The Mediterranean in the Ancient World

by Fernand Braudel

  This said, and it is all quite true, is it fair to blame Pericles, who was then embarking on a long political career which would end only with his death in 4x9? The godlike leader certainly did not invent imperialism in general, nor Athenian imperialism in particular. His predecessor Themistocles, creator of the Athenian navy, a regularfighting force, must certainly take some responsibility for that. But historians prefer to put prominent figures in the dock. Everything we have been taught to value about Pericles – his intelligence, his refusal to follow the crowd, his elegance, his eloquence, the quality of his friends, his unusual incorruptibility – all single him out as a good candidate for reappraisal. Of course Pericles had dreamed of Athenian hegemony. According to his friend Anaxagoras, mind (nous) rules the world and Athens was to become that mind, guiding the imperfect body of Greek states. This ideal could never be reached without fighting the obscurantism of Sparta, the jealousy of Corinth and the rancours of the allies. Pericles saw this war coming and worked it out in advance: the Athenians should abandon the land and hold on to the sea. The plan brought neither victory nor the salvation of Greece, it is true. But is its author on that account to be held guilty?

  To keep the debate brief, let one historian speak as counsel for either side. For Rene Grousset, who is certainly no grand inquisitor, Pericles could have maintained peace with the complicity of the active and sincere Archidamus, the pro-Athenian king of Sparta, but he deliberately let the occasion slip and chose to go to war. Alfred Weber on the other hand (1935) was perhaps too much the prisoner of a certain German historical literature when he wrote that Pericles took a masterly view of the situation: choosing to fight on sea was the right choice for victory, but the Athenians were simply not up to the grandiose strategy!

  My own version would probably disappoint both advocates. It is surely an illusion to believe that great men hold the destiny of the state in their hands, since destiny deals with them as it does with everyone else, and in some ways relieves them of responsibility. It is far from clear that the battle which eventually tore Greece apart was one of those conflicts that might have been avoided with a little common sense and a great deal of magnanimity. A unified Greece was never possible in peace or war. The major explanation of Pericles’ action is that Athens had come to assume quite disproportionate importance within the fragile Greek constellation, because of a past which Pericles had inherited and not created. It was the result of a trading combination which brought the city much advantage, since the grain and salt fish of the Black Sea were shipped directly to Athens and this cheap supply of food nourished the expansion of the city, allowed its industries to expand and in particular made possible a capitalism which depended on a low-paid workforce, as it faced growing economic difficulties.

  The drama of the Greek city-states was rather like that of the cities of the Italian Renaissance. None of them, not Florence, nor Venice, Genoa or Milan – was able in the end to unify Italy. Athens in 404 opened its gates to Lysander. But neither the victory of anachronistic Sparta, nor the ephemeral rise of Thebes under Epaminondas would throw up any force more capable than Athens of constructing Greek unity. The end-point of the process was the arrival of the great barbarian of Macedonia. His coming had been prepared long before.

  II Alexander’s mistake

  The title of this section should not lead the reader to expect a critical analysis of Alexander’s Asian campaigns. In his ‘meteoric’ adventure, what happened in the east tends to distract us from what happened– or ought to have happened – in the west. Alexander’s great mistake, in my view, was that he failed to recognize the value of the western Mediterranean. He threw himself into a brilliant course of action laid out for him in advance, and which led the other way.

  Hellenism runs out of steam

  The subjection of Greece to the Macedonian yoke was a consequence of the very expansion of Greek civilization. All the northern fringes of Greek culture – Macedonia, Thrace, Pontus, the Bosphorus and Bithynia – had forged ahead in the fourth century BC. Macedonia, an inhospitable region, snow-covered in winter, flooded in springtime, with its free peasantry and its warlords accustomed to sorties on horseback, was the one that eventually took the lead. This was logical enough, since the malaise of the Greek city-states had created – as could also be said of fifteenth-century Italy – a cyclonic zone of low pressure, into which currents were drawn from all sides.

  Philip II of Macedon (c. 383-336) had turned to his own advantagethe squabbles of the Greek cities. They were forced under the Macedonian yoke on the field of Chaeronea in 338. We need not enter into the detail of this familiar story or take sides for or against Demosthenes and Athens. Nor should we mourn too much for the latter: it was spared by the Macedonian conqueror on account of the Athenian fleet with which he hoped to reach the shores of Asia Minor. But Philip never realized his dream, since he was assassinated in 336. His son Alexander, aged twenty, inherited the task. Scarcely pausing to bring under his sway first the Epirots and then the Thebans, whose city he razed to the ground, Alexander crossed the Hellespont in 334, accompanied by the contingents of the pan-Hellenic League as reinforcements.

  In that spring of 334, the fortunes of Hellenism from the Spanish coast to the Aegean and the Black Sea were far from being tragic or catastrophic. They were uncertain perhaps, and not particularly promising. Dangers lay around, but none of them was new. Probably Greece itself in the narrow sense was the least healthy of the Hellenic regions.

  In the western sea, Greeks and Carthaginians were still skirmishing. They would fight, make a treaty and start again. There was, it is true, a new threat in the form of Rome, which had taken control of rich Campania in 341 and of Latium in 338 and was already looking like a ‘lair of wolves’ waiting to pounce on the rest of Italy. But the Greek cities were not as yet fully aware of this danger.

  The other conflict, to the east, was the endemic warfare with the Persian Empire. The Great King controlled the essential sea-crossings between Asia Minor and Egypt. The latter, however reluctantly, was among his most profitable possessions. Since the days of the pharaoh Necho, a ‘Suez canal’ had linked the Red Sea to the Nile. And the gigantic Persian Empire – which it took three months to cross from Sardis to Susa, by the Royal Road – extended to the Indian Ocean from where it imported rare merchandise for the Mediterranean. Indeed, during the tough ‘nationalist’ reign of Artaxerxes III (358– 337) the balance of trade had swung against Greece, which had to pay for Persian grain and manufactured goods partly with silver.

  Out of lassitude, a sort of peaceful but wary co-existence had developed between the Greeks and the Persians. Greek ships and the Phoenician vessels in the service of Persia had come to observe a sort of modus vivendi, with their own reserved areas. And the Persian Empire was routinely recruiting Greek mercenaries. This non-hostile situation might have continued. If we argue with hindsight in terms of ‘historical’ strategy, we can accept that in 334 or so, there were at least two possible options: either the overcrowded Balkan peninsula could have attacked the great Achaemenid Empire in a new Trojan war, this time on a grand scale, or the forces of Greece could have turned instead against Carthage, the Italic peoples and Rome. This would have been a less glorious option: the rich prizes and grand civilizations lay in the Orient. The west, for all the Punic and Greek successes there, did not appeal to the imagination in anything like the same way. But let us allow ourselves to imagine a Greek version of the ‘prose that was Rome’: Greece would have conquered the entire Mediterranean from east to west, turning it into a Greek lake, instead of the Roman lake it became after a conquest which ran the other way, from west to east.

  A Pyrrhic defeat?

  Thinking of this destiny which never came about, one is tempted to agree with the still stimulating book by Ulrich von Hassel, Das Drama des Mittelmeers (1940), which concentrates on the amazing adventures of Pyrrhos of Epirus (let us give him back his Greek name) a couple of generations after the death of Alexander the Great (323).<
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  The king of Epirus had been called on in 280 to help Tarentum. When he arrived there with some thirty thousand men and thirty elephants, he already had an eventful career behind him. A hostage in Alexandria in his youth, he had married an Egyptian princess; then having become ruler of Corcyra (Corfu) and briefly of the whole of Macedonia, he acted as a sort of condottiere, ready to go anywhere for money if it suited his fancy or his interest. His elephants created havoc among the Roman legions at Heraclea in the summer of 280; the following year he repeated his exploit at Ausculum, but with more difficulty; in 278 he landed in Sicily, probably the land of his dreams and ambitions and relieved Syracuse from a siege by the Carthaginians; in 277 he entered Agrigento. But Greek Sicily was war-weary. In autumn 276, Pyrrhos returned to Italy; in 275 he was harassed atBeneventum by the Romans, and left the peninsula; and in 272 he met an accidental death in Argos.

  Pyrrhos’ Italian adventures are trivial compared to the fantastic conquests of Alexander the Great fifty years or so earlier. But in a sense and with hindsight, they provide a verdict on them. Pyrrhos’ eventual failure, which stands for the failure of Greece against Rome on the central axis of the sea, was a direct corollary of the ‘wrong-headed’ conquests (as I see it) of the Macedonian Wunderkind. With Alexander, Greece had swung round to face east and south, towards Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. The last emigration of the Greeks westward – some sixty thousand people apparently in response to a desperate appeal by Timoleon, the ruler who restored the freedom of Syracuse– dates from about 338. Admittedly, Alexander is thought to have contemplated attacking Carthage, which lived in fear of such an assault for years on end. But in 323 Alexander died in Babylon and his empire began to fall apart at once.

  What would have happened to Italy if Alexander had ignored Asia and turned his forces on the west? Von Hassel’s question is the kind that comes under fire for seeking to rewrite history, but it is tempting all the same to think of Syracuse as the centre of a Greek Empire triumphing over both Rome and Carthage and bequeathing a Greek culture to the west directly, without Rome stepping in to act as intermediary and screen. But the war which never took place was effectively lost. Like it or not, the issue of who was to rule the Mediterranean was already being decided at that point in history in the central area of the sea, between the two basins.

  Darius’ empire is cut off from the Mediterranean

  No one has ever satisfactorily explained Alexander’s conquest of Persia. It is the apparent ease with which he accomplished it that puzzles one. Neither the familiar claims for the strengths of Macedonia and Greece nor those concerning the weakness or even decay of the Persian Empire are particularly convincing.

  The latter had been in existence for a century, but a century is nothing in the lifetime of such an organism. And the monster looked quite healthy, despite a few internal problems. The roads were busy, the administration as efficient as it could be in those far-off days. As regards beliefs, Persia was already tolerant, as Islam was to be in later times. The adventure of the Ten Thousand by no means pointed to any fatal weakness. When Cyrus the Younger tried to dethrone his brother Artaxerxes, the ‘Ten Thousand’ were Greek mercenaries in his service: they were victorious at the battle of Cunaxa (401) but the death of Cyrus on the battlefield cancelled out his triumph. The Greeks then managed to persuade Artaxerxes to withdraw towards the Black Sea: they miraculously escaped the treachery of the Persians, thanks to the energetic action of Xenophon, and finally reached the Bosphorus where they took ship. The episode pointed to internal Persian conflicts and to the success of a group of determined men, but it also revealed the poverty of Greece: it was apparently condemned to export its surplus men, the vagabonds who so worried Isocrates, to the rich state of Persia which could afford to employ them. The episode of the Ten Thousand as told in Xenophon’s Anabasis, while ‘an admirable piece of war reporting’, is in the end the story of a retreat.

  As for the policy of corruption practised in Greece by the basileis, the Great Kings, this is evidence neither of strength nor of weakness. It enabled the Persians indirectly to defeat Athens in 404, and they also benefited from their alliance with Sparta to impose the peace of Antalcidas (386) which gave them control of the Greek cities in Asia Minor.

  What does all this signify? I would like to point to two explanations, one of them often put forward and obviously carrying some weight, the other virtually unknown, although it was first formulated long ago.

  The first stresses the logical connection between the first campaigns of Alexander: in 334 he was victorious at the Granicus, and in 333 in Issus and Tyre, which he captured after a long siege. Then he occupied Egypt without a fight. During these lightning campaigns, the victorious army simply worked its way round the shoreline of the Mediterranean. Thus as if with a surgeon’s knife, the huge mass of the Persian Empire was detached from the Mediterranean: its roads were cut, and now led nowhere. The symbol of this surgical operation was the capture and physical and human liquidation of Tyre and Gaza, which had put up a desperate defence but which the conqueror destroyed leaving no stone standing nor defender alive. Without its fleet, the great empire was blind. In 331, after this operation, Alexander fought his way east towards the heart of the Persian Empire. The fate of the empire was sealed on the far side of the Tigris, at the battle of Gaugamela. Completion of the conquest meant pursuing Darius, bringing to heel the satraps east of Iran, and descending upon the Indus – fantastic journeys and difficult feats of prowess; but by 331, the Persian Empire had been brought to its knees.

  The Macedonian cavalry

  The second explanation was suggested by E.-F. Gautier in 1930. The strength of Alexander’s army (and of the little group of Macedonians who formed his general staff and the core of his companions in fighting, drinking and general roistering) lay in the cavalry. Until then the Greek hoplite, a foot-soldier, had never had the effective protection of a real corps of cavalry. The Persians, who by contrast had excellent horses and horsemen, had had to recruit infantrymen from the other side to protect themselves against Greek incursions. In 334 the army they fielded in the first encounters with Alexander was commanded by a Greek, Memnon, and largely made up of Greek mercenaries fighting as foot-soldiers.

  The new element introduced by Alexander, alongside the phalanx, which remained a formidable and respected force, was therefore the corps of cavalry, based on selective horse-breeding and effectively a way of life for the Macedonian warlords. Horses proved to be the ideal war machine to conquer the great expanses of the Persian Empire. In later times, in the days of Crassus, Antony and Trajan, Rome was unable to conquer the Parthians, for want of a genuine cavalry force. We might reflect that the reconquest of the Balkans from the Turks in the eighteenth century ad was achieved thanks to the Austrian cavalry, a late development which provided Prince Eugene with the key to victory.

  The Persians, of course, had perfectly good cavalry of their own: the Persian nobles were born horsemen. But the Macedonian force had the double advantage of being heavy, well protected and well armed, the cavalrymen wielding both lance and sabre. It was also divided into squadrons; in other words, efficiently commanded. It was this discipline which led to its triumph at the Granicus, Issus and on the Tigris.

  Persia was conquered in a rapid movement, just as in the past it had conquered others – Mesopotamia or Egypt. It collapsed after a single campaign, a sort of Blitzkrieg, like a healthy man struck down suddenly by illness in the prime of life. Similar episodes occurred during the Muslim, Mongol and Turkish conquests. On each occasion speed, whether of horses or camels, was a vital factor. We might reflect that in 1940, France, neither a decadent nor a poor nation, was defeated in a lightning campaign by German armoured divisions, the twentieth-century version of cavalry. History is full of ‘unkind strokes of fate’.

  A long-term colonization

  On Alexander’s death in June 3 23, his empire fell apart almost at once. It would be a long story to describe what happened to these fragmen
ts, Macedonia, Syria under the Seleucids, and Egypt under the Lagids, between this date and the establishment of the Pax Romana.

  Apart from political events, there took place what one has to call, for want of a better term, a colonization of the Middle East by the Greeks, as a people and a dominant culture became established there. This colonization, which Rome inherited, lasted about ten centuries, until the Muslim conquests of the seventh century ad – which are as hard to understand at first sight as the victory of the ‘young god’ Alexander.

  Ten centuries elapsed – in other words, enough to embrace the whole of the known history of France. And yet, ‘after ten centuries, at one stroke of the Arab scimitar, everything collapsed overnight: Greek language and thought, western patterns of living, everything went up in smoke. On this territory, a thousand years of history were as if they had never been. They had not been sufficient for the west to put down the slightest roots in this oriental soil. The Greek language and social customs had been no more than a layer, a poorly fitting mask. All the Greek cities which had been founded and grown up, from the banks of the Nile to the Hindu Kush, any real or apparent implantation of Greek art and philosophy, all of it had gone with the wind.’