Battles and Tactics

by Bob Bennett

  Large numbers of Epirotes flocked to his standard eager to oust their pro-Macedonian rulers. Prospects seemed extremely favourable, as also an army from Aetolia was on its way to support their protégé. Aid given in the calculation that an alliance between Aetolia and Epirus would be sufficient to defeat Cassander; an objective neither could hope to achieve independently. Philip was well aware of this danger and forced-marched north to catch Aeacides before the full Aetolian army could reinforce him. In this, he succeeded and in the battle that followed he defeated Aeacides who fled with as many of his men as he could rally. He was able to fall back on the Aetolian forces which had arrived just in time to see their candidate lose. Philip, showing energy and enterprise, allowed Aeacides no respite and attacked the Aetolians’ position almost immediately. In open battle, the Macedonians again showed their marked superiority and Philip won his second victory where Aeacides perished. Whatever judgements might be made about the political and military abilities of this member of the Molossian line, there was no doubting his valour and spirit; qualities his son, Pyrrhus, would inherit in full measure.

  Philip was not content to rest on his laurels but pushed on in pursuit, driving the enemy back into Aetolia itself. He was now in a position to fulfil his original aim of invading Aetolia. The inhabitants, shaken by their recent reverses, had reverted to their traditional tactics to which their mountainous country and unsettled life was so suited. They fled (as they had before Craterus in 321 BC) from their undefended villages and hid with families and flocks in inaccessible mountain caves and forest retreats while Philip wreaked havoc and destruction on the rest of the countryside before the end of the campaigning season forced his retreat. What is puzzling is that after this outstanding campaign Philip is never heard of again. The usual speculation is that Cassander had him killed as Philip’s successes aroused his jealousy, like Nicanor before him. Yet Cassander, in his present precarious position, needed all the capable commanders he could muster and the demise of Philip almost certainly has a more prosaic explanation. Whatever happened to him, he had done his brother a fine service in an otherwise bleak year.

  Success in Epirus seemed inevitably ephemeral. While an active Macedonian ruler was too powerful to enable a hostile dynasty to take hold of the Molossian throne, the corollary was that an Epirote monarch who was too pliant to the administration in Pella could expect local resistance around an anti-Macedonian theme. The government that Philip had saved from Aeacides now felt the iron grip of this imperative. Far from being able to take advantage of his death, they contrived to lose control to Aeacides’ elder brother, Alcetas. This man had been exiled years earlier by his father for his uncontrollable temper and events were to show that the father knew the son for Alcetas appears to have been mentally unbalanced. His psychological state did not concern Cassander but the fact that he shared his dead brother’s hatred of Macedon certainly did. It looked like Philip’s impressive military achievements of the previous year would be in vain.

  Lyciscus, the ex-viceroy of Epirus, had since been acting for Cassander in Acarnania but now he was ordered to return. Marching rapidly with his own army and Arcananian allies he reached Cassopia in southern Epirus and set up his headquarters. From there, he encouraged the opponents of Alcetas, offering a refuge and rallying point. The new Epirote monarch immediately responded with all the armed might at his disposal. The royal guards and household troops were alerted and led out on the road to Cassopia, while Alcetas’ two sons were left behind to call out the national levy. This precipitate and risky offensive with a skeleton force was typical of the mercurial and unstable nature of the man but there was also policy in it. He felt himself strong enough, if not to overwhelm Lyciscus, at least to bottle him up until the arrival of reinforcements gave him decisive numerical superiority. In this he may have been right had it not been for the temper of his troops. Their monarch’s aberrant cruelty during his short reign had already alienated the loyalty of many of his men and when he neared Cassopia the army suffered wholesale desertion. Humiliated, Alcetas could only flee to find refuge in the mountains. Lyciscus followed up and trapped his quarry in the lakeside city of Eurymenae and began a siege. But the tables turned when the Macedonians heard the Epirote levy led by the king’s sons was nearby. A bloody battle followed, the siege was raised and Alcetas from a fugitive became again a force to be reckoned with at the head of a victorious army. However, these combatants were tenacious characters and Lyciscus, though beaten off, only paused to send for reinforcements before returning to the fray and eventually managed to drive the king, his sons and the battered Epirote army out of Eurymenae and deeper into the mountains.

  Cassander, on hearing of Lyciscus’ initial defeat, intervened personally, leading the rest of the Macedonian army into this troublesome state but he soon became aware that his general had turned the situation around. Assessing at first hand, Cassander felt that the time and effort required to subdue Epirus would not be well-spent and decided to come to terms. The army was needed elsewhere and Cassander calculated that Alcetas would cause so many internal problems that he would pose no real threat to Macedonia.

  Cassander now turned his attention to Illyria again but he seems to have been unusually lacklustre at this time, having even less luck than he had enjoyed against the Epirotes. Indeed, he suffered the indignity of being driven off by the citizens of Apollonia, after hard fighting, and, with winter drawing on, was forced to withdraw to Macedonia. His army was patently neither strong nor numerous enough, indicative of the severe manpower shortage he was suffering. The final insult came when he was safely back at home and heard that his garrison on the island of Leucas had also been evicted by the Corcyraeans who had taken advantage of a local insurrection to prise out the Macedonian interlopers.

  In two years, the son of Antipater had seen the edifice he had constructed so painstakingly on this flank of his kingdom crumble in front of his eyes. His western policy was in tatters; Ptolemaeus and his Aetolian and Boeotian allies were rampant in central Greece. So, when peace proposals arrived from Antigonus in 311 BC, Cassander grabbed at them with both hands. The years after the peace of 311 BC did not see any major campaigns on Cassander’s western quarter. Epirus seemed quiet, he never tried to involve himself in the Adriatic islands again and the Illyrians are not mentioned apart from one of their tribes, the Autariatae. Cassander apparently resettled them after a dispute with the Paeonians; an act not repaid with any great loyalty, as nine years later they deserted to the Antigonid side at the Battle of Ipsus! There are also elusive hints in our sources about a Celtic raiding party he had to rebuff near the Haemus mountains; a harbinger of things to come after he was long dead.7 But, for the main part, Cassander had plenty on his plate dealing with the Antigonids on his doorstep and he did not live long enough after Ipsus (he died in 297 BC) to push any ambitions he might have had over his barbarian borders. Even though this kind of involvement would for Macedonian rulers, both before and after him, be just as much of a historic imperative as any need to interfere in mainland Greece itself.

  Cassander’s long term foes, the Antigonids, were the archetypal central power of the post-Alexandrine world. Their capital of Antigonia sat on the fulcrum where the Levant hinged with Anatolia and their concerns were centred on the east Mediterranean. And, though they might head east (to campaign first against Eumenes and then to Babylonia when Seleucus took back his old realm), the coastline from Abydos to Gaza, which enclosed the seaward side of the regions, was where their real interests lay. Yet, even they, on one well attested occasion, found themselves involved in a fight on the fringes where it seemed their great projects were not crucially involved.

  In 311 BC, Antigonus had been determined not to lose time in rectifying the problems raised by Demetrius’ defeat at the Battle of Gaza. His veteran army soon accomplished the recovery of his Levantine holdings and with Ptolemy refusing to face him in Phoenicia or Coele-Syria he prepared to follow into Egypt.8 Before doing so, he chose to try to subdue
the inhabitants of the nearby desert country. Alexander had cast greedy eyes on the apparently-forbidding peninsula of Arabia inhabited by these people and their like, but he had not been the first. The Egyptians, nearly 2,000 years before the Macedonian’s birth, had taken copper and turquoise from the Arabians who lived near their borders. Assyrian armies had frequently campaigned against the oasis states of northern Arabia. The details of their conquests are vividly detailed on the self-aggrandizing sculpture made for their kings yet they never completely subdued them and Nineveh could not depend on controlling the spice trade that made the conquest of these desert wastes worthwhile. Two factors made the road tolls of this region one of the most lucrative sources of income in the ancient world. In what is now the Yemen, in the southwest of Arabia, great amounts of frankincense were grown. Here, a sedentary, civilized community utilized the benefits that nature had bestowed on that one corner of the arid peninsula to grow this most sought-after of balms. The caravans that took this treasure to the Mediterranean markets crossed the northern deserts and those who controlled these routes grew rich on the backs of the commerce. Nor was it just home-grown spices that came this way but also products from India and even further east. The enterprising inhabitants had controlled this sea borne trade for centuries and the exotic spices they unloaded at the quays of their ports followed the same route as the frankincense to the great markets of the west.

  The nomads who had come to control the trade route southeast of the Dead Sea were known as the Nabataeans, who had migrated from the north in the early sixth century BC. At this time they were a loose federation of clans and had not yet settled at Petra, the amazing ‘red rose’ city that would be the royal seat of the Nabataean kings. The zenith of their fortunes was to be in the first century AD when their power stretched to Damascus, having received a portion of Seleucid territory in reward for being loyal clients of Rome. For them, the Nabataeans were a useful buffer against Parthia and a powerful military support in the region. In 70 AD they provided thousands of troops for Titus in the siege of Jerusalem. During this period the merchants and caravanners of Petra grew more and more prosperous through servicing the huge expanding market of the Roman Empire. Perhaps it was the very opulence of these merchant princes of the spice trade that caused their downfall when Trajan found them too attractive a prize to leave unconquered as he passed this way on his great eastern campaigns against the Parthians.

  The ancestors of these rich middlemen lived on the desert flank of Antigonus’ likely route if he wanted to march directly on Egypt and he probably felt it would be useful to neutralize them to protect the communications of an army of invasion. His solution to the problem of possible attack by mobile Arab raiders against his inland flank was bellicose from the start. A swift and awesome example of his power was intended to intimidate into submission these ‘simple’, mainly-pastoral people, who were thought to only number 10,000 altogether. Good intelligence meant he knew the date when the nomads met their sedentary brethren in a commercial fair at the great rock where Petra later stood. With them they would bring the herds and spice consignments on which their livelihood depended. Three days before the event began, Antigonus despatched a strong detachment under an officer, called Athenaeus, from his camp in Idumaea. They surprised the Arabs at midnight after a secret march and rounded up huge amounts of spice, silver, sheep, goats and camels as well as 500 talents of silver. But, in response, the Nabataeans gathered all available warriors to the number of 8,000.9 They fell on the Antigonid raiders’ camp while the men were asleep, killing all, either in their beds or with javelins as they struggled to get in battle order; fifty horsemen alone managed to extricate themselves and take back news of the disaster.

  The attempt to eliminate the power of the Nabataeans had signally failed and only served to stir them up. They posted strong pickets against further inroads on the borders of this arid area, where any attempt to invade with a large body of men and animals was extremely difficult. But Antigonus was determined and prepared to wait till their guard had dropped. Disciplined observation proved impossible to sustain for a people who needed to keep on the move with their flocks and when the Macedonians thought the watchmen had withdrawn they prepared to act. Young Demetrius was sent, this time, with a mobile army of 4,000 cavalry and the same number of light infantry. He, too, tried to surprise the enemy, even providing iron rations so his men would not need to cook on the march, but they found their intended victims warned by signal fires and well-defended on the same great rock, now reinforced by man-made defences. All-out assaults failed and Antigonus’ son was persuaded into treating with them, apparently by that old chestnut of emphasizing what little the Arabs had in comparison with the men who were trying to despoil them.

  He left with forage and hostages, provided by the Arabs who had nothing to gain by a continuing conflict that disrupted crucial trade. The Antigonids made their return journey almost certainly by the same route from Petra that the later Roman road followed, directly north across the desert, reaching the Dead Sea after 34 miles. There, Demetrius camped and his officers made a detailed investigation of this rich and exotic region. Asphalt had been gathered for generations from the lake by local people who traded it in Egypt for use in embalming. The palms grown in the irrigated valleys nearby were also sold for great gain in the Levantine markets. These new sources of potential revenue were all that Demetrius could offer to compensate for the second failure against the independent desert tribes on his return to the headquarters in Idumaea.

  Antigonus had wasted time, men had been lost and morale shaken. But, if much had gone wrong, he intended the whole campaign should not end without profit. The bitumen harvest of the Dead Sea in his control would mean not only personal gain but the bleeding of Egyptian wealth to the detriment of his rival. Hieronymus of Cardia, Eumenes’ old confidant and future historian, was sent to organize the exploitation of this golden goose but found the task far from a lucrative sinecure. Local resistance emerged to the tune of 6,000 bowmen who shot down his followers and drove them off the lake; a third debacle that convinced Antigonus that his propensity for giving himself bloody noses in the Jordanian desert was unintelligent. His behaviour is in some ways difficult to understand, a hefty bribe would no doubt have brought round his ‘barbarous’ neighbours even after the first attack. The desire to control the spice routes explains much but there remains a suspicion that Antigonus miscalculated and, once committed, his prestige did not allow a withdrawal.

  The equipment and organization of these people who gave the Antigonids such trouble is little detailed. Almost all Arab soldiers mentioned in ancient sources are described as missilemen, either javelineers or bowmen. Horses were apparently very rare amongst them and richer folk would have ridden camels, dismounting on most occasions to fight. However in 547 BC, the king of Lydia’s highly-reputed cavalry had been upset by his Persian enemies fielding soldiers on camels, so it is clear fighting aboard the beasts had its advantages. The bow they used was described by Herodotus as long and, certainly, Hieronymus could vouch for its effectiveness from close, personal experience. The Antigonids found these skirmishers very difficult to combat on ground of their own choosing.

  What is noticeable in so many of these small wars is the trouble the Diadochi could have with apparently puny, ‘uncivilized’ and poverty-stricken peoples. The fact was that on the great powers’ borders there thrived communities who though thought backward were potent and indeed, in some senses, they were potent because they were ‘backward’. No military specialization prevented instant mobilization, each man, and even, on occasions, woman, was a warrior and natural skill in unconventional warfare gave some ‘Colonel Blimps’ of the established powers much to make them scratch their heads when they confronted these folk in arms.

  Chapter Ten

  Conclusion

  The years between 323 and 281 BC had been a time of civil war, not perhaps brother against brother, but, at least, cousin against cousin; the Macedonian nation had
not been an entity long enough to make it the former. There were strangers involved in these family affairs, whether they were urban Greeks or men from the parts of Asia that the Macedonian Empire had absorbed, but they were, apart from one spectacular exception, not often at the very centre of things. In these kin-contests it was not unusual for the parties to look to compromise before coming to blows but such interaction was often fraught with suspicion, and when no common ground could be found ties were rent apart and gave the prospect of particularly-bloody carnage. This was a traumatic process that, with changeable contestants, ensured years of slaughter before there emerged the kind of dynastic polities that were able to rub up against each other in a more normal, less cataclysmic way.