by Bob Bennett
Alexander’s death in 323 BC threw the sticks in the air the world over, but it was back in Europe that the pot boiled over most dramatically and where we discover a war, germinated before the death of the conqueror, which is well reported by our sources. Old belligerents from across Greece looked down the tempting road of resistance and saw hope of the old days of power shining at the end of it.
What was in so many heads and hearts had taken some form, the year before Alexander’s death, when, in July 324 BC, Leosthenes had been elected one of the ten Athenian generals. He had an interesting past, having fought as one of Darius’ mercenaries before defeat forced him into retirement. He had gained considerable kudos by undertaking to arrange the transport of Greek soldiers back home. The alternative for these men was bleak exile in the new Macedonian foundations in Asia. When even more were left rootless with the disbandment of the satrapal armies, Leosthenes used his contacts well to muster a considerable force of soldiers for hire at Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese.
When Leosthenes suggested that they take part in a war against Macedonia with Athens’ backing he found a receptive audience. Athens, for her part, was eager to use these potentially crucial auxiliaries and promised 50 talents and sufficient weaponry to equip all who did not have their own armour, spears and swords. Leosthenes planned as his officers distributed the arms and money around the mercenary camp. He needed allies, so his first stop was across the Gulf of Corinth from the Peloponnese into Aetolia. Here, he picked up 7,000 soldiers from a people who were always open to offers from those who wanted to kill Macedonians. From Aetolia, his agents spread all over central Greece enrolling Locrians, Phocians and many others while he moved his growing army to the pass at Thermopylae. Yet, he hardly had settled in the historic defile when he discovered enemies in his rear looking to threaten his communications with Athens and his allies in the south. He was a brilliant and energetic general having had experience of the lightning style of warfare Alexander pioneered in Asia. Prepared to risk deserting his defensive post alongside the Malian Gulf, he aimed a decisive blow against the Boeotians who had mobilized, with help from those Macedonians present in the region, and were in camp near Plataea.
Marching southeast as fast as he could push his men, Leosthenes attacked at Plataea, in conjunction with the Athenian army which had come in force from the south comprising 5,000 citizen foot, 500 horse and 2,000 more mercenaries. Together they administered a crushing defeat to the heavily outnumbered Boeotians. Leosthenes, having accomplished his objective, hardly halted to deal with the dead and set up a trophy to victory before he hurried his way back to Thermopylae. In this adventure, fortune had favoured the brave as the Macedonians had still not arrived at the hot gates.
Antipater had had plenty on his mind as the world turned upside down in the last year. First, it looked like he was to be replaced and forced to carry his old bones to Babylon, as news arrived that Alexander had sent off Craterus to take over as his viceroy in Europe. Then, after Alexander’s death, he kept a job that now included facing a Greek uprising. After leaving Sippas in charge of home defence, with orders to recruit more troops where he could, Antipater led out an army that only amounted to 13,000 Macedonian foot, presumably mostly phalangites, and 600 horse.1
He crossed the border into Thessaly, following the coast road, and here many thousands of the local cavalry joined his army. But their mood was sullen and unenthusiastic and, on the road south, their shaky morale deteriorated towards open mutiny. In Thessaly, support for the Macedonian cause was evaporating and changing to outright allegiance to the Greek coalition and, as Antipater approached the Greek defences at the pass of Thermopylae, it became common knowledge that the native cities of his Thessalians had declared for the enemy en bloc. The Thessalian cavalry, taking stock of both their interests and their inclinations, deserted and went over wholesale to join Leosthenes’ side.
Leosthenes’ strength and confidence was increasing daily and, with the unexpected arrival of these excellent heavy cavalrymen, his strategic position dramatically changed for the better. He no longer needed to confine himself to a defensive posture in the coastal defile of Thermopylae but could look to take the offensive and face Antipater in the open. His opponent still had faith in his previously-undefeated phalangites and accepted battle somewhere north of the pass. Though heavily outnumbered in both foot and horse, the old marshal had known a history of victory and achievement that meant he felt he had at least to try his luck in battle. Still, his situation must have given him pause, even as he showed a brave face to his men at the start of the encounter. His worst fears were realised and ‘the Greeks who far outnumbered the Macedonians, were successful’.2 This was a famous victory but we know absolutely nothing of the details. From what we know of the battles that were to follow it is not unreasonable to conjecture that it was the allied cavalry that carried the day. We know Leosthenes had at least 500 Athenian horse added to his 2,000 Thessalians and whatever cavalry the other allies had provided, while all that is reported for Antipater is 600 and this imbalance surely turned the combat, rather than an infantry struggle, where it would be difficult to believe that Greek hoplites with their shorter spears would have easily driven off their sarissa-wielding opponents.
Whatever, the reverse was far from total and Antipater managed an organized retreat north. The Greeks had failed to destroy their enemy and the lack of close pursuit allowed the Macedonians a space in which to regroup. But, if the extent of the defeat was limited, Leosthenes had full command of the open countryside. Unable to forage far from camp, the Greeks’ superior cavalry arm made it difficult for Antipater to see a way to safely get back to Macedonia. He took his battered army to Lamia (the one city in the area that had stayed loyal) where at least he could hope for refuge behind the town walls. But the corollary of this was that it handed over the initiative completely to Leosthenes. This man was a first-rate general; he did not allow his men to be distracted by plunder but followed on the heels of the Macedonians and led his victorious men to immediately make an attack on Lamia itself. He led them out in battle formation and challenged the Macedonians to come out from behind their defences and face him in the open. When Antipater sensibly declined another combat against the odds, the Athenian ordered an all-out assault. This unusually determined attack continued for several days and only by an equally determined and well-organized defence did Antipater keep his enemies at bay. In the limited time available to him, Antipater had worked a small miracle in strengthening Lamia’s defences and mounting artillery on the walls. In this he had been aided by the sailors and marines from the Macedonian fleet stationed in the Malian Gulf.
The coalition army soon sustained considerable casualties and the waves of attackers began to lose some of their early enthusiasm. Calling off the assault, Leosthenes made preparations to blockade the city and its formidable garrison. As the lines of defences rose before his eyes, Antipater heard, at last, news which offered some hope. Predictably, the coalition army, made up of so many disparate peoples, had begun to show its fragility and parts of Leosthenes’ army began to drift away. The Aetolians had requested and received permission to return home temporarily for what is described as ‘national business’.3 Whatever the lack of reliability of some of his units, Leosthenes had achieved great things in the last few months. Unbroken success since he had taken the field had made him for the moment, at least, the most powerful man in the Balkan Peninsula. Though, by now, he was also in command of the Athenian army, his real strength lay in the mercenaries he had recruited. As long as he could pay them, he had the potential to be an independent power, a warlord in his own right.4
He reflected the growing development and importance of mercenary armies in the fourth century BC.5 Since the zenith of Theban power in the 370s and 360s BC only Macedon had had real success with a citizen army. Most of the other powers in the Hellenic world had come more and more to rely on hired bands of soldiers who usually had no connection with the state that pai
d them. Men like Jason of Pherae could make themselves the greatest men in the Greek world on the back of large mercenary forces, the only drawback being that they needed to be paid and this could lead these dynasts into deep and difficult waters. Twenty years after Jason, Onomarchus of Phocis had to plunder the temple treasury at Delphi in order to pay his troops; that action brought a Sacred War on his head and gave Philip of Macedon a doorway through which to enter the world of Greek politics.
Unfortunately, Leosthenes was not to have the opportunity to fulfil his potential. Antipater’s men made a sortie in an effort to frustrate the completion of the siege lines around the city of Lamia. The Macedonians rushed out and attacked the enemies who were digging out the ramparts and, though only intending a raid, they had some unexpected luck during the day’s fighting. Leosthenes, observing his men being overrun, gathered together the immediately available troops and hastened to their support. During the resultant melee he was struck on the head by a missile fired from the city walls and within three days had died from his wounds.
For Leosthenes perceived that the whole of Greece was humiliated and…cowed, corrupted by men who were accepting bribes from Philip and Alexander against their native countries. He realised that our city stood in need of a commander and Greece herself of a city.6
So Hypereides, the great Athenian orator and enemy of Macedon, lauded the patriotism, intelligence and courage of the dead man in the funeral oration for the Athenians who had died outside Lamia. The speech is largely extant and, apart from its intrinsic interest, it serves to temper a tendency that sees in the death of Leosthenes the beginning of the end of the coalition cause. The whole feeling of the piece is upbeat and optimistic, a call to arms to repeat against the Macedonian ‘barbarian’ the triumphs achieved against the Persian invaders in the fifth century. Leosthenes’ death may seem, in hindsight, to mark a watershed between triumph and decline towards eventual defeat but this is contrived. Internal weakness in the alliance had anyway manifested itself before his demise and in Antiphilus, another Athenian, the coalition found a brave commander and sound tactician who would be ably seconded by Menon of Thessaly.
For Antipater, if comfort could be drawn from the disruption Leosthenes’ death had caused, substantially his situation was unchanged. He was trapped and reluctantly had to reconcile himself to a winter in northern Greece. The one consolation was that, as the seasonal rains began, his men had proper roofs over their heads in contrast to the tents and makeshift huts of the Greek army’s encampment outside the city walls. His greatest problem, after fighting off the initial coalition assault, was how to supply the army he had brought down from Pella. This was no mere garrison that he was responsible for feeding; if that had been the case Lamia’s granaries would have been sufficient. Antipater managed this prodigious feat and the army survived without any great hardship the whole of the winter of 323/322 BC. One consolation in his having very few cavalrymen in his army was that only a small number of horses needed to be kept fed, and finding forage for these animals would plague the commanders of all armies down to very recent times. During the middle of the winter, news at last began to reach the besieged army that help was on the way. Leonnatus was on the march to try and prevent a victory for the Greek coalition that would threaten the very root of Macedonian imperial power. With his province including the Asiatic shores washed by the Hellespont, Leonnatus had the advantage of proximity in reaching Europe with his army. Marching through Thrace and Macedonia he recruited as he went. The army he brought over was not large and most of the force he took into Greece was mobilized en route. Sippas, Antipater’s governor in Macedonia, would not have been able to spare him many of his already depleted garrison but somehow Leonnatus assembled an army of over 20,000 men. Antipater was very short of experienced soldiers when the war began and no large body of veterans had returned to Macedon from Asia so Leonnatus had to recruit the untrained and the young. These men were not part of the trained national levy and as raw recruits their inexperience was to play a part in the battle to come.
This glamorous, high-status officer had been years in the east with Alexander, rising to a command in the Companion cavalry. He had now come back to his homeland. The year 322 BC would be a fatal one for him but, as he rode out of Pella in the spring, he showed no signs of having any premonitions of trouble ahead. His makeshift army came down through Thessaly taking the most direct route to the theatre of war. No army blocked his way but most of the Thessalian towns shut their gates against him, hoping that their sons away fighting with the coalition cavalry would give short shrift to the intruder, who was marching over their ancestral lands and past their walls. But exact news of all this would probably never have got through to Lamia and only when Antipater saw his besiegers packing up, burning their encampment and sending their camp followers away to Melitia for safety, did he realise that possible relief was so close at hand. He tried vainly to draw his men up in battle order and break out to join the army that was approaching to relieve him. But, after the rigours of a winter in Lamia. his men were not ready to march at a moment’s notice and when the coming battle occurred Antipater was not there to second Leonnatus as he met the coalition army in battle somewhere north of Lamia town.
The Greek army consisted of 22,000 foot and 3,500 horse while Leonnatus could boast 20,000 infantry and 1,500 cavalry. It was again the cavalry in which the Greeks had the significant edge, because of the presence of 2,000 first-rate Thessalians: cavalry destined to decide the day. They were led by Menon, a great aristocrat of Pharsalus in Thessaly (his daughter had married Aeacides, the Epirote king and was mother of Pyrrhus). With them were the 500 Athenian horse, recruited from the bluest bloods of that city, but this still left 1,000 cavalry who must have come from the Allied cities of Phocis, Locris and the rest. These others were on the left while Menon took up his position at the head of his Thessalians on the right wing of the allied army.
Antiphilus led the Greek infantry phalanx in the centre where problems were anticipated and his steadying presence would be needed. The heavy infantry there would have been traditional hoplites with aspis (shield) and 8-foot spear who had won glory for their cities on the battlefield for several hundred years. Some were the 8,000 mercenaries who Leosthenes had mustered in the Peloponnese, plus the 2,000 others that the Athenians had brought with their citizen troops up past Plataea where they had been instrumental in dispersing the Boeotians. These citizen Athenian forces were 5,000 in number, far more than anything other cities could provide, but still the other coalition cities must have brought in several thousand more heavy infantry. Who was still there and who had slipped away over the winter we don’t know but, as Diodorus reminds us, ‘all the Aetolians had previously departed to their own country and not a few of the other Greeks had at that time scattered to their native states’. So, though they must have fielded some light troops in front of the eight-deep ranks of the main phalanx, these would not have included the Aetolians who produced some of the best of this troop type.7
The opposing 20,000 in the Macedonian army are not described in any detail at all but most would have been sarissa-armed phalangites with some light troops, probably recruited from Macedonia’s borderlands, to offer a protective screen in front of the heavy infantry. The Macedonian phalangites at the centre of the battle line were for the most part untried and presumably only briefly drilled in the complicated manoeuvrings of the phalanx, but their great reputation still went before them.
Despite the fear they inspired, Antiphilus could not afford to wait and decided he had to engage Leonnatus before Antipater could join the man from Asia. The Hellespontine satrap, on his part, had always been inclined to boldness and he took on the enemy as soon as they came in sight. No doubt, he thought victory unshared with Antipater would be all grist to the mill when it came to deciding on the governmental pecking order once the war was done. Menon attacked on the right and his brave and well-armoured cavalry had immediate success. Our source suggests that Leonnatus h
imself bore the brunt of the attack by the Thessalians which indicates he had taken place on the left wing, not the place of honour on the right. He may have realized that this was the place of greatest threat and there he would be most needed. Whatever the exact details of the deployment, Leonnatus only had 1,500 troopers, so his wings were bound to be stretched thin to avoid being overlapped. Still, they made a stern fight of it until numerical inferiority inevitably took its toll and they were pushed back. Driven onto marshy terrain the horses were unable to find firm footing and their order disintegrated. Separated into small groups, they had to defend themselves against the rampant Thessalians as best they could. They fought valiantly but it was in one of these vicious small-scale combats that Leonnatus received a fatal wound. This brave, but foolhardy, general, who had escaped major injury in years of campaigning in Persia and India, met his end on the very doorstep of his own country. Servants and bodyguards managed to rescue his body and escorted it back to the baggage train.
When the commanders of the Macedonian phalanx (we do not know whether the push of pike had begun, or if both sides had waited to see who won the cavalry combat) realized their flank had been exposed to the Thessalians and that Leonnatus was dead they conceded the battle and ordered the undefeated foot soldiers to retire towards their baggage camp:
the Macedonian phalanx, for fear of the cavalry, at once withdrew from the plain to the difficult terrain above and gained safety for themselves by the strength of the position. When the Thessalian cavalry, which continued to attack, was unable to accomplish anything because of the rough ground the Greeks, who had set up a trophy and gained control of the dead, left the field of battle.8
Here, in hilly country, they would be less vulnerable. The blood of Menon’s followers was up after turning the tables on their usually-dominant neighbours and they pursued the retreating Macedonians even though once out of the open ground where the battle took place they, in turn, found it difficult to keep formation. The Macedonians, though left leaderless, were resilient and fought back from the advantage of steeper ground, the charging enemy squadrons found themselves disorganized and began to sustain such casualties that they were forced to break off the fight.