Dividing the Spoils

by Waterfield, Robin

  So when Antigonus made himself master of Asia, he inherited a number of provinces that were under constant pressure from the young Indian emperor. He did little to defend the region, but it remained fairly stable for a while, as long as Chandragupta was more concerned with securing what he had already gained. Unlike Alexander, Chandragupta put in place a complex, detailed, and precise administrative pyramid, to cover military, fiscal, and civil functions throughout his empire. He made his capital at Pataliputra (modern Patna) on the Ganges.7

  Antigonus was little interested in the far east of his kingdom, and the satrapies there were left pretty much to their own devices until Seleucus reconquered them. This brought Seleucus into direct conflict with Chandragupta, and in 304 a great battle was fought. Seleucus was defeated and forced to cede to Chandragupta eastern Arachosia, Gandaris, Paropamisadae, and parts of Areia and Gedrosia. These provinces were never recovered, nor was any attempt made to do so. Chandragupta then expanded south until he controlled almost all of India, and Pakistan and Afghanistan up to the Hindu Kush. His empire was larger than British India. Seleucus kept a permanent ambassador at Chandragupta’s court, a man called Megasthenes. We have no more than a few fragments of his account of India,8 unfortunately, but it seems to have contained a warning against trying to defeat the Maurya empire. Chandragupta himself resigned the throne and dedicated his final years to religious devotion. He died in 298, and his empire continued for more than a hundred years, until the rise of a new dynasty in 185 BCE.

  LORD OF ASIA

  In the spring of 316 Antigonus started out from Ecbatana on his journey home. At Persepolis, he set up a kind of court—only a kind of court, because one night in 330 Alexander had gone along with a drunken escapade to destroy the main royal palace.9 Antigonus summoned the eastern satraps from Eumenes’ coalition and dictated their futures from his throne, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of the imperial power Antipater had assumed at Triparadeisus. Many satraps retained their earlier posts; not surprisingly, Eumenes’ chief ally, Peucestas, found himself out of a job. The fact that he was allowed to remain alive at all is powerful evidence that his poor performance at Gabene was deliberate, that he had been suborned. At any rate, Antigonus took him back west with him on his staff, and he remained as a close adviser first to Antigonus and then to his son Demetrius. It was a climbdown for the former Bodyguard of Alexander, but it was safe: though he more or less drops out of the historical record, we still hear of him alive in the 290s.10

  When Antigonus reached Susa, he appointed a permanent satrap there as well. Seleucus, who had already returned to Babylon, was no longer needed; the garrison commander of the citadel of Susa had surrendered as soon as news arrived of Eumenes’ defeat. And so the treasury of Susa fell into Antigonus’s hands. With Eumenes’ death, none of the treasurers of Asia would refuse to open their doors to their new master. Antigonus helped himself to the resources stored at Ecbatana, Susa, and Persepolis, to the tune of twenty-five thousand talents (about fifteen billion dollars), and the territories he controlled, at their largest extent, brought in an annual income of a further eleven thousand talents.

  Antigonus’s wealth fueled his ambition and his ambition fed his wealth. Apart from anything else, he was able to maintain a huge standing army of forty thousand foot and five thousand horse, at a cost in the region of 2,500 talents a year. He brought west with him on his return from the eastern satrapies all the bullion he had taken from the east, and stored it in his key treasuries in Cilicia and Asia Minor. He was not intending to return that far east, and needed the money to retain control of his core realm, Asia west of the Euphrates. For the next dozen or so years, this heartland of his was remarkably free of warfare (though he was often at war beyond its borders), and he used this time of peace to develop and administer it, while still keeping an eye open, as did all the Successors, for occasions for expansion.11

  But even though Antigonus ruled the entirety of the former Persian empire, apart from Egypt, he was not yet ready to call himself king, not while Alexander IV was still alive. That would have invited trouble—certainly from his rivals, who would pounce on the chance to use it against him, and probably from his troops, many of whom were still fiercely loyal to the Argead line. He allowed himself to be recognized by his native subjects as the successor to the Achaemenid kings and Alexander (who had also used the title “Lord of Asia”),12 but in public he maintained the fiction that he was just some kind of super-satrap, the Royal General of Asia, holding the former Persian empire for the kings.

  Antigonus was now living up to his alternative nickname—not just “the One-Eyed,” but “Cyclops,” after the famous one-eyed giants of myth. Both he and his son Demetrius were exceptionally tall and strongly built, but now Antigonus had become a metaphorical colossus too. Would the others tolerate it? Could a balance of power emerge, so soon after Alexander’s death? It did not take Antigonus long to show that he was not interested in balance—he wanted the totality of Alexander’s empire.

  Antigonus, Lord of Asia

  FROM SUSA, ANTIGONUS journeyed west to Babylonia, with all his bullion and booty carefully guarded in the caravan, the moving equivalent of the strongholds that made up the empire’s treasuries. The size and strength of the army, and its voraciousness, were plain tokens of Antigonus’s naked ambition. Woe betide anyone who stood in his way, or who might even have the potential to stand in his way. Seleucus was the next to find this out.

  When Antigonus reached Babylon, Seleucus honored him as a king, but it was not enough to appease the great man. The relationship deteriorated until Antigonus demanded from Seleucus, as though he were king and Seleucus a mere satrap, an account of his administration of the satrapy, and an audit of his finances. With considerable courage, Seleucus resisted Antigonus’s bullying. He said he had been awarded Babylonia legitimately at Triparadeisus (subtly reminding Antigonus that the Triparadeisus conference was also where he had received his commission), in recognition of his services to Alexander, and that Antigonus did not have the right to interfere. In effect, he claimed a kind of seniority to Antigonus, who had scarcely been involved in Alexander’s campaigns, since he had been posted in Asia Minor throughout. At the same time, Seleucus sensibly made plans to escape, and before long he fled for safety to Egypt with his family and a small escort.

  In Egypt, Ptolemy welcomed Seleucus as a friend, but was no doubt also aware of the propaganda value of sheltering someone who could be portrayed as a victim of tyranny. When Seleucus reached Egypt, he told Ptolemy that Antigonus now wanted “the entire kingdom of the Macedonians”—sole rule of Alexander’s empire.1 It was the truth, and it meant that no one could feel safe from Antigonus. Ptolemy wrote to Cassander and Lysimachus, enlisting their support in the attempt to restore Seleucus, and at the same time Antigonus wrote to all his opponents, reminding them that they had all been allies for the war against the Perdiccans, and insisting that they honor that agreement. He was asking, in effect, that they connive at the deposing of Seleucus, but this act had already come to symbolize the insatiable scope of his ambitions. As he must have expected, his pleas fell on deaf ears.

  From Babylonia, Antigonus marched to winter quarters in Cilicia. All the parties spent the winter preparing for the renewal of war; it was a good time to be a mercenary. In the spring of 315 Antigonus set out for Syria; on the way he was met by a delegation of representatives of Lysimachus, Ptolemy, and Cassander. They presented Antigonus with an ultimatum, which was a strange mixture of undisguised ambition and justified indignation. The justifiable part was that they demanded the return of Babylonia to Seleucus. The rest was no more than a demand that he share the spoils of his victory over Eumenes with them, on the grounds that it had been a joint war, triggered by agreement at Triparadeisus. Specifically, they wanted some of the fortune in bullion that Antigonus had brought back from the east. Lysimachus also wanted Hellespontine Phrygia (a big gain for him, since it would give him territory on both sides of the Propontis); Antigonu
s had seized it in 318, but none of them had any right to dispose of it as if it were private property. Ptolemy wanted official recognition of his annexation of Palestine and Phoenicia; and, for reasons that are obscure, Cassander wanted Cappadocia and Lycia.

  Antigonus would have been left with severely reduced territories west of the Euphrates, but with mastery of the eastern satrapies. Communication would have been difficult between the two halves of his empire, and his hold on Asia Minor tenuous. The subtext of the allies’ demands was the suggestion that he take himself off east. But Antigonus had gone too far to do anything other than reject the ultimatum and accept the inevitability of war with his former friends and allies. He saw himself as Alexander’s heir, which made the others rebel satraps. And so began the so-called Third War of the Successors (315–311), pitting Antigonus and his son Demetrius against Lysimachus, Ptolemy, Seleucus, and Cassander.

  SECURITY MEASURES

  Antigonus was surrounded by enemies, but he had the resources to mobilize sufficient means of violence to keep them at bay. His first priority was to dissuade Cassander from leaving Greece. He went about this both defensively and aggressively. For defense, he sent his nephew Polemaeus to Asia Minor, where Cappadocia had declared for Cassander. Polemaeus extinguished such thoughts of independence, and then continued northwest to the Black Sea coast. Having intimidated Zipoetes, the ruler of Bithynia, into neutrality and ensured that the Greek cities in the region would not cause trouble, he established himself on the Hellespont to guard against a possible invasion from Europe.

  Meanwhile, Antigonus’s fleet succeeded in securing some of the Aegean islands. The first outcome of this was the formation, over the next few years, of many of the Cycladic islands into a league, allied to Antigonus. The sacred—and increasingly mercantile—island of Delos became the center of the league, and was therefore lost to Athens, which had controlled it for much of the fourth century; it remained free for almost 150 years, until the Romans restored it to Athens. The formation of the league was good for the islands, since it gave them self-government and greater bargaining power, and good for Antigonus too, since it simplified his dealings with them. In due course of time, Antigonus would form other groups of cities within his empire into leagues as well.

  In addition to these defensive moves, Antigonus also took direct action against Cassander. He sent Aristodemus of Miletus, one of the Greeks in the inner circle of his court, to the Peloponnese with plenty of money and instructions to establish a working relationship with Polyperchon and his son Alexander. Eight thousand mercenaries were raised and Polyperchon was named “General of the Peloponnese” for the Antigonid cause, with the job of opening up a second front in Greece, to keep Cassander occupied there. Alexander sailed south for a meeting with Antigonus to confirm the arrangements—specifically, no doubt, the division of the spoils.

  Along with these measures against Cassander, Antigonus took steps to challenge Ptolemy’s naval supremacy. As a first step toward gaining a fleet, he persuaded the Rhodians to build ships for him, from raw materials that he would supply. We can only guess what arguments were used to turn the Rhodians, who were theoretically neutral, although for commercial reasons they were closest to Ptolemy. Rather than argument, the decisive factor was probably fear of what would happen to them if they refused. Rhodes was not only an island state, and their possessions on the mainland opposite the island were vulnerable. Antigonus also sent agents to Cyprus, where the currently dominant king was an ally of Ptolemy. If Antigonus’s intention was to gain control of the island, he failed, because Ptolemy responded in strength, and was able over the next few years to make the island effectively his. But if his intention was simply to tie up some of Ptolemy’s forces, the plan worked perfectly, and Antigonus was able to move south against Ptolemy’s possessions in Phoenicia.

  Given that Ptolemy’s annexation of Palestine and Phoenicia in 320 had been achieved relatively easily and that Eumenes’ visit in 318 was brief, the region had last seen major trouble in 332, when the prolonged resistance of Tyre and the lesser resistance of Gaza had provoked Alexander the Great to atrocities that were repellent even by his standards: a mass crucifixion on the seashore at Tyre and having the garrison commander of Gaza dragged behind a chariot. The garrisons that had been installed by Ptolemy now withdrew in the face of Antigonus’s overwhelming army and its reputation, taking Ptolemy’s Phoenician fleet with them.

  City after city capitulated without resistance, but, probably gambling on Antigonus’s current naval inferiority, the garrison of Tyre chose to resist. Tyre was the most important city in the region, a major mercantile center (especially for the Arabian spice trade) with a good port. It had taken Alexander seven months to take the stubborn island city, and then only after he had demolished the mainland town and used the rubble to build a causeway across the few hundred meters separating the island from the mainland. It was to take Antigonus fifteen months, but until his control of the sea was as secure as his hold on the land, there was little he could do against blockade runners. Even so, the siege was curiously unadventurous. Alexander, for instance, had made use of a specialist naval siege unit for his assault on Tyre, but Antigonus preferred to establish a simple blockade rather than take the city by storm.

  Antigonus badly needed this stretch of coastline. As long as he lacked a fleet that could challenge Ptolemy’s, his territories would be vulnerable to seaborne raids, or even invasion, and the merchants who left his shores would be harassed or worse. All the facilities and the expertise he needed could be found in Phoenicia’s flourishing shipyards and ports, and the raw materials, especially the famed (and rapidly diminishing) cedars of Lebanon, were not far inland. Antigonus’s propaganda, designed to terrify his enemies, let it be known that he was preparing a fleet of five hundred warships and, unrealistically, that they would be ready that very summer. For this purpose, he established three shipyards in Phoenicia and another in Cilicia; we have already seen that the Rhodians were building a few more for him. The whole eastern Mediterranean seaboard was dedicated to this one task. While maintaining the siege of Tyre, Antigonus also cleared the Ptolemaic garrisons out of cities as far south as Gaza, thus gaining another wealthy mercantile port.

  ANTIGONUS’S RESOURCES

  With the annexation of Phoenicia and Palestine and the alliance of Polyperchon and Alexander, in 315 Antigonus was at the height of his power. In addition to the eastern satrapies, he controlled all Syria, all Asia Minor, and southern Greece. He had capital reserves amounting to billions of dollars (mostly left over from the treasuries of the Achaemenid empire), and a very healthy annual income from taxes. A slim volume wrongly included in the corpus of works by Aristotle gives us some idea of the range of taxes Antigonus employed, since it lists six forms of tax exacted by his satraps: on agricultural produce, on livestock, on natural resources, on profits from trade, on profits from the local sale of agricultural produce, and finally a poll tax.2 As the Achaemenids had done before him, Antigonus left it up to his satraps or governors to raise the taxes from their subjects and pass the revenue on to him for use and redistribution.

  A preserved inscription affords us a window onto Antigonus’s economic intentions. The cities of Teus and Lebedus in Asia Minor had asked permission to import grain from abroad. In his reply Antigonus explicitly says that he does not usually allow this, since he would rather they took grain from within his own realm, but that in this case he magnanimously gives his permission.3 He wanted to be an exporter, not an importer of grain. But he also recognized that foreign grain was cheap; he himself had forced the price down by his embargo on it.

  Mountains within his realm held minerals and metals, and grew every kind of timber he might need; there was no shortage of fertile river valleys and plateaus; he commanded almost all the overland and sea–river trade routes from the east to the Mediterranean; and he could call on enough manpower to meet any emergency. All the Successors did their best to make their lands self-sufficient, not just because
this was the instinctive goal of ancient economic policy but because they did not want to help their rivals by paying them for imports. Antigonus even developed Syria’s native papyrus production, so as not to be so dependent on Egypt even for that.4 In Antigonus’s case, self-sufficiency was not an altogether unrealistic goal, and many communities within his empire made considerable profits from trading surpluses or exporting commodities that were unavailable elsewhere.

  Antigonus now had a healthy slice of the grain market, and controlled almost all the main sources of timber. Just as his inroads into the grain market put commercial pressure on Ptolemy, since Egypt was by far the largest grain exporter in the eastern Mediterranean, so Ptolemy was also his target of his attempt to monopolize timber. This was precisely what the annexation of the Phoenician ports was for: to enable Antigonus to build a fleet and to deny Ptolemy access to timber. Egypt itself had no timber to speak of, and Ptolemy was forced to rely on imports from his ally in distant Macedon and on the less productive but closer forests of Cyprus, with their pine and cedar. Before long, Antigonus would make Cyprus a primary target.

  This is not the last time we will see Antigonus using economics as a form of warfare against Ptolemy, his rival in the eastern Mediterranean. And he had good reasons to be money-minded. His realm could be approached by enemies from three directions. A vast army was needed to defend it—and if the opportunity arose, to expand it. Such an army was very expensive; Antigonus was simply making sure that he had the means.