Tyrant: Destroyer of Cities

by Christian Cameron

  They heard that, in the absence of Amastris, her half-brothers Clearchus and Oxathras seized the city of Heraklea. They immediately allied with Cassander against Demetrios.

  And finally, two weeks later, Ptolemy’s fleet landed – led in by Leon, reinforced by every ship that could be spared by Ptolemy’s allies. Three thousand fresh mercenary hoplites were landed on the mole in three hours. Thousands and thousands of mythemnoi of grain flowed into the city, along with herds of pigs and legions of cattle.

  Ptolemy’s reinforcements included the Macedonian, Antigonus of Pella. He had served with Alexander – indeed, like Phillip of Mythymna, he wore the old dun and purple cloak of the hetairoi. He swaggered when he walked. He looked at the sea wall; he paraded the city hoplites and the oarsmen.

  He came and visited Satyrus in his tent.

  ‘How’d you do it?’ he asked. ‘Don’t get up.’ The Macedonian extended his hand.

  Satyrus, taken unawares, managed to swing his legs over the edge of his low bed and winced. He felt the cold wetness that meant the wound on his hip was open again. ‘Do what?’ he asked.

  Antigonus shook his head. ‘You held Demetrios.’

  Satyrus shrugged. ‘We all held Demetrios. Menedemos is polemarch now, I think. Go and talk to him.’ But he laughed. ‘But we did hold, didn’t we? So why doesn’t he sail away?’

  Antigonus shook his head. ‘He’ll try one more attack. With everything.’

  They chatted amicably enough for an hour – about the war, about the last year. ‘I remember your father,’ Antigonus said. ‘Fine cavalry officer. As good as a Thessalian.’

  Satyrus smiled. ‘I’ll be up in a few days,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you the walls, and make sure you know all the tricks.’ He grinned at the older man. ‘Is it hard, being called Antigonus? When Demetrios’ father One-Eye is the arch enemy?’

  The Macedonian officer shrugged. ‘Half my phalanx is called Antigonus,’ he said. ‘I suppose it was the “in” name that year.’

  Two days later, while Satyrus lay on his bed and Miriam held his hand, Demetrios’ grand assault took place. He did it in broad daylight. The magnificent Argyraspides penetrated to the theatre. Then they were driven out. Again. The rest of the assaults were half-hearted. The fresh hoplites sent by Ptolemy had never been ill fed and had never had the fever, and Demetrios’ men were broken by a year of defeat. They ran.

  That was the last attack, and Satyrus lay on his bed. And held Miriam’s hand as if it were his hope of salvation.

  And then there were weeks of negotiations. But for all those weeks, the food poured in, so that the pithoi under the old temple floor filled with grain again. And as soon as the negotiations started, something changed in every man and woman. Although there was wine to drink, no one was drunk.

  Miriam wore the full robes of a woman, and put off the boy’s tunic she had worn for months. When she did, so did the other women who had fought to the last.

  The newly enfranchised citizens were assigned homes.

  No one kissed in the streets. But the law courts returned to their function.

  The stone of the third wall was retrieved to reface the theatre.

  Before the ink was dry on the papyrus, the city had begun rebuilding.

  And then, one morning more than a year after he had landed, Demetrios, the remnants of his army and his fleet, packed and sailed away for Greece. They left six thousand wretched slaves, who were immediately fed by the city and put to work.

  That evening, Satyrus and Abraham, Miriam and Charmides, Anaxagoras and Melitta and Jubal, Thyrsis and Scopasis and a half-dozen others sat comfortably on stools in the cool autumn breeze with members of the boule and Antigonus, the new commander of mercenaries. Demetrios’ fleet was still visible, their sails like knife cuts in the edge of a parchment.

  ‘He’ll be back,’ said Abraham, raising a wine cup.

  Satyrus shook his head. ‘Never. He and Antigonus One-Eye are finished.’

  Anaxagoras was gently strumming his lyre. He looked up. ‘Were we finished? At any point?’ he asked softly. ‘They are, in their way, great men. They will find more warm bodies to carry their spears and pull their oars, and the world will have no peace until they are hacked to pieces.’ He began to play the hymn to Ares very softly.

  Miriam sat back and stretched like a cat. ‘I hate them,’ she said. ‘I hate them all. None of them is great. They are all little men trying to be that great monster, Alexander. I spit on his shade. They posture and kill and torture and inflict catastrophe – why? To be more like a man who died drunk and alone at thirty-three!’

  Antigonus of Pella looked at her for a moment, and bit his lips. ‘Alexander was a god,’ he said very carefully, through his teeth.

  For a moment, she looked at him, her face impassive.

  And then Miriam laughed. And her laughter – the ancient derision of women for the foolish games of men – rolled out over the sea, and followed Demetrios.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  Writing a novel – several novels, I hope – about the wars of the Diadochi, or Successors, is a difficult game for an amateur historian to play. There are many, many players, and many sides, and frankly, none of them are ‘good’. From the first, I had to make certain decisions, and most of them had to do with limiting the cast of characters to a size that the reader could assimilate without insulting anyone’s intelligence. Antigonus One-Eye and his older son Demetrios deserve novels of their own – as do Cassander, and Eumenes and Ptolemy and Seleucus – and Olympia and the rest. Every one of them could be portrayed as the ‘hero’ and the others as villains.

  If you feel that you need a scorecard, consider visiting my website at www.hippeis.com where you can at least review the biographies of some of the main players. Wikipedia has full biographies on most of the players in the period, as well.

  From a standpoint of purely military history, I’ve made some decisions that knowledgeable readers may find odd. For example, I no longer believe that the Macedonian pike system – the sarissa armed phalanx – was really any ‘better’ than the old Greek hoplite system. In fact, I suspect it was worse – as the experience of early modern warfare suggests that the longer your pikes are, the less you trust your troops. Macedonian farm boys were not hoplites – they lacked the whole societal and cultural support system that created the hoplite. They were decisive in their day – but as to whether they were ‘better’ than the earlier system – well, as with much of military change, it was a cultural change, not really a technological one. Or so it seems to me.

  Elephants were not tanks, nor were they a magical victory tool. They could be very effective, or utterly ineffective. The same applies to the invention of the ballista and the various torsion engines. I’ve tried to use the siege to describe some of the strengths and weaknesses of these weapons. And again, horse archery could be decisive or merely annoying. On open ground, with endless remounts and a limitless arrow supply, a horse-archer army must have been a nightmare. But a few hundred horse-archers on the vast expanse of a Successor battle-field might only have been a nuisance.

  Ultimately, though, I don’t believe in ‘military’ history. War is about economics, religion, art, society – war is inseparable from culture. You could not – in this period – train an Egyptian peasant to be a horse-archer without changing his way of life and his economy, his social status, perhaps his religion. Questions about military technology – ‘Why didn’t Alexander create an army of [insert technological wonder here]?’ – ignore the constraints imposed by the realities of the day – the culture of Macedon, which carried, it seems to me, the seeds of its own destruction from the first.

  And then there is the problem of sources. In as much as we know anything about the world of the Diadochi, we owe that knowledge to a few authors, none of whom is actually contemporary. I used Diodorus Siculus throughout the writing of the Tyrant books – in most cases I prefer him to Arrian or Polybius, and in many cases he’s the sole source. I also admit to
using (joyously!) any material that Plutarch could provide, even though I fully realize his moralizing ways.

  In this book, I have a siege that is lovingly and confusingly described by Diodorus, and I have tried to use his account to frame my story. There are issues with his story that I can’t resolve across the span of history, so I can only invent—a tunnel to explain the destruction of a war machine; the character of Demetrios. For the novelist, it is sufficient to tell a story, perhaps not the story, of how that might have come about.

  For anyone who wants to get a quick lesson in the difficulties of the sources for the period, I recommend visiting the website www.livius.org. The articles on the sources will, I hope, go a long way to demonstrating how little we know about Alexander and his successors.

  Of course, as I’m a novelist and not an historian, sometimes the loopholes in the evidence – or even the vast gaps – are the very space in which my characters operate. Sometimes, a lack of knowledge is what creates the appeal. Either way, I hope that I have created a believable version of the world after Alexander’s death. I hope that you enjoy this book, and the two – or three – to follow.

  And as usual, I’m always happy to hear your comments – and even your criticisms – at the Online Agora on www.hippeis.com. See you there, I hope!

  Chris Cameron

  Toronto 2012

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I am an author, not a linguist – a novelist, and not fully an historian. Despite this caveat, I do the best I can to research everything from clothing to phalanx formations as I go – and sometimes I disagree with the accepted wisdom of either academe or the armchair generals who write colorful coffee table books on these subjects.

  Destroyer of Cities breaks away from the simplicity of earlier books because Satyrus, grown to manhood and power, is going to be at the siege of Rhodos. In fact, the King of the Bosporus wasn’t there. But many other people including a large contingent of mercenaries were there, and had a profound impact on what was, arguably, the greatest siege of the ancient world. There were mercenary ships on the seas, and they, too, had an impact, and I suspect the line between mercenary and pirate must have been very slim. At any rate, I hope that readers will forgive the intrusion of Satyrus and Melitta. The discovery a few years back of some trilobite Scythian arrowheads can be taken as justification – I smiled as I typed that.

  And ultimately, errors are my fault. If you find a historical error – please let me know! Aside from allowing my characters to have a major role in the siege – the role held in the actual siege by a succession of mercenary officers supplied to the beleaguered city by Ptolemy, according to Diodorus Siculus, who I used (as usual) as my main source – I have tried to avoid altering history as we know it to suit a timetable or plotline. The history of the Wars of the Successors is difficult enough without my playing with it. In addition, as I write about this period, I learn new things, from research and from reenacting, and my ideas about things undergo change – sometimes profound change. Once I learn more, words or ideas may change or change their usage. As an example, in Tyrant I used Xenophon’s Cavalry Commander as my guide to almost everything. Xenophon calls the ideal weapon a machaira. Subsequent study has revealed that Greeks were pretty lax about their sword nomenclature (actually, everyone is, except martial arts enthusiasts) and so Kineas’s Aegyptian machaira was probably called a kopis. So in the second book, I call it a kopis without apology. Other words may change – certainly, my notion of the internal mechanics of the hoplite phalanx have changed. Even as I write this note, I’m learning more about Hellenistic Judaism that will probably impact on Abraham and Miriam in the next book. The more I learn . . .

  But I really want to say that was great fun to return to the Hellenistic world. I missed these characters and I’m delighted that they will return one more time in Force of Kings. Well, perhaps again after that. There are always the Celtic invasions.

  Enjoy!

  Toronto

  2012

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’m always sorry to finish an historical novel, because writing them is the best job in the world and researching them is more fun than anything I can imagine. I approach every historical era with a basket full of questions – How did they eat? What did they wear? How does that weapon work? This time, my questions have driven me to start recreating the period. The world’s Classical re-enactors have been an enormous resource to me while writing, both with details of costume and armour and food, and as a fountain of inspiration. In that regard I’d like to thank Craig Sitch and Cheryl Fuhlbohm of Manning Imperial, who make some of the finest recreations of material culture from Classical antiquity in the world (www.manningimperial.com), as well as Joe Piela of Lonely Mountain Forge for helping recreate equipment on tight schedules. I owe a long paean of praise to any number of professional scholars and academics who have patiently answered my questions on anything from helmet crests to ancient sexuality, and I’d especially like to thank Prof. Donald C. Haggis and Prof. James Davidson. I’d also like to thank Paul McDonnell-Staff, Paul Bardunias, and Giannis Kadoglou for their depth of knowledge and constant willingness to answer questions – as well as the members of various ancient Greek re-enactment societies all over the world, from Spain to Australia. I’d also like to thank my friends who I think of as my ‘corps of archers,’ including, but not limited to, Chris Verwijmeren, Zack Djurica, Matt Heppe (also a novelist!) and Dariusz Wielec, who provided some much needed flora and fauna to populate Melitta’s steppe scenes, as well as illustrating Tom Swan.

  Thanks most of all to the members of my own group, Hoplologia and the Taxeis Plataea, for being the guinea-pigs on a great deal of material culture and martial-arts experimentation, and to Guy Windsor (who wrote The Swordsman’s Companion and The Duelist’s Companion and is an actual master swordsman himself) for advice on martial arts.

  Speaking of re-enactors, my friend Steven Sandford draws the maps for these books, and he deserves a special word of thanks; and my friend Rebecca Jordan works tirelessly at the website and the various web spin-offs like the Agora, and deserves a great deal more praise than she receives. And Dmitry Bondarenko who has seen service as both an 18th century British Solider and a Greek hoplite and who continues to do illustrations for the maps in these books.

  Speaking of friends, I owe a debt of gratitude to Christine Szego, who provides daily criticisms and support from her store, Bakka Phoenix, in Toronto. Thanks, Christine!

  Kineas and his world began with my desire to write a book that would allow me to discuss the serious issues of war and politics that are around all of us today. I was returning to school and returning to my first love – Classical history. I am also an unashamed fan of Patrick O’Brian, and I wanted to write a series with depth and length that would allow me to explore the whole period, with the relationships that define men, and women, in war – not just one snippet. The combination – Classical history, the philosophy of war, and the ethics of the world of arête – gave rise to the volume you hold in your hand.

  Along the way, I met Prof. Wallace and Prof. Young, both very learned men with long association to the University of Toronto. Professor Wallace answered any question that I asked him, providing me with sources and sources and sources, introducing me to the labyrinthine wonders of Diodorus Siculus, and finally, to T. Cuyler Young. Cuyler was kind enough to start my education on the Persian Empire of Alexander’s day, and to discuss the possibility that Alexander was not infallible, or even close to it. I wish to give my profoundest thanks and gratitude to these two men for their help in re-creating the world of fourth century BC Greece, and the theory of Alexander’s campaigns that underpins this series of novels. Any brilliant scholarship is theirs, and any errors of scholarship are certainly mine. I will never forget the pleasure of sitting in Prof. Wallace’s office, nor in Cuyler’s living room, eating chocolate cake and debating the myth of Alexander’s invincibility. Both men have passed on now, since this book was written – but none of the Tyr
ant books would have been the same without them. They were great men, and great academics – the kind of scholars who keep civilization alive.

  I’d also like to thank the staff of the University of Toronto’s Classics department for their support, and for reviving my dormant interest in Classical Greek, as well as the staffs of the University of Toronto and the Toronto Metro Reference Library for their dedication and interest. Libraries matter!

  I’d like to thank my old friends Matt Heppe (again) and Robert Sulentic for their support in reading the novel, commenting on it, and helping me avoid anachronisms. Both men have encyclopedaeic knowledge of Classical and Hellenistic military history and, again, any errors are mine.

  I couldn’t have approached so many Greek texts without the Perseus Project. This online resource, sponsored by Tufts University, gives online access to almost all classical texts in Greek and in English. Without it I would still be working on the second line of Medea, never mind the Iliad or the Hymn to Demeter.

  I owe a debt of thanks to my excellent editor, Bill Massey, at Orion, for giving these books constant attention and a great deal of much needed flattery, for his good humor in the face of authorial dicta, and for his support at every stage. I’d also like to thank Shelley Power, my agent, for her unflagging efforts on my behalf, and for many excellent dinners, the most recent of which, at the world’s only Ancient Greek restaurant, Archeon Gefsis in Athens, resulted in some hasty culinary re-writing. Thanks, Shelley!

  Finally, I would like to thank the muses of the Luna Café, who serve both coffee and good humor, and without whom there would certainly not have been a book. And all my thanks – a lifetime of them – for my wife Sarah.

  If you have any questions or you wish to see more or participate (want to be a hoplite at Marathon?) please come and visit www.hippeis.com.