only painter he allowed to do his portrait, and Apelles too was at the forefront of developing a new realism in painting—so much so that, as the story goes, Alexander’s horse Bucephalas whinnied at its own image in one of his paintings.9

  A new aesthetic was emerging. Poetry and the visual arts focused on technique and subtle displays of learning, and reflected each other. What was assonance in poetry and repeated motif in music became the periodic placing of color and form in painting; poetry in particular was full of such devices, designed to enhance its musicality, playfulness, and suggestiveness. Techniques such as filigree, chiaroscuro, and gilding were the visual counterparts of the wit and refinement of Hellenistic poetry. Poets returned the favor by valuing vividness, the ability to bring a matter directly before the mind’s eye. The subjects of all media were similar: pets, plants, children, ordinary people, domestic scenes, comic characters, tragic characters—all portrayed with vigor, a love of detail, and psychological insight. In some cases, artists chose to make their emotional point by grotesquery and caricature (here we find hunchbacks, dwarfs, and cripples, for instance); in others, by pathos or a gentle eroticism. Realism or caricature were the goals. It was all a far cry from war.