by Bob Bennett
At the commencement of our period, the armed forces the Successors fielded were much alike in nationality, cultural inclinations and training. Many had been brothers in arms till a few years before. But, equally, there were differences of emphasis brought on by geography, resources and personal style that need to be recognized. Alexander’s army did not break down into neat sections and then begin to attack each other. From the beginning, the armies fielded by rival Diadochi could be different in composition and this only increased as time went on. In 322 BC, the army Seleucus marched with (under Perdiccas’ supreme command) to Cappadocia and on to the invasion of Egypt had many similarities to the one brought to Asia by Alexander from Macedonia. But by the Battle of Ipsus, twenty-one years later, the host Seleucus led across half the known world was very different from the army Cassander sent from Europe to aid his ally, Lysimachus, in Anatolia, yet ended fighting in the same climactic battle. These changes need to be recognized and clarified if the reasons the wars developed as they did are to be understood.
From this starting point, the main battles will be detailed from the Lamian War, through to the campaigns where the great rivals clashed: Eumenes versus Neoptolemus and Craterus, Antigonus versus Eumenes, and the other major contests that we have good sources for, culminating in Ipsus in 301 BC. Then we will look at the separate specialisms, siege and naval warfare. Few were the Diadochi wars where a siege or naval encounter was not crucial to the outcome and sometimes these encounters are well enough sourced to tell us much about the nature of conflict in the society that was evolving from the death of Alexander.
Finally, we will consider the periphery; Cassander spent more of his time struggling in Illyria, Acarnania and Epirus than he ever did directly confronting the Antigonids. It was a constant hazard for any ruler at Pella; the need to anticipate tribal incursions from the north. Lysimachus’ career may have hit its high spot at Ipsus, but it was Getae, Scythians, Thracians and truculent Black Sea Greeks whose eruptions usually filled his nightmares. Even the Antigonids took on and indeed were bested by desert tribesmen. Ptolemy had to handle Libyan charioteers at times and Seleucus grappled with Indians from the Punjab and the steppe tribes of central Asia.
Chapter One
Soldiers and Armies
As with so many discussions involving the Diadochi everything seems to drag us back to Alexander one way and forward to the era of Rome on the other. We are drawn to the origin and the nemesis. To try and understand the armies the Successors deployed in their many wars, we must first try and understand the army that Alexander brought to Asia, because both were, by and large, Macedonian organizations. Changed certainly by experiences in Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, Bactria, Sogdia and India, but subsequently only in the case of Seleucus’ armies were the changes probably more than skin-deep. Elephants, chariots and light troops seemed to dominate in his armed forces, as they marched west from the borders of India towards the climactic Battle of Ipsus in 301 BC, in a manner that was quite different from his rivals. The military establishments that we have good details for, fighting the great battles of 323 to 312 BC, performed as Macedonians in a manner that would have been all too familiar to Alexander and even Philip, his father. The armies and the Diadochi’s use of them was rooted in the invading host that Alexander led over the Hellespont in 334 BC and how that organization was used and developed in the years of conquest. What changes there were, between 323 and 281 BC, as the Hellenistic kingdoms shook themselves out, had more to do with the military problems the generals faced over those years, rather than any inherently different attitudes or approaches amongst the leaders and soldiers involved.
The core of both Alexander’s armies and those of his Successors was the infantry phalanx, not always the battle winner but always the backbone. We know much of these units, not just from descriptions of their role in the creation of the Macedonian Empire but also because this formation exerted a fascination on generations to come, that stretched even down to Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD. If Machiavelli saw the Roman legion as the exemplar of his Florentine militia at the beginning of the sixteenth century, the cousins William Louis and Maurice of Nassau at the end of that century reformed the Dutch army based on ideas from Aelian’s Tactica, a work from the age of Trajan which discussed the place of the phalanx in the Macedonian war machine.
There had been military manuals written before Aelian, some even predate the rise of the Macedonian Empire. Aeneas Tacticus and Xenophon both wrote in the first half of the fourth century BC. Aeneas apparently penned a number of treatises on war but unfortunately only the one, How to Survive under Siege, remains. As for Xenophon, he produced a copious output, most of which is extant; however, his interest in military matters was mainly confined to his beloved horses. The material we do have on Alexander and his Successors’ war machine dates from considerably later. Asclepiodotus in the first century BC wrote an account of the Greek phalanx, though it is more a philosophical treatise than a book of tactics designed for generals. Arrian (like Aelian, from the second century AD), usually regarded as the most reliable source for Alexander, was a Roman provincial governor and military man. He also wrote a Tactica, of which only the part on cavalry survives, though he has much useful military information in his life of Alexander. Both Arrian and Aelian may well have based much of their work on Polybius who, we know, wrote a Tactica in the second century BC, less than 200 years after the Diadochi era. Indeed, Arrian specifically cites the work which, again, is now lost. Polybius himself, though a Greek, knew some of the greatest Roman military figures of his age.
But, even if some of these ancient descriptions of the phalanx were anachronistic, describing a military organization which had long been defunct and was now surpassed by the Roman legion, their content still had strong resonance for its audience. Just as in much the same way Alexander’s career always retained a special place throughout ancient history as the archetype of the conqueror. He retained this kudos even in comparison to other greats like Hannibal, Scipio Africanus and Julius Caesar; even though, it could be argued, he had an easier task than these later generals. They all fought enemies with comparable fighting qualities to themselves whereas those Alexander had to deal with were, by and large, peoples and tribes unused to fighting together and thus easier prey for the Macedonian military machine. But, whatever judgement is (or was) made, the fact remains that the Romans and their emperors, in particular, were ‘suckers’ for his glamour.
Nero, in 66 AD, apparently organized a new (all-Italian) force he styled as the ‘phalanx of Alexander the Great’ in order to conquer Parthia, though in the event it was never used. Caracalla took this hero worship of Alexander one step further and in 214 AD also organized a phalanx, but this time the soldiers were to be all Macedonian and the officers were instructed to adopt the names of Alexander’s generals. And, less than twenty years later, the emperor, Alexander Severus, created a unit called the Silver Shields, named after Alexander’s guardsmen who had such a major influence on the Diadochi era. Many of the original members of the elite unit lived for several generations and their reputation and aura was such that units in Antiochus the Great’s army in the 190s BC were still being called the Silver Shields. As for their Roman equivalents, both Nero’s and Alexander Severus’ units fought in the traditional Roman fashion. However, it is possible that Caracalla really did train his phalanx to fight in the ‘Macedonian style’ and certainly the unit was 16,000 strong as recommended in most military treatises.
This military formation that exerted such an attraction to so many was a real invention that had sprung fully-grown from the head of that extraordinary monarch Philip II of Macedonia. A man whose reputation only suffers eclipse by the inevitable comparison with the son he sired. Macedonia may have been out on the fringes of the Hellenic world when his career began but Philip had known that world from within. He had been exiled in Thebes as a youth of 15 years and stayed with a man called Pammanes, a soldier and a great friend of Epami
nondas, and had seen there the cutting edge of Greek military evolution. It must have been here that Philip absorbed the idea of a deeper, weightier phalanx like the ones handled so successfully by Epaminondas at Leuctra in 371 BC and Mantinea in 362 BC, when the Thebans dispelled for ever the threat of Spartan hegemony that had lain like a black cloud over the Greek mainland since the triumph of those reactionaries in the Peloponnesian War.
The longer spears of his phalanx came from somewhere else. Philip, here, may have been influenced by Iphicrates of Athens who in the first half of the fourth century BC toured the ancient world from Thrace to Egypt commanding mercenary armies in the service of a number of employers. Cornelius Nepos even claims Iphicrates as Philip’s protector at one stage: ‘Eurydice the mother of Perdiccas and Philip fled with these two boys, after the death of Amyntas, to Iphicrates and was secure under his power’; and if this is true Philip would have known of his reforms first hand.1 Some such closeness to these tactical reformers is required to explain the radical military thinking that Philip so quickly put into practice in his relatively backward country. Iphicrates armed his hoplites with a smaller shield and longer spear as well as a particularly sturdy boot that took his name.
Philip’s kingdom was not a land of city states which, since time immemorial, had provided citizen spearmen and foot soldiers equipped to fight in the heart of the battle line, whose social status was intrinsically bound up with this function. Macedonia was famous for its aristocratic horsemen, if anything, and if the commonality fought at all it was as javelin-armed light troops. But the reforming king changed all that; he levied the peasantry and mobilized them around a core of infantry guards who had traditionally protected the king when he fought on foot. The social environment helped to grease the wheels of change. There was no dead hand of tradition dictating how infantry should fight as there was in the cities to the south. In Greece, in many places, it was generations before the military establishments changed their formations to Macedonian-style phalanxes, even though these ‘new model’ soldiers had already comprehensively seen off old-style hoplites in their own backyard on key occasions, from Chaeronea in 338 BC to Megalopolis in 331 BC.
The name of the original royal guards or foot companions was pezhetairoi, and, from then on, this was used as the designation for the whole of the new infantry arm. The men were now equipped with a small round shield (pelte) made of a bronze facing over a leather and wood core about 2 feet across, rimless and less concave than the traditional large round shield (aspis) of the classical hoplite. The shield was slung from the soldier’s left shoulder on a baldric, to free up both his hands to wield an 18-foot pike (sarissa) that made the phalanx so formidable. This was in two pieces, weighed about 15 pounds with its front end sheathed with a 20-inch point and its butt similarly covered, so it acted to balance the great bulk of the pike held out in front and also could be used offensively if the weapon broke in combat. In this the phalangite differed from the citizen hoplite who held his aspis by a grip in the middle and used one hand to brandish his 8 to 9-foot spear. Helmets, body armour and greaves were worn by some of the men, probably at least the front-rankers, from the beginning and, with Alexander’s success and with the resources available to his Successors, defensive equipment became more elaborate and complete over the years. If it is likely that some of the peasants that Philip conscripted made do with just helmet and shield, by a generation or two later they would have been very well armoured indeed.
These warriors were deployed in files usually 16 ranks deep, but this could be cut down to 8 or doubled to 32 as appropriate. The formation was not as deep as the weighty 48-man-deep Theban phalanx, but twice the depth of the typical 8-man file of the Classical era. Individual phalangites usually had 3 feet of frontage in battle formation, though in locked shields defensive formation this space reduced by a half. The smallest tactical unit was the 256-man syntagma comprising 16 files (lochoi) of 16 men. In overall command was the syntagmatarch and each file had an officer at the front, a lochagos, and one at the back, the lochagos’ second in command, the ouragos, whose function was to encourage the men from the rear. The syntagma was also subdivided into two taxeis of 128 men, each under a taxiarch and then a tetrarchia (four files of 16 men) and a dilochia (two files of 16 men). How many syntagmai were in the main regimental infantry formation of Alexander (somewhat confusingly called a taxis) has caused much ink to be spilt by military historians of the ancient world. Some consider them to be 1,500 strong whilst others think 2,000 a more likely number. It will be noted that this is the approximate equivalent of either six syntagmai (1,500) or eight (2,000). But later Diadochi formations are described as either 1,000 or 2,000 men strong.
In the case of a 2,000 man taxis, when deployed 16 deep, there would have been 125 lochoi with a consequent frontage of 125 yards. Thus, at Paraetacene in 317 BC, where we have specific information, we can calculate that for Eumenes, who had 17,000 in his phalanx (and allowing for small gaps between the units), a complete frontage of roughly 1,100 yards. For Antigonus, the equivalent calculation at Paraetacene would give a frontage of about 1,800 yards or more. At Gaza in 312 BC, where the phalanxes were smaller, Demetrius’ 11,000 infantry would have had a frontage of about 800 yards and Ptolemy with 18,000 men would have spread to 1,200 yards or so. Presumably, although we are not told, the general with the smaller phalanx would make it less deep, or have greater intervals between units, to avoid being outflanked by his opponent.
But what is sure is that, as in any army, these theoretical divisions and the numbers in them would not have long survived the attrition of campaigning. The phalanx units, like any other formations, would have gradually decreased in numbers until it was possible to get replacements. How this was achieved under those generals whose power base was far from Macedonia is very unclear. We have details of replacements coming from Macedonia to flesh out Alexander’s depleted phalanxes but, after his death, activity of this sort is less recorded and also was practically much more difficult with no centrally-controlled state to organize and push them on their way. The tendency for those commanders who had no access to the manpower pool of Macedonia must have been to find replacements locally, but our sources for the Diadochi years are pretty specific about the nationality of the make up of the front line phalangites. They are recorded as either Macedonians or of mixed nationality or as mercenaries equipped to fight like Macedonians. This probably means that for some time most of those phalangites described as Macedonians were originally from that country and if they did include replacements from elsewhere, these were few in number.
The warriors that Philip had levied were well-drilled and had, even by Alexander’s time, become far more expert soldiers than the citizen militia of classical Greece. Philip’s thousands of recruits were trained into near professionals, to a high standard of fitness. They could march with very little baggage, only had one servant for every ten men and could even campaign in winter when most citizen hoplites would demand to go home to their farms. By the time of the Successors, the new essence of this soldiery was typified by the Silver Shields, who epitomize the more notorious and unfortunate qualities of the mercenary. These rootless men were dominated by the cash nexus, with all they owned and cared for in the wagons and tents of their camp. Their loyalty to the original Macedonian state, if not to the memory of Alexander, had been eroded by years away from home and, if they could be kept paid and loyal, they showed they might win an empire for their commanders. Yet, if these veteran professionals were necessary to found a dynasty, any ruler, so established, must eventually return at least a proportion of the men back to the land to become the progenitors of another generation of soldiers, something each of the Hellenistic dynasts strove to do once the campaigns that won them their kingdoms had been accomplished. Military colonies had been the martial bedrock of great states since records began and the Macedonian elites who took control, whether in Europe, Asia or Africa, were no exception.
Whether they were the old sweats fro
m Philip’s reign, or the new recruits that had been brought to Asia during the great conquests of Alexander, how many soldiers it amounted to who took the road to Persia is problematic. Diodorus describes 12,000 Macedonian foot crossing to Asia and 3,000 were probably already there, having been sent as an advance guard under Parmenion in 336/335 BC. In the winter of 334/333 BC, some of Alexander’s officers took the married Macedonians back home (no detail of figures is given) with instructions to recruit more men. These were most likely those that are recorded as having arrived at Gordium, 3,000 foot and 300 horse in all. Another 5,000 foot and 800 horse could have arrived before Cilicia was invaded in 333 BC, but the evidence is somewhat confused (taken from Quintus Curtius and Polybius) and how many were actually Macedonians is a very moot point. In Babylonia in 331 BC, Alexander received 6,000 Macedonian foot and 500 Macedonian horse. It has been suggested that altogether between 9,000 and 12,000 Macedonian infantry came as replacements between the years 334 and 331 BC and this seems as credible a ball-park number as it is possible to get.2 Two years later, Antipater sent 8,000 replacements who arrived in Bactria, but they are called Greeks, and in 326 BC Diodorus claims reinforcements of 30,000 foot and 600 horse, but again they are described as allies and Greek mercenaries. It is possible some of these were Macedonians but probably not many. Thus something over 20,000 Macedonians were available in the main army near the end of Alexander’s life just before he dismissed the 10,000 veterans who Craterus was to lead back home to Europe. This suggests that 10,000-odd remained at Babylon when the world changed. However, these figures are far from certain.3 It must also be remembered that some of Craterus’ 10,000 veterans remained in Asia as he took only 6,000 Macedonians back to fight in Greece.