Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (28 page)

Ptolemy, of course, was a natural ally (though in the event he was not especially helpful), and Seleucus had at last freed himself from his eastern wars and offered his assistance too. At the conclusion of their conflict, Chandragupta had given him five hundred elephants and their handlers, a stupendous gift, though not as valuable as the territories Seleucus had had to give up. He would bring most of the beasts west with him. Cassander, Lysimachus, Ptolemy, Seleucus—it was the same grand anti-Antigonid alliance as in 315–311.

Cassander sent an army under Prepelaus to Lysimachus and marched south from Macedon. He confronted Demetrius in Thessaly, but the campaign was ineffective from both sides. They built enormous military camps and eyeballed each other, but both armies were so terrifyingly huge that neither was in a hurry to start the offensive, but preferred to wait for news from Asia Minor. Cassander commanded over thirty thousand men, Demetrius over fifty-five thousand. Both had good supply lines and were securely encamped on high ground. Neither had a good reason to risk battle against such formidable forces. The battle that should have taken place for control of Macedon never happened.

In the early summer of 302, Lysimachus invaded Asia Minor. It was the first time for many years that Asia Minor had seen war. While he headed east into Hellespontine Phrygia, Prepelaus took an army south down the coast. Both had the same aim, to win over as many as possible of the Greek cities of Asia Minor before the Antigonids had a chance to respond. They quickly gained a few important cities, and some significant allies among the Antigonid governors of Asia Minor who were terrified into surrendering. But those cities that were not immediately threatened, or felt they could endure a siege, preferred to wait and see what would happen rather than risk Antigonid wrath if they gave in prematurely.

Antigonus, feeling the burden of his eighty years, was forced to break his retirement and move north into Asia Minor. He knew he was
no longer fit for battle, and had been involved in more peaceful pursuits. In fact, he had been about to stage a superb international athletic competition, to prove to the world that Antigonea was a Greek city to be reckoned with, but he had to cancel it. It was as shocking—and as expensive, in terms of compensation—as if the host nation of a modern Olympic festival canceled at the last moment. But Antigonus was never one to duck a fight.

Once Antigonus reached Asia Minor, Lysimachus’s and Prepelaus’s tactics had to change: they were no match for him in the field—not until Seleucus arrived. As Antigonus advanced, threatening their supply lines, they fell back north, avoiding pitched battle by keeping safe behind a series of entrenched camps. This also served the purpose of drawing the Antigonid forces farther away from Seleucus’s arrival point in Asia Minor, which they knew to be Cappadocia. They held Antigonus at bay at Dorylaeum, and then winter intervened and both sides separated. While Antigonus retired to Celaenae, Lysimachus and Prepelaus fell back on the plain south of Heraclea Pontica. Lysimachus confirmed his alliance with Heraclea—and its detachment from the Antigonid cause—by marrying its current ruler, Amastris. Control of Heraclea gave him an extra source of timber, but also an extra lifeline back home to Thrace, the importance of which became clear that very winter.

In order to be certain of victory, Antigonus needed reinforcements. He ordered Demetrius to make a truce with Cassander, so that he could join him in Asia Minor. Once Demetrius had set sail, Cassander recovered Thessaly, retained a force to protect Macedon, and sent a second tranche of troops by land under his brother Pleistarchus to support Lysimachus and Prepelaus. Meanwhile, Demetrius landed at Ephesus, recovered the city immediately, and then moved up the coast, undoing all Prepelaus’s gains. He made his winter quarters at Chalcedon and guarded the strait.

So when Pleistarchus and his army reached the north coast of the Propontis, they found that Demetrius had already secured the southern coastline. Pleistarchus therefore marched up the west coast of the Black Sea to Odessus and prepared to embark his forces there and sail for Heraclea. There were not enough ships at Odessus for a single crossing. The first contingent made it safely to Heraclea; the second was captured by Demetrius; the third was smashed by a storm, with Pleistarchus among the few who made land safely. Fully six thousand of the twenty thousand troops he was bringing died or fell into Demetrius’s hands. But during the winter, news arrived that Seleucus had
reached Cappadocia. Even an Antigonid raid on Babylon from Syria had failed to deflect him from his purpose. He had avoided the route through Syria and traveled to Cappadocia via Armenia.

In the meantime, while Antigonus’s Syrian army was busy in Babylonia, Ptolemy played his part by invading Phoenicia. But on receiving misinformation that his allies were losing the war in Asia Minor, he prudently or lamely withdrew for the winter to Egypt, leaving garrisons in the cities he had taken. It was not much of an effort, and Tyre and Sidon, the most important ports, remained in Antigonid hands. Seleucus, by contrast, had made an epic journey in a few months, and so was waiting to join up with Lysimachus when he marched south in 301 from his winter quarters.

Battle was joined at Ipsus in Phrygia; each side was commanded by two kings and fielded about eighty thousand men. It was the greatest battle of the Successors numerically, and the most significant. Lysimachus and his allies would either crush the Antigonids or be crushed by them. If they lost, only Ptolemy would stand in the way of the Antigonids’ long-held desire for world domination.

But it was an outright victory for the anti-Antigonid alliance. Octogenarian Antigonus died appropriately in a shower of javelins, while Demetrius escaped by the skin of his teeth. Hostile propaganda afterward said that he had performed badly—that he had raced with his cavalry too far in pursuit of a fleeing enemy contingent to be in a position to support his father when the crisis came. But it is equally likely that Seleucus’s elephant drivers skillfully blocked the attempts of Demetrius’s victorious cavalry to return to the battlefield and relieve his father. Demetrius’s cavalry, on the right wing, had been expected to win; details of the battle are uncertain, but it may even have been a deliberate tactic by Lysimachus and Seleucus to let him drive their left wing back far enough for them to deploy their elephants to block his return. Then, while he was held at bay, Antigonus and his men either surrendered or were cut down. Demetrius prudently fled, but his heart must have been filled with dread, anger, and sorrow in equal measures: he and his father were famously close.
¹⁸
So died one of the most determined, successful, and gifted of the Successors. At the age of sixty, circumstances had given him the opportunity for imperial rule; he had seized it eagerly and had exercised vast power for twenty years. To minds not already besotted with power, Antigonus’s fall from such a great height might have taught moderation.

O
NE OF THE
most important effects of the battle of Ipsus was that it left Seleucus and Ptolemy in firm control of their kingdoms. This is a good point, then, at which to pause from war narrative and take a closer look at those kingdoms, insofar as we have evidence. Many conclusions must remain tentative, but we are even worse off for other Successor kingdoms. Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt remain our best chances for investigating the important topic of what the Successors made of their realms once they had carved up Alexander’s empire.

After Ipsus, the Ptolemaic kingdom remained unchanged, in terms of core territory, until the Roman takeover in 30
BCE
. The Seleucid kingdom suffered more from shifting borders, and there were mountain tribes in several parts of the empire that were never altogether tamed. We have already seen that in 304 Seleucus ceded the satrapies bordering India to Chandragupta, and he and his descendants had to put up with several independent or semi-independent kingdoms in Asia Minor, such as Bithynia. For much of the third century, Persis was semi-independent, and around the middle of the third century, the Seleucids lost Bactria, which went independent under Greek leadership. Worse was to follow: the Parthian satrap declared his province free of Seleucid rule in 246, but within ten years had lost it to invaders from the north, who held it for thirty-five years. Seleucus’s great-great-grandson, Antiochus III, recovered it, but only temporarily, and by the
middle of the second century
BCE
the invaders had annexed Media, and Babylonia and Mesopotamia became the front line of their ongoing war with the Seleucids. The remains of the Seleucid empire were finally broken up by the Romans in 62
BCE
, and the Euphrates became the border between the Roman and the Parthian empires.

We have a a lot more evidence for Egypt, thanks to the preservation of papyri in the dry heat, than we do for Asia. Almost all this evidence, however, dates from later than the first forty years of the Hellenistic period with which I am concerned in this book. It may be legitimate, in some cases, to project what we know from a later period back on to an earlier period, but this can be no more than intelligent guesswork. As the history of early modern Europe shows, the processes whereby states become increasingly centralized, territorialized, and bureaucratized are complex and develop over time, but we do not have enough evidence for early Ptolemaic and Seleucid history to see the processes in detail. At any rate, I shall assume that, in our period, the administration of the kingdoms was in the process of development rather than settled. Ptolemy and Seleucus spent a great deal of their time on a war footing, and it is likely that their first administrative measures were designed mainly to ensure that their kingdoms were internally stable enough to guarantee them sufficient income to continue to make war.

In each case, as one would expect, the administration blended Macedonian with local institutions.
¹
In Asia, “local” largely meant

Achaemenid, since Antigonus’s regime had left hardly a mark (or, if it did, it is impossible to distinguish it), but the Persians themselves had necessarily worked with local subsystems in the further-flung parts of their empire. Egypt held a mix of Egyptian and Achaemenid systems, since it had intermittently been under Persian administration for two hundred years. In each case, the Macedonians came as conquerors, with their own way of doing things, but in order not to ruffle too many feathers, and to keep their lives simple, they took over local structures, which had proved their effectiveness for decades, if not centuries. It follows that we should expect to find both similarities and differences between the administrations of the two kingdoms, with the similarities being due to the Macedonian background and the similar situations in which the kings found themselves, and the differences to inherited local practices or other local conditions, such as the relative sizes of the two kingdoms.

Egypt was a relatively self-contained unit, both geographically and ethnically; it consisted of the Nile delta and a thin fertile strip a
thousand kilometers (620 miles) up the river, never wider than thirty kilometers (twenty miles) at any point, and bounded by desert to the east and west. Seleucid Asia, however, was a sprawling empire, consisting of huge territories and varied peoples, each with its own traditions and subcultures. In modern terms, they held much of Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Iran, Afghanistan, and bits of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, and Tajikistan. Seleucus and his son achieved the remarkable feat of coming as conquerors and holding all this together for fifty years before it began to break up in the east. The size of the empire meant that wherever the king happened to be at the time was the center. In Ptolemy’s case, after 313, the center was Alexandria, but Seleucus had palaces or residences all over the kingdom. He was most likely to be found in Antioch, but Susa, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, Celaenae, and Sardis were also royal residences.

Macedon basically consisted of a large and fertile plain to the west of the Thermaic Gulf, ringed by mountains (Upper Macedon). The country was rich in all the essentials: timber, grain, and minerals. It was still very largely rural, with a history of barons and princelings ruling cantons of upland farmers and peasants. These cantons were subject to frequent raids from their neighbors; as a result, military prowess was a dominant virtue in Macedonian culture, and kings and barons were expected to be powerful and successful war leaders as well as performing their administrative and religious duties. Each local princeling relied on the advice of a group of close friends, but was the sole decision maker. Every man bearing arms had the right to assemble, but such an assembly had little independent power; it was formed at the ruler’s behest, and its job was to approve his decisions.

When Philip II united the country under central leadership, he retained the same essential structure: king, friends, assembly of citizens. The assembly consisted of whatever citizens were to hand; out on campaign, then, it consisted of however many Macedonian soldiers were to hand. Citizenship and military obligation were very closely allied: in order to be a citizen, you had to be awarded a grant of land by the king, and being the king’s tenant in this way simultaneously committed you to paying your taxes and serving in the army when needed. Sons inherited their father’s obligations along with the land. The king nominally owned all the land (at least in the sense that it was his to
dispose of), but parceled it out as he chose. The assembly was not the source of the king’s legitimacy, but could be a critical factor at times of uncertain succession, or if a king proved weak. We have already seen this, at Babylon after Alexander’s death. The increase in the use of army assemblies by the Successors is a sign of their insecurity; it was a kind of insurance.

But the overriding dynamic of any Macedonian king’s administration lay not so much in his relations with the peasantry and soldiers but in his relations with the barons, many of whom formed his inner circle of advisers and lieutenants. In the first place, these Friends were military leaders in their own right, in command of divisions raised from their own cantons. Even the king’s relations with the army, then, were largely mediated by his barons. Since the barons also ruled regions of Macedon, they formed the basic structure of the state, and they also took on any other jobs within the administration that the king required. There must have been a bureaucracy, to promulgate decisions, arrange for the shipment of goods, conscript troops, and so on, and there were local administrative structures for each town and canton, but there was no overall administration as such other than the king and his Friends.