back south into Thessaly. At Krannon the Macedonian army met the allied Greek
army in battle and beat it. The defeat of the Greeks from Baktria and those in
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Europe took place within about three months of each other. 45
Antipater dealt separately with the defeated cities; most quickly surrendered.
Athens was treated to a Macedonian military occupation and given an oligarchic regime; democratic leaders were killed, the cleruchs on Samos expelled, and the remains of the fl eet confi scated. 46 Aitolia, a league of upland cantons which had only recently developed into an important state, proved most obdurate;
the Aitolians methodically removed their population to the hills and defi ed a Macedonian invasion. Antipater and Krateros made plans to treat the land by
a mixture of ravaging, extermination and deportation, but events elsewhere
interrupted that process. They had not captured many Aitolians anyway. The
Macedonians withdrew.47 The League of Corinth was not revived, being replaced by a Macedonian domination enforced by the garrisons in the Peiraios, Corinth
and elsewhere.
By mid-322, therefore, the empire of Alexander had been restored. Macedon
dominated Greece, and the Macedonian army dominated Asia. The governing
system, such as it was, continued with the appointment and reappointment of
the satraps, and there were two kings supervised by a regent. The two possible main competitors for Perdikkas’ authority, Antipater and Krateros, were fully
occupied in Greece, fi rst by settling affairs after the battle of Krannon, and then by the continued resistance of the Aitolians.
Perdikkas had come north from Babylon to install his protégé Eumenes,
Alexander’s former secretary, as satrap of Kappadokia. Leonnatos in Hellespontine Phrygia and Antigonus the One-Eyed in Phrygia had been instructed to conquer
the land for Eumenes, who had few troops, but neither had bothered, Leonnatos
having been quickly distracted by the Lamian War. Perdikkas came to do the
job himself, which involved a substantial battle, 48 and intended to discipline Antigonos because of his dereliction. Antigonos, summoned by Perdikkas to
explain himself, fl ed to Antipater and Krateros and explained that Perdikkas had great plans to discipline everyone else as well. He cannot possibly have known Perdikkas’ plans, but he was preaching to men already suspicious of the regent: Krateros and Antipater welcomed the allegation as justifi cation for their own political stances. 49
Perdikkas was a poor politician, rousing far too many enemies at the same
time. His power made him every Macedonian baron’s enemy, but he was clumsy.
The men in Greece were joined by Ptolemy, the satrap of Egypt, who had defi ed Perdikkas by taking Alexander’s body for burial at Alexandria rather than to Aigai as Perdikkas intended. Perdikkas made his personal ambition clear by repudiating Nikaia, Antipater’s daughter, and marrying Kleopatra, Alexander’s sister. He
was manoeuvring himself into a very strong dynastic position, similar to that
from which Ptolemy of Aloros had made himself king. He turned to deal with
Ptolemy, who proved to be a military match for him. In the camp at Pelusion,
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after a disaster in which 2,000 of Perdikkas’ soldiers drowned in the fl ooded Nile, a group of his offi cers, led by Seleukos, his second-in-command, banded together to assassinate him. 50
Krateros and Antipater crossed into Asia Minor, as did Antigonos separately.
The fi rst two were opposed by Eumenes, who proved to be a masterly commander; he met Krateros in a battle in which Krateros died. 51 The deaths of both Krateros and Perdikkas cleared the air, and Antipater was now the Macedonian with the
greatest prestige. At a meeting of the top men held at Triparadeisos in Syria, Antipater was made regent, and Antigonos was to have charge of the kings, with Antipater’s son Kassander as his chiliarchos. This arrangement did not last long, for Kassander distrusted Antigonos and persuaded his father to take the kings
under his own control. Antipater was the obvious man to be regent, given his
rank and experience, and he took the two kings to Macedon with him when he
returned there. He was by now almost 80 years old, the last of Philip’s generation in a position of authority, which gave him a certain moral authority, as did his control of the persons of the kings.
There still remained Eumenes and his army. Antipater, instead of going after
Eumenes himself and using his prestige and authority to bring him to terms,
which, as regent, he surely should have done, commissioned Antigonus as
‘ strategos of the royal forces’, or perhaps as ‘ strategos over Asia’, to do the job, with Perdikkas’ former army.52 It was, of course, the policy Antipater had always used: force fi rst, and diplomacy nowhere. Eumenes could probably have been brought
in by diplomacy, for his strongest political belief was loyalty to Philip II and his family, but no real attempt was made to persuade him.
A new distribution of satrapies was necessary as a result of the several deaths.
The murderers of Perdikkas were rewarded with Babylon (Seleukos) and Susiana
(Antigenes); Antigonos was confi rmed in Phrygia and his other lands in Asia
Minor, as was Ptolemy in Egypt. 53 Antipater was not very interested in all this.
He had control of the kings, of a major part of the Macedonian army, and the
kingdom itself. These he clearly identifi ed as the crucial elements in the gov ernment, but, not having been on the great campaign with Alexander, he had no
real conception of what Asia was like, and this aspect affl icted the judgement of other men. The legacy of Alexander was also the shared experience of his long
anabasis.
Perdikkas had been beset from the start of his regency by his fellow
Macedonians’ suspicions and ambitions. He was clearly not a man to attract
loyalty, and most of the men he favoured betrayed him in some way: Peithon,
Seleukos, Antigenes. But he had accomplished the main task he had, by assuming the regency, set himself, which was to maintain the unity of the empire. And
yet the fi rst cracks in that unity appeared because of his policy, in the form of the failure to discipline Ptolemy of Egypt. Under Antipater the empire of
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Alexander still held together, but the basic problem, the growing autonomy of
the satraps, was ignored. Alexander had tried to discipline them, but had died before succeeding; now they were killing each other. This was in no way unusual in a period of royal succession in Macedon. Philip II’s assassination had been accompanied by the same set of events, and Alexander’s death had produced
the usual set of murders which followed the death of any Macedonian king. The
elimination of some commanders had winnowed out the fi eld, leaving the one
old man in charge. Or so it seemed.
The settlement at Triparadeisos put Antipater in power, but he was no longer
up to the job. His conduct of the Lamian war had been barely competent,
his gullibility when Antigonos accused Perdikkas of plots was culpable, and
his acquiescence at Triparadeisos was that of a lazy old man who couldn’t be
bothered any more. As regent he may have had authority, but he immediately
returned to Macedon. It was simply not possible to run the empire from there, as even Alexander had realized. By appointing Antigonos to the command in Asia,
Antipater abdicated responsibility for the major part of the empire, and lifted the most ambitious man around to a post with the gre
atest potential. Antipater knew Antigonos’ great ambition, and refused to let him have the persons of the kings, but he did not follow that thought to its obvious conclusion. When he
died, in 319, only a few months after Triparadeisos, 54 there was no Macedonian left with his personal authority, and in that year the unity of the empire broke down defi nitively.
World view II: 319 bc
Between 325 and 319 bc most of the lands between the Adriatic Sea and the Indus River were under the government of one man, fi rst Alexander, then Perdikkas,
then Antipater. For that brief period Greece, Macedonia, the Persian Empire and the Indus Valley were theoretically united. The end of that period is a good point from which to consider other areas. Alexander’s last plans included the conquest of Arabia and possibly an attack on Carthage; an embassy from Rome was at
Babylon in the last year of his life, presumably to fi nd out what he intended for Italy. And the thwarting of his invasion of India was surely something he would try to overcome at some point.
Arabia, Carthage, Italy, the Ganges valley: these are the areas still outside the empire which were known to be functioning and recognizable states. If appetite grows up by what it feeds on, then Alexander, beginning by seeking ‘revenge’ for the Persian invasions of Greece, had ended by aiming to conquer the world: his fi nal plans were aimed therefore at the achievement of that ambition. 1
His soldiers, after his death, swiftly voted to abandon the plans, when Perdikkas asked them. 2 This was one of the key moments in the disintegration of the empire.
The ambitions of the great men were now directed against each other: only an
active king could exercise control over such men, preferably by send ing them
on to conquer more lands. There were areas technically part of the empire but
actually outside it. Perdikkas identifi ed two, Kappadokia and Paphlagonia in Asia Minor, both supposed to have tendered their submission to Alexander in 334,
but by 322 they were independent. It took a full-scale battle and several thousand casualties to bring Kappadokia into the empire. 3 As an empire, Alexander’s was a very ramshackle affair, much more so than its Persian predecessor.
The Roman embassy to Alexander is not a well-attested event, but Rome was
at the least very interested in what was happening. 4 In the 40 years since the accession of Philip II the city’s power had grown substantially. A war with her Latin league partners produced a reorganized league which guaranteed clear
rights to the league cities, yet also liberated substantial military manpower under Roman direction. Like Alexander’s system, this was a polity which was either
aggressive or suffered internal divisions. As a result a process of expansion began and brought Rome close to the position of the greatest power in Italy by the time of Alexander’s death. True, two years later, in 321, Rome suffered a setback in a
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war against the mountain confederation of the Samnites, but still maintained
control over the Campanian cities, which were threatened by the Samnites no
less than Rome. Controlling both Latium and Campania, Rome held the richest
and most populous areas of peninsular Italy: a substantial geographical base for the city’s growth.5
The Greek cities of southern Italy were also threatened by inland Italian
states, and appealed for help to their mother cities in old Greece. Taras had
twice been assisted, fi rst by King Archidamos of Sparta in 342 and then by King Alexander the Molossian in 333. Both had some success until they died in the
fi ghting. 6 The main cause of the troubles in southern Italy was the slow collapse of the Syracusan monarchy. Dionysios II was not as ruthless as his father, and in 357 Dion, his uncle, returned from exile and drove him out. Dion was then
murdered, and the tyranny broke down. In 347 Dionysios II returned to Syracuse, but by this time the opposition was emboldened, and he was able to re-establish himself only in Syracuse. The opposition appealed for help to Corinth, Syracuse’s mother city.
Instead of a king and an army, Corinth had sent one man, Timoleon, who
turned out to be a statesman of uncanny power. He removed Dionysios, decon-
structed the Syracusan kingdom, repelled a Carthaginian invasion, set up the
Greek states of Sicily in local independence, and then retired to live as a private citizen, dying in 337 or 336 bc.7 It was an extraordinary performance, which took place at the same time as Philip was uniting Greece. Only time would tell if it had any long-term success: Sicily was liable to these great reversals, and ambitions for conquest by Carthage, or for monarchical rule among some of the Greeks, were
by no means over. In 325 one such ambitious man, Agathokles, had been driven
into exile. He intrigued to return, and in 319 he did so. Syracuse was always the powerhouse of the Greek Sicilian empire and monarchy, and Agathokles was
territorially even more ambitious than Dionysios, and just as brutal. 8
This was part of the essential background to Philip and Alexander’s plans.
The expeditions of Archidamos and Timoleon in the 340s were surely in their
minds, for the tyrants of Syracuse were always liable to intervene in old Greece, and Sparta was Macedon’s most inveterate enemy. With both cities distracted
and with Alexander of Epiros also interested – he sailed to Italy in 334 – the Macedonian kings had no worries about intervention from the west while
conquering the east.
Given all this activity in their political neighbourhood, the Romans were
sensible to send an embassy to test Alexander’s intentions: Rome’s actions
in Campania, Agathokles’ actions in Syracuse, Alexander of Epiros’ work in
southern Italy, could provide excuses for Macedonian invasions in the name of
the liberation of Greek cities, or even for revenge for the death of Alexander’s sister’s husband.
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Alexander’s brutal campaign in India may well have been in the minds of his
soldiers when they rejected his plans, for a campaign in the west would have been equally unpleasant and diffi cult. The conquest of most of the Persian Empire
had required three battles (Granikos, Issos and Gaugamela), three major sieges (Halikarnassos, Tyre, Gaza), and the Baktrian campaign. It had been necessary
only to defeat the Persian royal army to gain control of the whole empire from the Hellespont to eastern Iran; the resistance of Baktria and Sogdiana had been, so it might seem in retrospect, a warning of what was to come in India. In the west, things were different. The campaign would have been against individual
cities and tribes, each of which would resist, very like that in India, and probably even nastier. Alexander might have been welcomed in southern Italy, but not in Syracuse, and neither Carthage nor Rome would be easy victims. Carthage could
be expected to put up the same sort of resistance as her daughter city Tyre, and each central Italian city and tribe would be likely to resist Alexander as some had resisted his brother-in-law; nor would the Samnites give in easily. In India the result had been many Macedonian, and even more Indian, casualties, and
the destruction of an established political system and society. A Macedonian
campaign in the west would be just as unpleasant and destructive.
The Indus Valley heaved with trouble after Alexander left. Two of his satraps
were murdered even as he marched through the Gedrosian desert, and India
was largely ignored in the redistribution of posts at Babylon. At Triparadeisos the Paropamisadai remained with Oxyartes, Roxane’s father, but India itself was assigned to the Indian kings Poros and Taxiles, because they were irremovable, at least by Antipater. 9 The mess was about to be cleaned up by a man
who the Greeks claimed was inspired by Alexander. Chandragupta Maurya may have
met Alexander in the Punjab, according to later legend. 10 More importantly, he was a political opponent of the Nanda dynasty in Magadha, which had largely
united the Ganges Valley under its rule. This would have been Alexander’s next victim if he had managed to persuade his army to march east. The Nandas’
position was brittle, and proved to be as vulnerable as the Persians had been.
By 321, when Perdikkas was failing, Chandragupta had overthrown the Nanda
king in a coup d’état, and by 317 he had taken control of the Punjab from Poros and Taxiles. Only six years after Alexander’s death, all northern India from the Khyber Pass to the Ganges Delta was united into a single empire. 11 If Alexander had implemented any of his presumed plans for India it was just about this time he would have turned to deal with Chandragupta. Well might his soldiers have
quailed at the prospect.
The effects of Alexander’s actions thus extended well beyond his formal
boundaries: westwards to the Atlantic and eastwards to the Ganges Valley. His
career inspired Chandragupta to great deeds, and soon Agathokles in Sicily
would emulate him. It was one of the infl uences behind Rome’s expansion
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in the next generation, if only to pre-empt a possible Macedonian invasion.
When Octavianus reached Alexandria, three centuries later, he had Alexander’s
sarcophagus opened to inspect his preserved corpse.12 Alexander’s infl uence spread through time as well as space; his achievement has been a benchmark for every conqueror since.
Alexander the Great Failure Page 17