Unfortunately, our ancient sources tell us very little about this colonizing process: we only see the result. But from the few sources that do offer some detail, a picture of the process can be reconstructed. We may take as an example the city of Antigoneia on the Orontes, founded around 307 by Antigonus the One-Eyed, and later (after 301) moved a few miles downstream and re-founded as Antioch by Seleucus. The late antique chronicler John Malalas, a native of Antioch, reports in his Chronographia at book 8.15 that the population of Antigoneia was mostly made up of Athenians but with some Macedonians, 5,300 men in total. The source of the Macedonians is clear: Antigonus had thousands of Macedonian soldiers in his army, whom he settled as they grew older in numerous cities and garrison colonies all around western Asia. But how did the four thousand or more Athenians, perhaps even as many as five thousand, get to Syria and the banks of the River Orontes? And those numbers just account for the men: we must surely assume that many if not most of these Athenian settlers had wives and children too. At a very conservative guess we can assume that more than ten thousand people had to be transported from Athens to Syria to found this city. To begin with this issue sheds a new light on Antigonus’ decision at the beginning of 307, as we shall see below, to send his son Demetrius with a huge expeditionary force to “liberate” Athens from the rule of Cassander and restore the traditional democracy there. That gave Antigonus the ability and popularity to request Athenian settlers for his new foundation. It also gave him the means of transporting them.
Generals like Antigonus were experts in the movement of large groups of people over long distances: as leaders of armies they had to be. When Demetrius unshipped his men, horses, and supplies from his transport vessels (more than two hundred of them) to campaign in Greece, we can be sure that the ships did not just sit idle in port at the Piraeus. It must have been in these transport vessels that the Athenian settlers, with their families and goods, were shipped to the mouth of the River Orontes in Syria: there is no alternative, as passenger ships in antiquity were actually just merchant ships with room for a handful of passengers in addition to cargo. Only military transports will have had the capacity to transport people in the large numbers required for city foundation. Antigonus and Ptolemy, and later Seleucus, had plenty of such transport vessels available to them, in which settlers from Greece and the Balkan region could travel to western Asia and Egypt at the ruler’s expense. So the initial movement of settlers from the Balkan region to Asia or Egypt was in essence a military operation, carried out in military transport vessels and, once they had landed, by overland march to the sites of their settlements under military escort for protection, and using the logistical supply systems developed for supplying armies on the march. But before this transport operation could be undertaken, there must have been extensive preparation work at the settlement site; because one could not simply deposit ten thousand or more men, women, and children at an empty site and expect them to survive.
The most obvious advance preparation will have been the stockpiling of several months’ worth of food supplies at the settlement site, so that the arriving settlers could eat. In addition there must have been planning for an ongoing supply of food to reach the developing settlement for at least a year or two, until the settlers could begin to be self sustaining. Key here was the designation of a large territory around the settlement site as civic land (ge politike in the ancient Greek) belonging—with its native inhabitants engaged in farming—to the new city and responsible for supplying the food requirements of the city once the phase of initial development had passed. In addition, settlers could not just be left to fend for themselves in open fields. The founder will have needed to have a city planner on site to lay out the initial plan of the urban settlement, with a street plan incorporating housing blocks, public spaces, sites for temples, a theater, a gymnasium, and the other basic infrastructure considered necessary to the Greek urban way of life. There will have needed to be hydraulic engineers to locate a safe source of drinking water and arrange to pipe it into the settlement. The settlers will have needed building supplies of all sorts—stone, timber, roof tiles, and so on—to build their homes; and the help of trained architects with this, and to plan the temples and other public buildings, will have been indispensable. During the phase of building, which must have taken many months at a minimum, some kind of temporary housing for the settlers must have been made available, lest they die of exposure. The most obvious solution will no doubt have been again to draw on military experience: tents and bivouacs of the sort used by soldiers (and their hangers-on) on campaign could house the settlers until newly built homes became habitable.
In addition to all of the material supplies and planning necessary to creating a physical settlement, the political and legal arrangements of the settlement had to be taken care of. An inscription informs us that when Antigonus planned to create a new city by joining together the older Greek cities of Teos and Lebedos, it was planned that they should draw up their own laws and political structure jointly, under his overall supervision. But while they were engaged on this, the law code—including the political system—of a mutually agreed third city was borrowed to serve as the temporary legal and political system. In the case of Antigoneia, with its settlers drawn primarily from Athens, it is reasonable to guess that a legal/political code and system based on that of Athens will have been applied. No doubt the settlers could have brought a copy of Athens’ laws with them. But Antigonus built, we know, a palace (basileion) in Antigoneia, planning to live and rule his empire from there. And the presence of a ruling king was not allowed for in the Athenian system. There must have been suitable adjustments to Antigoneia’s law code, which will have required negotiation and the expert advice of Antigonus’ legal consultants in his administrative chancellery.
The point of all of this is that founding a new city by bringing in thousands of settlers from elsewhere was a huge, expensive, and demanding undertaking, requiring detailed planning, the commitment of resources of all sorts, and the provision of various kinds of expertise that will have needed to be paid for. In the case of Antigoneia, we know that by the middle of 306 the city was already considerably built up, with a town square (agora) and the palace of Antigonus nearby; and by 302 the city was mostly complete, as Antigonus was then planning an international festival to inaugurate the new city. That means the initial settling took about a year, and the major building of the city some five years to bring to a state of reasonable completion. And Antigoneia was just one of more than twenty cities and colonies founded by Antigonus between 314 and 302; the largest no doubt, but we begin to see the scale of the work accomplished in these years by Antigonus and his various military and civil assistants.
After 301 the task of continuing the settlement and urbanization, in the sense of bringing in Greek speakers and establishing Greek-style urban settlements, was continued in western Asia by Seleucus, who founded or re-founded many dozens of larger and smaller cities and colonies over the following twenty years, until 281. In the meantime Ptolemy had been doing the same sort of work in Egypt, building the great city of Alexandria, and also founding cities named Ptolemais after himself and Berenice after his favorite wife. Seleucus’ son Antiochus and Ptolemy’s son Ptolemy II continued their fathers’ work, so that by the middle of the third century BCE there was a thriving network of Greek cities and towns in western Asia and Egypt where the Hellenistic culture that dominated the near east for six centuries developed and grew. But the most important work was undoubtedly done in the first generation, by the Successors of Alexander during the forty years following Alexander’s death; and the epic scale of this work, made possible by the opening up of the Persian Empire to Greek control and settlement, the existence of a large under-resourced population in Greece and the Balkan lands willing to move to build a better life for themselves, the monetization of the stored treasures of the two hundred years of Persian rule to fund the colonization program, and the extraordinary leadership and organizat
ional talents of the officers Philip had trained during his years as king, cannot be understated. This colonization program literally changed the near eastern world once and for all.
As so often for this era, Alexander has received far too much of the credit for all this colonizing and city-building. As we saw in the previous chapter, properly scrutinized Alexander’s city founding work turns out to have been quite modest. It was the three great Successors, Antigonus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy who did most of this work, though Lysimachus, Antiochus I, and Ptolemy II also deserve some credit. Antigonus I founded some twenty cities that we know of, and our record of his city founding is certainly very defective. Seleucus built on Antigonus’ work when he took over Antigonus’ empire, refounding most of Antigonus’ cities with new names—so Antigoneia on the Orontes became Antioch, and Pella became Apameia on the Orontes—and founding dozens of additional new cities. Ptolemy was the real builder of Alexandria, which had been nominally founded by Alexander, and founded several other cities in Egypt. Since much of the stored-up wealth of the Persian Empire and of Egypt was put to work in this colonizing enterprise, instead of being uselessly held in treasuries, the colonizing also had a positive economic effect in promoting the further generation of wealth through productive industry (building activities of all sorts) and associated trading. Our sources focus overwhelmingly on the warfare of the Successor period, giving the impression that men like Antigonus, Seleucus, and Ptolemy were generals pure and simple who devoted their time and energy to campaigning and fighting battles. That obscures the real and much more important work these great leaders, and others like Lysimachus and Cassander too, were engaged on in these decades: the fundamental re-shaping of their world by one of the great settlement and urbanization programs in western history.
4. FURTHER WARS OF THE SUCCESSION TO 301
In 315, though the basic political geography of the new Hellenistic world had taken shape, the conflicts among the Successors of Alexander were far from over. Antigonus had emerged as by far the strongest leader, and as we have seen the remaining autonomous commanders—Cassander in Macedonia, Ptolemy in Egypt, and Seleucus and Lysimachus who had proved to be very capable generals—decided to work together to cut Antigonus down to size. They jointly sent Antigonus an embassy demanding that he cede moneys and lands to them as their share of the successful wars against Perdiccas, Polyperchon, and Eumenes. The treasures of the Persian kings were to be shared (equally?) among all five dynasts, and Antigonus was to cede Hellespontine Phrygia (along the Hellespont and Propontis) to Lysimachus, Lycia and (probably) Caria to Cassander, Syria to Ptolemy, and Babylonia to Seleucus. Thus shorn of money and lands, Antigonus would be no more powerful than the other dynasts; if anything indeed less so. That Antigonus would tamely agree to these demands was hardly to be expected, and in fact of course he rejected them out of hand. To the ambassadors’ warning that if he did not accept there would be war his response was to begin the war by marching into Phoenicia and beginning to expel Ptolemy’s garrisons there.
The war begun in 315 lasted four years until 311, and was fought primarily on three fronts: in Phoenicia and Palestine, where Antigonus and Ptolemy competed for control; in southern Greece, where Antigonus sought to drive out Cassander’s garrisons and allies; and in the Aegean, where Antigonus and Ptolemy competed for naval dominance. A feature of this period is the gradual receding of Antigonus away from active command of his forces in favor of his nephews and his son Demetrius. Antigonus was nearly seventy at the beginning of 314 and had been pushing himself hard for the past ten years. In the years from 323 to 314, in fact, Antigonus had fought with an energy, skill, daring, and success that mark him as one of the great generals of the ancient world: from his Cyprus campaign in 320, to his crushing victories at Orcynia and Cretopolis in 319 and at the Bosporus in 318, and through his extraordinary duel with Eumenes from 317 to 315 culminating in the showdown battles of Paraetacene and Gabiene, he set a record that only the very greatest generals, such as Alexander and Caesar, could match or beat. It is hardly surprising that in his seventies he preferred to leave as much as possible of the active campaigning to younger men, while himself concentrating more and more on the organization and administration of his empire.
As already noted, Antigonus did not wait for his opponents to initiate hostilities at the beginning of 314, but himself made the first move by invading and occupying Phoenicia and Palestine. Ptolemy had already prudently left these lands for Egypt, leaving only garrisons behind; these garrisons offered little opposition to Antigonus. Only Tyre put up serious resistance. Once again, as in the time of Alexander, Tyre withstood a major and long-lasting siege, only to succumb in the end and be captured after holding out for more than a year. While he was besieging Tyre, Antigonus busied himself with a host of other matters. Learning that forces sent by Cassander were operating in Asia Minor, he sent his nephew Polemaeus with an army of around ten thousand men to eject those forces and secure the coasts of Asia Minor, at the Hellespont and Ionia, against further incursions. To keep Cassander busy at home, Antigonus despatched his close friend Aristodemus to southern Greece with a thousand talents to recruit mercenaries and campaign against Cassander’s garrisons. In addition, Aristodemus had orders to get in touch with Polyperchon, who was lurking in the western Peloponnesos with a substantial force: now that he was no longer regent, Polyperchon might prove a useful ally against Cassander.
Unwilling to confront Antigonus and his army directly, Ptolemy instead used the Phoenician fleets he had gathered while in control of Phoenicia. He placed Seleucus in charge of this combined fleet and sent him to harry Antigonus’ lands from the sea. After spending the summer attacking the coasts of southern and western Asia Minor, Seleucus retreated to Cyprus for the winter. There too, however, Antigonus had been active: he had sent ambassadors with promises, who managed to detach from Ptolemy the city-kings of Marion, Citium, Lapethus, Cerynia, and Amathous. In response to Seleucus’ naval demonstration, Antigonus had taken steps to redress the balance of naval power by setting up a huge naval building program. Timber was cut in Lebanon, Cilicia, and along the south Black Sea shore to supply ship-building yards in the Phoenician cities, along the coast of Cilicia, in the Black Sea ports, and on the island of Rhodes, which was allied to Antigonus at this time. Within two years, Antigonus raised fleets in excess of 240 warships. Fifty of these ships were sent to southern Greece under the command of Antigonus’ nephew Telesphorus, to aid the operations against Cassander there; the remainder were placed under the command of another nephew, Dioscurides, to sail around the Aegean expelling Ptolemy’s ships and forces, and to organize the Aegean islands as allies of Antigonus in the Nesiotic League, or League of the Islanders.
Seeking to undermine Cassander further in Greece and win the good will of the Greeks, Antigonus issued a great proclamation establishing his policy with respect to the Greek cities. The Proclamation of Tyre in 314 established the principle that all Greek cities should be free, autonomous, ungarrisoned, and free from outside taxation. Antigonus committed himself to enforcing and upholding this principle, and called on all Greek cities and other leaders of good will to join him in securing the promised freedom and autonomy for the Greek cities. Ambassadors were despatched far and wide to publicize this proclamation. Antigonus knew that to secure his empire and govern it effectively he needed Greek manpower on a vast scale: soldiers, administrators, and colonists by the tens of thousands. As the great patron of Greek freedom, Antigonus hoped (rightly) that he could secure a strong footing in the Greek world and succeed in importing Greek manpower into western Asia on the scale needed to establish Macedonian control there over the long term. Antigonus’ chief rival Ptolemy, who likewise needed Greek manpower to secure long-term control in Egypt, immediately echoed Antigonus’ proclamation with a similar one of his own, also espousing the principle of Greek autonomy. Cassander, who had plenty of Macedonian and other Greek manpower and needed control of southern Greece, resisted it, but increasingly unsu
ccessfully.
The fighting in Greece in the years 314 to 311 was chaotic, and need not be gone into in detail here. Antigonid forces organized and commanded by Aristodemus and (from 312 on) Polemaeus were able, thanks to the genuine popularity of Antigonus’ Tyre proclamation, to detach much of southern and central Greece from loyalty to Cassander, greatly weakening Cassander’s grip on southern Greece. Antigonus managed, with minimal expenditure of his own resources, to stir up enough trouble for Lysimachus in Thrace and among the Greek cities of the western Black Sea coast to keep that dynast too busy to intervene against Antigonus in Asia or the Aegean. Thus any threat from these two leaders was effectively neutralized. Minor trouble did arise when the governor of Caria in south-west Asia Minor, an influential Macedonian aristocrat named Asander, decided he wanted to rule his territory independently and sought aid from Cassander and Ptolemy to do so. Antigonus decided to put on a show of force to keep his provincial governors submissive. Leaving his handsome and brilliant son Demetrius, now in his early twenties, in charge of Phoenicia and Palestine with a large force, Antigonus marched with a large army into western Asia Minor and seized control of Caria in a brief campaign demonstrating exactly how to use overwhelming force effectively. While Antigonus himself, with a large army, marched through Caria from north to south receiving the surrender of local cities and forts, he sent additional forces on separate marches westward to secure the cities along the coast: a large force marched down the Maeander valley to occupy Miletus and the cities of the Mycale peninsula; another column under Peucestas was sent to take the cities of the Halicarnassos peninsula; and another force was sent down to the coast at Iasus. Meanwhile a great fleet under Antigonus’ admiral Medeius co-operated with the columns attacking the coastal cities and prevented any intervention by Ptolemy. Within a few weeks Caria belonged to Antigonus; Asander was in flight never to be heard of again; and the governors of western Asia understood that it did not pay to rebel against Antigonus.
Before and After Alexander Page 26