Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great's Empire (16 page)

Defensive walls were so expensive, and so important, that they came to symbolize civic pride, and statues representing the city, or its Fortune, were often crowned with battlements. Important cities would need defensive artillery and countersiege ability, as well as maintaining a limited citizen militia or mercenary force. Then, in time of war, fortresses needed to be manned in the countryside, to protect farmers and land; prisoners might need to be ransomed, and ships to be made ready. If the exigencies of war meant that a friendly army was billeted on the town, the expenses were enormous; if it was an enemy army, the cost was even higher. An enemy would take not just livestock and crops, but next year’s seed and probably all the slaves as well; the garrison would defect, the walls would be demolished. In short, the entire economy of the city would be destroyed.

Naturally, cities petitioned their rulers and other states to defray at least some of the costs. Kings were glad to oblige if, as in the case of
Ephesus, the city was critical to the defense of the realm, but lesser cities never received enough.
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The main upshot of this civic impoverishment was a vast increase in the importance to the Greek cities of citizen benefactors. A small number of people were getting very rich in the new world. If a city could not afford to pay for something out of public funds, such individuals wanted and were expected to bear the cost.

These people were important to cities not just for their wealth but for the circles to which their wealth could gain them entrance. Diplomacy was critical in a world where distant kings pulled the strings, and the wealthy and well-placed men who could gain the ear of the king or one of his advisers became vital to their cities. Some—a very few, and only men—actually joined the charmed circle as an official Friend of some king or other. Hence, as the Hellenistic era progressed, these men came to dominate the affairs of the Greek cities, even those that theoretically had democratic constitutions. From about 300 to the middle of the 280s, for instance, the wealthy Athenian Philippides (who had enjoyed a moderately successful career as a writer of comedies) used his influence with Lysimachus to gain a number of important benefits for the city, including grants of grain and the ransoming of Athenian prisoners.
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Cities, then, were expected to prioritize the king’s business on their agendas and to align their policies with the king’s wishes and whims. But, despite this necessary obsequiousness, the Greek cities retained a great deal of their past vitality, and many of their old structures remained in place. They still strove for economic self-sufficiency; they still had to make day-to-day decisions about the running of their community; they still had to generate an income, mint coins, and set local taxation levels; they still had to maintain a fighting force for local conflicts; they still needed to construct or repair public buildings and monuments and roads, run festivals, pay for public slaves and sacrifices, and relieve the poverty of their worse-off citizens. The basic social fabric remained in place too—the fundamental triad of citizens, slaves, and resident foreigners—with the vast majority of the citizens still being peasant farmers; the phenomenon of massive estates and extensive tenant farming was a later Hellenistic development.

In the greater scheme of things, cities were bound to have a reduced role, but this made little impact on civic pride. Most citizens still felt that their primary loyalty was toward the city of their birth, and were prepared to work to maintain or enhance its importance. And through their citizens cities even came to take on new roles. Precisely because there was now a greater scheme of things, there was more possibility of
impartial interaction, so that cities began to send out respected men to act as judges, or even to arbitrate in disputes between neighboring cities. These were occasions for civic pride no less than, say, the successful staging of a major international festival. And such diplomatic links might lead in due course to more formal alliances, or even some form of confederacy, on the principle that union was strength. The Greek city was alive and well in the early Hellenistic period, and learning to adjust to new circumstances.

T
HE LIKELIHOOD THAT
Greece would become a theater of war rapidly became a certainty, as Cassander and Polyperchon vied for control of the mainland cities. Political lines became clearly drawn, the only relevant issue being whether any given city would throw in its lot with the legitimate regent or the pretender. By and large, the poorer members of the cities and their champions lined up behind Polyperchon, while the wealthier classes found their interests best served by Cassander. But whichever side was in the ascendant, we can imagine the stress and the bustle as cities tried to determine how close they would be to the front line of the impending war and made their preparations accordingly, and as rival political factions, encouraged by one or the other of the contenders for supremacy in Greece, tried to gain or confirm their power.

In his proclamation, Polyperchon singled out Athens for favorable treatment: not only would the democratic exiles return, as everywhere, but the island of Samos would be restored to the city. It had been removed by Perdiccas just a few years earlier as a consequence of Alexander’s Exiles Decree. Somehow, Polyperchon’s promise of freedom for the Greeks did not include the Greeks of Samos, who were to be expelled once more from their farmland in favor of Athenian settlers.
But the glittering jewel of Athens in his crown was worth a little inconsistency.

The Athenian democrats contacted Polyperchon early in 318 and requested help in changing the regime that had been imposed by Antipater after the Lamian War. Polyperchon sent his son Alexander south. With an army encamped just outside the city walls, the leaders of the oligarchy were deposed and executed in May 318. Athens thus became a protectorate of the official regime in Macedon, and democracy was restored. Jubilation was muted, however, by the continued presence of Nicanor and the garrison in Piraeus, which could still make a considerable difference to Athenian fortunes. Before long Cassander himself arrived, with men and ships loaned to him by Antigonus, to make Piraeus the launch point for his attempt on Macedon.

Polyperchon responded by coming south in force to join his son for the blockade of Piraeus, but they achieved very little, since they could not control the sea. The Athenians were also finding it hard to feed the army of twenty-five thousand that was encamped on their land. Polyperchon therefore left Alexander with enough men to dissuade Cassander from venturing out of Piraeus by land, and marched into the Peloponnese.

Most of the Peloponnesian cities bloodily evicted the Antipatrid oligarchs on Polyperchon’s orders. The most important exception was Megalopolis in Arcadia, and Polyperchon put it under siege. The battle was protracted and closely fought, but in the end the defenders were successful. They even foiled a final push by Polyperchon’s elephants through the collapsed wall by laying spikes in the breach.
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In frustration, Polyperchon left Megalopolis under siege (which was eventually broken off months later without having achieved its objective) and withdrew back to Macedon. Polyperchon’s failures at Piraeus and Megalopolis, despite the size of his army, drastically slowed the rate at which the cities threw in their lot with him. It now seemed more sensible for them to wait and see who would win the war in Greece.

With many of his troops tied up in the sieges of Piraeus and Megalopolis, Polyperchon turned his attention elsewhere. Still desperate for allies, he sent the naval expert Cleitus to relieve Arrhidaeus, under siege in Cius, and at the same time to guard against a possible crossing of the Hellespont by Antigonus, who was encamped not far from Byzantium. The expedition went well at first; Cleitus relieved Arrhidaeus and joined forces with him. And when Nicanor arrived from Piraeus with over a hundred ships to help Antigonus, Cleitus inflicted a severe defeat on him off Byzantium. But that very night Antigonus
arranged an unexpected counterattack: while he set about Cleitus’s camp on land, Nicanor returned with the remnants of the fleet to disable the enemy ships as they lay beached or tried to escape. It was a complete victory. Arrhidaeus either died or surrendered. Cleitus’s flagship alone escaped, but when he landed in Thrace, he ran into a detachment of Lysimachus’s troops and was killed. It was a wretched end for the man who, after his earlier successes, had styled himself as Poseidon, the god of the sea, and had insisted on being treated as a god.
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Nicanor fared little better, since soon after returning to Piraeus he was killed on Cassander’s orders for being overambitious.

The loss of the fleet meant not just that Polyperchon was now cut off from Eumenes, but also that there was little to stop Antigonus crossing the Bosporus and coming at Macedon that way. But the deal the two allies had made assigned all Europe to Cassander, and Antigonus was not yet ready to leave Asia Minor. It was all under his control now—his personal control or that of allies such as Asander in Caria—from the Hellespont to the Taurus Mountains, but there was the matter of Eumenes just beyond the Taurus. He left most of his forces to protect Asia Minor, entrusted the war in Greece to Cassander, and marched southeast after the renegade Eumenes.

Naval warfare had not changed much since the Classical period. The methods were still the same: skillful maneuvering so that you were in a position to disable an enemy ship by ramming (with or without subsequent boarding by marines) or by breaking its oars and oarsmen. The main innovations or developments in the early Hellenistic period stemmed from the same love of gigantism that produced—to name just a few outstanding examples—enormous armies, the Colossus of Rhodes, the Lighthouse at Alexandria, and the temple of Apollo at Didyma. Ever-larger vessels were being built. Unlike the sleek triremes of the Classical era, larger ships could deploy artillery on their decks—joined together catamaran-style, they might even carry massive siege towers with which to assault a port from the sea—and they could also carry more men. So the two chief developments in the early Hellenistic period were a greater reliance on long-range offensive weaponry, and more direct action. Instead of maneuvering to take an enemy ship from the side, the primary objective of Hellenistic naval warfare became frontal ramming, followed by boarding.
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The increased sizes of Hellenistic warships hugely increased the expense of navies. A fleet of a hundred warships of varying sizes, from triremes upward, might employ around thirty thousand men as crew and marines. A single, enormous ship built toward the end of the third century
BCE
by Ptolemy IV had a crew of almost 7,500 men, including three thousand marines. This vessel was largely for show, but already in our period Demetrius the Besieger was building some lesser, sea-worthy monsters.

But even before the crews had embarked, ships were very expensive to produce. It was essential also to control the raw materials, or to have good trading relations with places that controlled them: wood for the hull, mast, and deck (preferably fir, cedar, or pine), for the keel (oak for warships), and for the oars (preferably fir); pitch for caulking and bitumen for coating the hull; hemp, esparto, or papyrus for the cordage; flax to make linen for the sailcloth. The cost of ships was such that enemy ships were extremely valuable booty for the enemy. Being made of wood, holed ships tended to founder rather than sink, and could then be captured and taken in tow.

It was essential also to have access to as many ports as possible, not just as dockyards but as havens. Ancient ships were very vulnerable to bad weather, did not ride comfortably at anchor in the open sea, and, given the sizes of their crews, needed to restock their provisions regularly. They also had a tendency to become waterlogged. This weakness of ancient warships—that they often needed to make land—made it desirable to control not just ports but whole stretches of coastline, as well as islands. Ships that were temporarily beached, away from the safety of a good harbor, were also vulnerable to attack from either land or sea, as Cleitus found to his cost.

In Athens, constant military and diplomatic pressure from Cassander took its toll. Despairing of any effective action from Polyperchon, the Athenians decided to surrender and opened negotiations. After only a few months, in the summer of 317, the restored democracy fell again, this time in favor of dictatorship by a puppet ruler of Cassander’s choice. Cassander gave the job to the Aristotelian philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum, highly regarded, but still aged under forty. Demetrius ruled Athens for the next ten years, with the backing of the
Macedonian garrison, of course. Piraeus and Athens were reunited, and gave Cassander a secure base in southern Greece.

Demetrius of Phalerum’s rule, though benign, sealed the end of Athens’s world-famous experiment in democracy. Although in later years from time to time the term was used for the constitution, the democratic organs of the state were actually dominated by a narrow group of wealthy families. This, as I have already remarked, is the pattern that came to exist within all the great cities of the Hellenistic world: power devolved upon those citizens who were wealthy enough to support the city both materially and through their channels of communication with distant kings.

Cassander’s protection ushered in a decade of relative peace for Athens. No wars were fought on Athenian soil, though of course the city took a keen interest in events elsewhere. Theophrastus (Demetrius of Phalerum’s teacher) wrote his
Characters
, light-hearted vignettes of different kinds of people, around this time, and his sketch of a rumor-monger shows him spreading the alarming (and untrue) report that “Polyperchon and King Philip have won a battle and Cassander has been taken prisoner”
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—a situation that would certainly have spelled trouble for Demetrius of Phalerum’s pro-Cassandrian Athens. But Athenians watched from the sidelines rather than being involved in the action, and this was a major change for a city that had been at the center of Greek affairs for almost two hundred years, until the Lamian War.