Before and After Alexander

by Richard A. Billows

  In hard reality, Amyntas III’s rule was precarious at best as he faced challenges from rival claimants to power—a certain Argaeus and another Pausanias are specifically named—and was driven out of all or most of Macedonia on apparently two separate occasions. In order to cling to what power in Macedonia he could, he was forced to make a series of pacts with other strong powers: the dynast Derdas in Elimea, the Illyrians, the powerful city-state of Olynthus in the Chalcidice, the Spartans, and the Athenians. By such pacts, he at times ceded effective control of large parts of his kingdom. Though some thoughtful and excellent attempts have been made to reconstruct the detailed history of Macedonia during these chaotic years—Eugene Borza’s In the Shadow of Olympus is probably the best—the plain truth is that our knowledge of precise reigns, relationships, events, and chronology of Macedonia before the rule of Philip II is as spotty and insecure as Macedonia was unstable. Even after the death of Amyntas III, Macedonia saw three brief and weak rulers during the next decade—Alexander II (ca. 370/69), Ptolemy “of Aloros” (ca. 368–366), and Perdiccas III (366–360)—before Philip II brought stability at last.

  3. THE NATURE OF MACEDONIAN SOCIETY

  Macedonia, then, was a tribal kingdom or chiefdom—it is unclear whether Macedonian rulers used the title basileus (king) before the time of Alexander the Great, though southern Greek writers certainly gave them that title—ruled by members of a dynastic family called the Argeadae. At one time, there was a widespread belief among ancient historians that Macedonia was a constitutional monarchy: the theory was that the Macedonian people under arms (that is, the adult males of the military class or caste) were the sovereign element in the state, and had the right to freely elect their monarchs, and to try cases of treason. This notion was based on some episodes during the reign of Alexander the Great (336–323) and the time of his Successors. On several occasions when he was proposing to execute important Macedonian leaders, Alexander summoned meetings of his army to inform them of the basis for considering the leaders in question guilty of treason, and to gauge the army’s reaction to these charges. After Alexander’s death, the Macedonian soldiery involved themselves in the disputes among the leading officers as to how the succession should be settled, and the final compromise arrangement that was agreed on was approved by the army by acclamation. These events were worked up by scholars writing in the early twentieth century into a constitutional right for the “Macedonians under arms” to settle the succession and conduct treason trials.

  Unfortunately, no example of such a treason trial, or of the Macedonian army choosing a new king, can be pointed to in Macedonian history prior to Alexander the Great. Instead, we hear of plenty of executions and assassinations, and of frequent usurpations of the throne from existing kings by rival claimants of the Argead family, quite often by assassination: rulers who were assassinated included Archelaus, probably Orestes, Amyntas the Little, Pausanias, Alexander II, Ptolemy of Aloros, and perhaps others. The notion of any Macedonian constitution was called into question in a series of important articles in the 1970s and 1980s, and is now no longer much believed in, though it has still a few defenders. What we see instead, in Macedonia, is a region and people loosely held together by allegiance to a ruling family or clan, and a certain sense of common identity. The Argead family was, though, more of a “first among equals” for much of its history. Local regions of Macedonia, especially upper Macedonia, had powerful dynastic families of their own—a family frequently using the name Derdas in Elimea, for example, and a family using the name Arrhabaeus in Lyncus—who were as often rivals and opponents of the ruling Argead family as they were allies or subordinates.

  Macedonia was, in effect, a country of large landowners who formed a powerful aristocracy over whom only the strongest rulers could exercise meaningful control. In order to be able to govern, the Argead ruler needed to win the backing of a significant portion of this powerful aristocracy. Those aristocratic landowners who backed the ruler would be designated his hetairoi (companions), and formed an advising council of state (synedrion) helping him to govern. Crucially, they also expressed their backing by riding to the ruler’s support in times of conflict (which was frequent!) with bands of mounted retainers. Before the time of Philip II, Macedonian military power was overwhelmingly based on cavalry, and besides the few hundred cavalrymen a strong ruler could raise himself, he needed the mounted retainers of leading aristocrats in order to field a sizable cavalry army. Equipped with breast-plates and stout lances, Macedonian cavalry were of excellent fighting quality, as Thucydides informs us (2.100). But even strong Macedonian rulers could seldom put more than six or seven hundred cavalry in the field—only with allied forces from neighboring Elimea or the Chalcidice could forces over a thousand strong be mobilized—and the plain truth is that cavalry did not rule the battlefields of ancient Greece: heavily armed infantry did.

  Ancient cavalry, before the time of the later Roman Empire, lacked the built-up saddles and stirrups that gave medieval and early modern cavalry a secure seat on their mounts, enabling them to function as shock troops. Ancient cavalrymen, the Macedonians included, rode either bareback, or with at most a blanket between them and their horses. Their seat on their horses therefore depended on their ability to grip with their thighs, and was always rather insecure at best. Any major impact was liable to unseat the rider, so it was not possible for ancient cavalrymen to charge into enemies with “couched lances” in the style of medieval jousters: thrusts at the enemy were made by swinging the arm, and had only the force of the cavalryman’s arm and upper-body strength behind them; and even such thrusts carried the danger of unseating. Furthermore, horses will not charge into a stationary obstacle they can see no way over or around. Disciplined infantry able to present and maintain a solid and unflinching formation in the face of a cavalry charge would thus see the impetus of the charge falter and dissipate as the horses got close enough to see that they could not leap over the mass of men confronting them, nor pass through gaps that did not exist. As their horses pulled up, cavalry were limited to riding along the front of the disciplined infantry formation, hurling insults and, if equipped with them, javelins, but doing little damage. Disciplined phalanxes of southern Greek hoplites (heavily armored infantry: see ill. 3) knew this very well, and were consequently little troubled by cavalry charges.

  What this means for Macedonia is that even strong rulers who could reliably mobilize relatively large cavalry forces of six to eight hundred could not compete when confronted by large and well-disciplined infantry forces, especially the hoplite phalanxes of the city-state Greeks. Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans were thus able to intervene effectively in Macedonia almost at will; and when sufficiently unified (as in the Olynthian League of the early fourth century) even the colonial city-states of the Chalcidice could be more than a match for the rulers of Macedonia. Macedonian cavalry were very effective in the open, hit-and-run style of warfare of northern Greece and the southern Balkan region, where the large plains and plateaus gave ample room to maneuver and infantry forces tended to be lightly armed and poorly disciplined. In this style of warfare, the cavalry dominated the field of battle, and the infantry were present largely to provide support to the free-wheeling cavalry. Macedonian rulers could mobilize thousands of light infantry of this sort, but we can see from the descriptions of Macedonian campaigning provided by Thucydides and Xenophon that they were ill disciplined and ineffective when confronted by southern Greek heavy infantry, or even by more numerous and motivated Illyrian or Thracian armies. This explains the basic features of Macedonian history as we know it: strong rulers like Alexander I and Archelaus, who could establish their authority over the Macedonian aristocracy, were able to dominate Macedonia and compete very effectively against neighboring tribes and peoples, but were no match for the Persians or the southern Greek powers; weaker rulers, however, faced chronic instability due to their inability to enforce the submission of local Macedonian dynastic families, and that domestic weakn
ess made them almost helpless in the face of outside interventions, not only by southern Greek hoplite armies, but even by Illyrian and Thracian forces.

  3. Greek hoplites on Attic vase in Athens Archaeological Museum

  (Wikimedia Commons photo by Grant Mitchell)

  With its dominant class of aristocratic families owning most of the land, Macedonia was a highly stratified society, with a rather small elite class of wealthy landowners, a large population of poor people dependent in various ways on the rich, and only a very small “middling” element between the two. Cities had not developed down to 400 BCE, and people lived in a few smallish towns and—for the most part—villages in the countryside. In the late fifth and early fourth centuries at any rate, when we start to have some evidence, we see the wealthy landowning class living in a style that resembles that of the heroes of Homeric epic. That may to some degree have been a matter of imitation: Homer was very popular in Macedonia, as the names drawn from the Homeric epics, referred to above, indicate. Macedonian rulers and other great leaders were surrounded by bands of retainers called hetairoi or companions, just like Homeric heroes. And like Homeric heroes they spent a great part of their time and energy on fighting, hunting, and feasting. Hunting helped to provide the meat for the feasts the Macedonian aristocrats enjoyed: boar, deer, hare, fowl of various sorts, and other game animals were abundant in the marshes, woods, and hills of Macedonia, and a man’s worth in this society was in large part measured by his hunting skills. The few remains of elaborate art surviving from this period of Macedonia often depict the hunt, and there are numerous anecdotes of leading Macedonians hunting. Together with the prevalence of herding in the economy, this meant that meat-eating was much more common in Macedonia than in southern Greece, at least among the wealthy, and the meat-rich diet may help to explain a feature often commented on by southern Greek writers: many of the Macedonian elite were particularly large and beefy men. Philip II’s marshal Parmenio was a big man, as was Alexander the Great’s beloved companion Hephaestion. Among Alexander’s Successors, Lysimachus was strong enough to have once won a “cage fight” against a lion; in later life he liked to show off his scars from the fight. Seleucus, we are told, once stopped a rampaging bull with his bare hands. Demetrius was heroically tall. Biggest of all, Antigonus the One-Eyed was a huge and intimidating figure, bulky and scarred as well as immensely tall.

  These men were heavy drinkers at their feasts too. Stories of drunkenness at the feasts abound, and with drunkenness went disorder and not infrequent violence. Philip II’s assassination was, according to the stories we have, in part at least motivated by insults and violence inflicted on one of his guard officers during a drunken feast; at the feast for Philip’s last (seventh) wedding a drunken brawl erupted between the uncle of the bride, Alexander, and Philip himself; and Alexander once killed one of his officers at a feast in a fit of drunken rage. To the Macedonian aristocracy all of this was just manly exuberance: after all, Homer’s heroes had behaved very similarly. To southern Greeks in their city-states, who had long left behind the kind of life depicted in Homer, the manners and lifestyle of the Macedonians seemed primitive and uncivilized. Some of the Macedonian elite recognized this themselves: the Macedonian rulers Archelaus and Philip II strove to introduce Athenian culture and manners at their courts, and Alexander once commented to southern Greek intellectuals at a feast that they must feel as if they were surrounded by beasts in the company of the boisterous Macedonians.

  The lifestyle of poor Macedonians was, of course, very different, but it has gone largely unrecorded by our sources, who themselves came exclusively from the elite class. There is one relatively late source that does have a few words to say about it: the historian Arrian in his account of the reign of Alexander the Great.

  “When Philip came to power over you, you were indigent wanderers, most of you wearing animal hides and herding a few sheep in the mountains, and fighting in defense of them poorly against neighboring Illyrians and Triballians and Thracians; but he gave you cloaks to wear instead of hides, brought you down from the mountains into the plains, made you a match in battle for the foreigners along your borders … he made you city-dwellers and organized you with proper laws and customs …” (Arrian Anabasis 7.9.2).

  These words are said to have been spoken by Alexander in a harangue to his rebellious Macedonian soldiers at Opis in 325/4. Though we can’t be sure that Alexander said just this, the words at the very least represent the view of Macedonian conditions held by Arrian, a well-educated and well-informed Greek historian writing in the second century CE, based on sources (now lost) that were contemporary or near contemporary to Philip and Alexander, such as the fourth-century BCE historians Marsyas of Pella and Theopompus of Chios. The lifestyle of the poor depicted here does make sense: shepherding on a seasonal transhumance basis—that is, moving the flocks between highland pastures in summer and lowland in winter—has been a very common way of life in central and northern Greece all the way into the twentieth century. So the notion that a large part, perhaps even a majority of poor Macedonians made a living by animal husbandry, focused especially on sheep and goats, seems quite plausible. The seasonal movements between different regions made the building of cities unnecessary as well as impossible with the limited resources available. This kind of movement helps to explain the links between the otherwise separate regions of “upper” and “lower” Macedonia. And a population of poor pastoralists, dressed in skins, lacking permanent settlements, and living largely hand to mouth, the prey of stronger and more settled neighboring peoples, accords with what we know of early Macedonian history.

  Herein lay the weakness of Macedonia: it was not that resources were lacking, it was that the socio-economic conditions of Macedonia did not permit the diffusion of wealth down the social scale to produce a well-to-do middle class, to enable the development of cities, to allow for a disciplined army of well-equipped infantry to be raised. Macedonia was rich, but most Macedonians were poor. Most Macedonians were dependent serfs, and so Macedonia itself was often at the mercy of stronger neighboring powers. The Macedonian aristocracy was strong, but the Macedonian rulers and people were correspondingly weak, and so Macedonia was weak. But for all that, the resources of Macedonia, human and material, created the potential for strength under the right conditions.

  4. THE NATURAL RESOURCES OF MACEDONIA

  The inability of Macedonian rulers to mobilize effective infantry armies was not due to any lack of manpower. Macedonia was, by the standards of classical Greece, a large country, with expansive and well-watered agricultural plains and plateaus, capable of sustaining a substantial population. Estimating that population is difficult for any period of Macedonian history, due to the absence of reliable statistics of any sort, but especially so for early Macedonia—before the reign of Philip II, that is—since we don’t even know where exactly the boundaries of Macedonia were at any given time. The territory of the greater Macedonia created by Philip II covered at least over 30,000 km2, which at a standard population density for the ancient world of some 40 persons per km2 would give a population of some 1.2 million. If we reduce that territory by half, and assume a rather low population density of 30 per km2, we arrive at a figure of some 450,000 as a conservative estimate for the population of pre-Philip Macedonia. A ruler strong enough to impose his authority over even this “smaller Macedonia” would thus have had ample manpower resources in principle: by comparison, the population of Athens at the height of her power and success in around 440 BCE has never been suggested to have been greater than 250,000.

  With a relatively large territory and population (compared to the city-states of southern Greece), Macedonia had the potential to be a strong power, and it had other important resources besides land and people. As mentioned above, the land of Macedonia was well-watered. Water was a scarce and important commodity in ancient Greece, because Greece is a rather arid country with relatively low annual rainfall, providing barely enough water resources to m
ake agriculture viable in an average rainfall year. The famous older civilizations of the ancient world, in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and Egypt, relied on very large and perennially flowing rivers—the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt—to provide plentiful water for agriculture via irrigation. In most of Greece, the small rivers and streams dry up completely after the winter/spring rains, leaving the country dry and parched in summer and autumn. Agriculture by irrigation was not possible, therefore, leaving farmers to practice “dry-farming,” in which the crops are dependent on rainfall for watering, and the growing season is during the winter/spring rainy season. But in northern Greece, rainfall was more abundant than in southern Greece, and more importantly winter snows covered the heights of the Pindus and Rhodopi massifs, providing a summer melt run-off that kept northern rivers flowing year round. Macedonia was particularly favored in this regard, with the large rivers Haliacmon, Axius, and Strymon providing year-round water, and several smaller rivers—the Loudias and the Echedorus (modern Gallicus)—supplementing them, as well as numerous streams and springs. So not only did Macedonia have, along with Thessaly, the largest agricultural plains in Greece, but these plains were well watered all year round. Consequently, Macedonia was one of the two regions of ancient Greece (along with Thessaly again) that was not only invariably self-sufficient in its grain supply, but was capable of producing a surplus available for export.